2011 - Page 5 of 10 - T. Harv Eker

Posted on July 22, 2011 - 3:45 am by 32

Imagine that you’re on an airplane next to somebody. You know how it is—sometimes you can tell whether someone is open to conversation or whether a polite ‘hello’ will do. But if you get into a conversation, of course the question comes up: “So what do you do?

Most people will try to narrow it down into a few words: a manager at such and such a place; salesperson; lawyer, etc. In short, the answer, as impressive as it may be, is usually something that elicits, at best, an “Oh, that’s interesting,” unless it’s something like Sea World animal trainer or something really out of there.

Do most people fare any better at networking events where the answer to what you do is actually, really important? I don’t know, but if you’re giving “airplane” kinds of answers, I’d be surprised if anything beneficial would come out of that kind of networking.

In sales, in business, you have to be able to clearly articulate what you do in such a way as to make the person you’re communicating with say, “Wow, how do you do that?” Your ability to summarize the benefit of your product or service is the key to success in selling. If you can do that, you can make all the sales you want to make for the rest of your life.

If you can’t summarize what you do that way, it means that you don’t understand what you’re selling. If you don’t understand what you’re selling, it’s impossible for your customer to understand.

All people are concerned about is what your product or service does. How can it change lives? How does it improve someone’s work or family life? What does it do? What’s the before and after difference? That’s what people want to know.

Successful businesses know exactly what they specialize in and then become absolutely excellent in their area of specialization. A rule in business and in selling is that you never take on more than you can do with excellence. You don’t try to be all things to all people.

Companies that go under start off with one area of specialization, become successful, and then think they can walk on water. They start to offer everything in a mediocre way, and then mediocrity becomes everything they do.

Unsuccessful people try to do all kinds of things, but that’s like trying to ride three bicycles at once. Successful people pick a single focus, and they concentrate on that. The only way that you can succeed in life is by becoming an expert in what you do: an expert not only in your own mind, but in the minds of others. They must know that you are very good at what you do.

One of the big frustrations we have in life is when we waste so much time on low probability prospects who turn us off, turn us down, reject us, and we start to think we’re no good, or the product is no good, or life sucks, when that’s not the case, yes? We’re just talking to the wrong people. And much of the time, we’re talking to the wrong people because we haven’t really focused in on what we have to offer.

What are your stories of turning a business—or anything—around from trying to do too many things with little success to finding success in a single focus? Was it business? Career? Relationships? The Millionaire Mind community wants to hear from you!

Aim to Please

Posted on July 15, 2011 - 4:00 am by 16

There was a study out a few years ago that said 80% of millionaires are self-made. That is, they didn’t inherit their millions, and they didn’t win the lottery. They literally started out wanting to be a millionaire—like everybody else—but found a way to earn their millions.

Ten percent of self-made millionaires are people who work for self-made millionaires. They join a company like Apple when it’s small and grow financially and professionally with the company. Only about 8-9% of millionaires are professionals like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, athletes, entertainers and such. Inheritors represent about another 1 percent. These are ballpark figures.

For a vast majority of millionaires, the one skill they had in common that made them millionaires was simple: the ability to sell something at a higher price than it costs them to produce.

So for you, the purpose of a millionaire-making enterprise is to create customers in a cost effective way, and your job is to innovate what you’re selling and market it. Those are the only two things that create customers: to find newer, better, faster, cheaper ways to help people achieve their goals or get what they want, and to let as many people know about it as possible.

The measure of the success of a business is customer satisfaction. If your customers are pleased, you’ll know because you’ll still be in business. When you realize, “It’s not about me, it’s about the customer,” you become focused on that, not ‘How can I rip them off, how can I get the money and run, how can I get them to buy once and never buy again.’

Once you have learned how to build a successful business, you can use the same principles to build business after business after business. That’s how millionaires stay millionaires.

Yet, here’s another sobering fact: a vast majority of businesses go broke in the first three to five years. Businesses started by people with no experience go broke more often than not. Businesses started by people with experience succeed 90% of the time or more.

People starting out don’t know how to sell; they don’t know how to satisfy customers; and they don’t know how to create and keep customers.

The good news is all business skills are learnable. When you realize that there are certain things successful people do over and over again—and if you can learn what they are and do them yourself over and over again—you’ll eventually get the same result.

People will say, “Well, I’m not very good at selling.” Get over it! You may not be very good at it, but it’s a learnable skill.

So what is the highest paid work in our society, for most people? It’s not doctoring, or lawyering, ball playing, or singing. It’s thinking.

Think, “What can I sell that I’m passionate about but also adds value to other people’s lives in some kind of way, and how can I do this profitably?”

The customer may not always be right, but never let them know that. You want raving fans. You want supporters. You want critics who care. You want to see those people again and again. Like any relationship, it’s not only about you and what you get out of it. It’s building and sustaining rapport while your profits soar to millionaire heights.

https://bit.ly/ClickAndBeFree

The Answer Lies in How

Posted on July 8, 2011 - 2:06 am by 28

From now on, whenever you have a goal, the only question you ask is, “How?” If you have a problem, the question is, “How do you solve it? How do you overcome it?”

All successful people ask how. They’re proactive. They’re action oriented, and the word ‘how’ is like pushing the button on a detonator. The answer always triggers you into explosive action. You can’t ask ‘How do I solve this,’ ‘How do I achieve it,’ ‘How do I get there,’ or ‘How do I overcome it’ without being triggered into taking an action of some kind.

If top people think about what they want and how to get it, what is it that unhappy, unsuccessful people think about most of the time? They think about what they don’t want and/or who’s to blame. That’s the basic summary of all abnormal psychology. They think about what they don’t want, which makes them unhappy, and they think about who is to blame, which makes them angry.

Unsuccessful, unhappy people are always angry at someone who they blame for their problems. The goal is to mature to the point where you realize that you are in command of your own life. You’re in charge. You make things happen. You are not a victim. That was then, this is now.

Never allow your past to determine your future. Think about what you want and how to get it.

When you turn toward the sunshine; when you think about what you want and how to get it, the shadow of negativity falls behind you. You realize you can’t change any of that stuff from the past anyway, so why fret over it anymore, yes? You have control over now. Now you can ask how. ‘Instead of what thinking about what I don’t want, what do I want, and how do I get there?’

One of the greatest wastes of life is to be upset about something that happened in the past that you can’t change. One of the great uses of life is to think about what you want in the future and how you’re going to get it. You keep your mind so focused on the future that all those other things just peel away like dead skin.

Don’t allow unhappy experiences in the past to keep re-emerging in your daily life. This is what holds us back. This is what stops people from succeeding.

Maybe some things happened to you that were beyond your control. Maybe those events had consequences that detoured or even derailed some goals in your life up until this point. Maybe you’re still living with those consequences. You are responsible for your life now. You are responsible for the things that you want and how to get them.

Nobody is smarter than you. Nobody is better than you. If they are doing better, they have just figured out how. They’ve gotten the recipe before you did, but the recipes are available to everyone.

What was the recipe for your success? How were you able to use basic, simple psychology to turn your situation around from lethargy to activity? What’s your story? We want to hear from you!

Time: Your Friend or Your Foe?

Posted on July 1, 2011 - 4:50 am by 13

How long does it take to get to where you want to be?

The answer for most people is ‘Too long!’ In our culture of instant gratification, the likelihood that it can take years to become a millionaire is enough to keep most from ever trying.

The truth is few businesses make money in the first four years. In fact the average business takes two years to lose money, two more years to pay back the money it lost, and three more years to become profitable. In other words, it typically takes seven years for a business to succeed.

For a lot of people that’s way too long, but for most fields of study, work, or career, it takes about seven years to become a master. Seven years seems like a long time, and in some ways it is, but in seven years how much older will you be regardless?

One of the prime rules for success also happens to be one of the hardest to swallow. I choked on it for a while, maybe because it’s so painfully obvious and avoidable: that time is going to pass anyway. Seven years from now, seven years will have gone by. Three years from now three years will have gone by, so whatever you know you’re supposed to be doing anyway, get on with it!

Put your head down, pull out every stop, and pay any price you can to get into the top 10% in your field. Then you’ll remain one of the highest paid people in your field for the rest of your life.

But here’s another important point to remember: the pay-off is not when you get to your goal. If you think that’s the case, you are setting yourself up for some serious disappointment. You only get to a goal once, yes, then what? Then the next, and the next, and then your head is always looking ahead instead of where you’re at right now.

The pay-off is every step of along the way. Every step you take toward becoming better, you feel yourself improving. It raises your self esteem. It releases endorphins in your brain which make you happy. Every step you take toward the goal makes you happy and gives you energy. It’s people who are not moving in the direction of becoming better who are negative, unhappy, miserable complainers.

We constantly have to work on ourselves. Your life only gets better when you get better, and there’s no limit to how much better you can become. Conversely, it’s your weakest skill that is holding you back. Your weakest key skill in your field sets the height of your income.

Time is on your side, and it’s not. Time, in reality, doesn’t really care what you do or don’t do. It’s going to keep moving (or not “moving,” depending on how Zen you want to get here!) regardless of whether or not you get up and stop wasting it, or stop pushing things off, or stop making excuses. Time can be your friend or ally, but never your enemy. The real enemy is usually within.

What one skill—if you developed a mastery of it—would help you the most to increase your income? What would help you the most in terms of learning a skill within your career or business right now?

https://bit.ly/ClickAndBeFree

Facing the Consequences

Posted on June 24, 2011 - 5:07 am by 13

One of the most impactful words in our language is consequences—this concept that action means something because it creates reactions, results: consequences. When we think of “facing the consequences,” that usually means something “bad.”

Likewise, inaction has consequences in that if we don’t do certain things that can also affect our lives, and sometimes with the greatest negative consequences.

However, there can be good consequences when we face up to the choices and decisions that we’ve been putting off. Every change in life happens when our mind collides with a new idea and goes off in a different direction. Once that happens, there are an infinite number of possible consequences that can happen.

In this sense, it’s pretty elegant but simple proof that you don’t necessarily have to be super smart to create the possibilities you want—though education, intelligence, and wisdom can’t hurt. You don’t have to be super-certain—though confidence and courage help more often than hinder.

Successful people are successful because they do more things that increase the probabilities that they will achieve the success they want. The probabilities say that if you try enough things in the right ways, eventually you’ll try the right thing at the right time with the right result for you.

One of the things I’ve found with regard to new ideas is that smart people continually move themselves within a stream—where they are connecting with the right people and events serendipitously, simply because of a decision they may have made years ago that brought them to that spot. At some point that person said, “Yes, I think I’ll try this and commit to it.”

They’re in a flow where the people, and the situations, and the ideas are colliding and pin-balling back and forth. The downside to that is it can be over-whelming sometimes, causing paralysis because all these ideas sound good but—jack of all trades, master of none.

The upside is that you can never tell which idea is going to be the one you need at that time. You only know that if you increase the number of ideas, the likelihood or probability that you’ll get the right idea at the right time goes up dramatically.

And sometimes all you need is one new idea to change the whole course of your life. One small change in the ingredients can change your whole world, or maybe impact the world. We’re seeing proof positive of that across a whole region of the globe today.

Bernard Baruch, one of the wealthiest men in America back in the day, started off penniless. When asked what was the key to becoming wealthy he said, “The starting point to becoming wealthy is to decide to become wealthy.” Look at his consequences.

The average self made millionaire goes broke two or three times throughout the course of his or her lifetime, which means there’s hope for all of us. Most Americans start off broke but like it so much they keep going back to it throughout their lives. Break the cycle.

What were some of the most powerful consequences of a decision that you made in your life? What other possibilities opened up for you? Share your experiences with the Millionaire Mind community. We want to hear from you!

https://bit.ly/NewMMI

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