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Tag: Financial Freedom

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Funnel Into The Market Of Success

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Beyond the funhouse mirrors of what people think it means to run a successful business, at the end of the day there’s a science to it, like most everything else.

The definition of a scientific formula is something that has been developed, tested, then tested again and again by geniuses compared to most of us. The benefit we get is those formulas can now be used successfully by just about anybody who applies them. We’re surrounded by formulas that we can simply follow. It may have taken them years to develop, but now we can use them with just a little effort.

There are formulas for business success. Some of them need to be applied before you invest your first dollar into any enterprise. The businesses that fail are the ones that fail to specialize, differentiate, and segment their core customers.

Specialization means you specialize in a particular product or service; a particular market area; a particular industry or geographical area. You target this like a marksman. What do you specialize in? What is your focus?

The next part of successful marketing is differentiation. Every act of professional selling is differentiation; that is, identifying your area of excellence. Specialization focuses on who you’re targeting and what the product is going to be. Differentiation takes it a step further—how are you going to deliver that product and/or service differently than the other businesses your customers could be going to? What are you going to be excellent at? What is it about your product or service that makes it better or superior to anything or anyone else?

If you want to earn the highest possible income, it’s worth taking a week, a month, a year—as long as it takes—to excel in a particular area because that’s where all the money is. Real money is not for the average, the mediocre, the well meaning or the hopeful. It’s for people who are really good at what they do.

Segmentation is deciding who your best customers are based on what you sell, what you specialize in, what you’re already good, and who can most benefit the fastest from what it is you sell. These are the customers that are the easiest to sell to. You focus single-mindedly on them. You identify the 20% of customers who can account for 80% of your sales.

Wave a magic wand and imagine your perfect customer. As silly as it may sound, it is actually the most appropriate analogy to make. Your perfect customer is literally on the verge of buying, all you have to do is meet them, and they’ll take it right out of your hand. Who is that person?

Now by the time they are arriving at your door, you already know what they need because you’ve focused on your specialization, differentiation, and segmentation. You begin talking about your product or service, showing them that all things considered yours is the best choice. You answer their objections or hesitations, close the sale, and get re-sales and referrals from them. Marketing Success 101.

You do this prospecting so you don’t spend a single minute talking with people who are not good prospects. Your job is to identify the people who are most likely to buy, and then connect with them immediately with a benefit that they want now. All you have to do is prove that you can deliver.

Time: Your Friend or Your Foe?

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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

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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

Think Rich, Get Rich: Is it really that simple?

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Each time I am on stage or working directly with my students in my mastermind groups, I tell them, “Don’t just take my word for anything.” And I mean it. Not everything is always right or wrong, and experience is always the best teacher. Anything we learn has to put it to the test for ourselves.  However, I will say that what I’ve learned has worked for me, and it’s worked for thousands. I am sure, especially during this economic challenge, that you have seen “financial gurus” promising you secrets on how to change your financial situation instantly. What makes me any different than the others? Why should anybody listen to me?

It’s not like I had some special gift that got me to where I am today. Like some of the best things in life, the turning point in my financial destiny came to me completely out of my control. See, after yet another failed business venture, I was forced to move back into my parents’ basement. A visiting friend of my father’s—a very rich friend—took pity on this 20-something still living with his folks and gave me advice that literally changed my life.

He said, “If you thought the way rich people do and did what rich people do, do you believe you could become rich too?” I probably hemmed and hawed some kind of ‘I guess’ response, and he added, “Then all you have to do is copy how rich people think.”

The missing ingredient in my bid for financial success was two-fold. Not only was it knowing what other successful people know, but it was also knowing what was going on in my own mind.

Without examining our true beliefs, sometimes we can block our own success and not even realize it. For me, even though I said I wanted to be rich, I had some unconscious worries about it. I was afraid that I might fail, or even worse, succeed and then lose it all, then look like a fool.

Eventually, I became aware of how my own thoughts were holding me back from wealth, and more importantly, I learned several powerful ways to “unlearn” what we’re typically conditioned to think when it comes to money, so I would think in the same ways that rich people do.

How many times have you challenged your own thoughts and beliefs about money, or about who you really are for that matter? How do you really feel about yourself? Do you actually believe that you deserve to be wealthy? Our personal blueprint ends up determining our money blueprint, and we need to understand these influences before we can begin transforming into a millionaire mindset.

I believe our lives are shaped by defining moments and the decisions that we make from them. From one embarrassing yet insightful incidence, I made a decision to learn everything I could about the psychology of money and success. My results speak for themselves.

It’s true: rich people really do think differently than most. To make that transition, you have to let go of some of your old ways of thinking about money and about yourself, and adopt some new thought patterns. In other words, you need to learn how to think like someone who is rich.

It really is that simple. If you think like rich people do and do what they do, chances are you’ll get rich too!

https://bit.ly/NewMMI

Split the Difference

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With so much turmoil going on in the world today, sometimes it can seem too selfish to think about personal riches while so many struggle for basics. This is a feeling I experienced periodically throughout my life—that flip-flop between getting rich as an unqualified goal and wanting to get rid of it all and retreat to a temple or something, or otherwise reject the idea of staying rich.

I’ve made it and lost it. I went from being rich to ‘money is not the most important thing in life’ and ‘why would you put that much focus on it?’ Honestly, I used to think this was a curse. It’s like I had this split personality where one side was about being an entrepreneur and focusing on finances. But I had this other part of me that just wanted to be at the monastery, meditate and eat in silence.

It took me years to figure out that neither extreme was really me. Sometimes it takes success to understand success in itself is not enough. I had to win and lose, tune out and turn on in order to learn that when you reach your first big goal, joyousness, gratitude, and satisfaction don’t just automatically jump on for the ride.

There has to be an intention for these intangibles, and that means knowing what makes you joyous, grateful and satisfied—where money has nothing to do with it. The money only takes it to a whole other level. So discovering these things about yourself certainly does require asking yourself quality questions—or in my world, that and some soul searching.

There’s an eloquent balance between wealth and spirituality that I can now fully embrace, as should we all. For the spiritual-minded in a world of such disparity, consider yourself blessed to have an interest in that and in financial success. Be the fortunate one to put the two together and help other people know that they can be rich and spiritual too. You can be rich and a good person with intentions that consider others.

If spirituality doesn’t ring true for you, throw that out the window anyways. Both riches at any costs and “money doesn’t matter” are two extremes that simply don’t work. They didn’t work for me, and I can’t think of anyone I know who can survive either over the long haul. Intend to split the difference. Balance is beautiful.

Now I look at my duality as a blessing, thanking my stars for the successes and failures, those swings from hermit to world conqueror. You can have your goals, and when you achieve them acknowledge yourself and be thrilled, but there better be something else bringing you joy in your life, or you can end up psyching yourself out of success.

Bank riches without inner riches is a bank account waiting to see itself dwindle, because you’ll look for other ways to use that money to fill a hole that it can never fill—even if that means consciously or unconsciously getting rid of it.

Do you have any stories of having a bunch only to lose it willfully? What was it that finally made you realize the money wasn’t enough, and what did you do to get that sense of real satisfaction? What was the particular lesson you can share with the rest of the Millionaire Mind community? We want to hear from you!

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