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The Epic Driven Life

Filed Under (Goal setting and achievement, Uncategorized) by Gogo on 25-02-2010

Epic-Driven Life Day 1 by Denver Business Coach
Uploaded by IdeaAgeConsulting. – Parties, dorm life, and other college videos.

A few days ago, my wife and I received our first child into the world (my little man above). Over the previous 3 months, I had carefully prayed and contemplated what his name would be. In many African and Semitic cultures, names given to newborn children are designed to tell a story that will (hopefully) positively inform or affect the life in front of them.

It is partly an act of faith, sometimes an act of sorrow (see the biblical story of Benjamin’s name) but most often an act of stubborn insistence that we will have a hand in shaping the future.

My last name for instance “Erekosima” ironically translates into “Don’t give him a name” – and tells the story of the first Erekosima about 6 generations before my time, who was such a feared, powerful and temperamental warlord that other members of the community declined to attach a nickname to him as was customary for other chieftains and kingmakers of his stature. As such things often go, it became his default nickname, and one of 3 surnames borne by his descendants.

Thinking about this whole issue of our traditional African names reminds me of a talk I delivered at a Men’s event in Colorado Springs a few months ago, entitled, “The Epic-Driven Life”.

In my conception, the epic-driven life is a complete philosophy of self-management through which you can ignite your noblest ambitions, douse your fears, and generally hold yourself accountable to live a more passionate life.

The word, “Epic” (ep.ic) is defined as

“…pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero in which a series of achievements or events is narrated in elevated style”

(See Dictionary for this and other related definitions).

The epic-driven life is a life lived intentionally. A life in which you intentionally choose the epics that excite you, write those epics down to the best detail that you can, and then proceed with purpose to “act out” the epics of your dreams.

Millions of people read the Purpose-Driven life and while I have never gotten around to reading beyond the first page of that book, I presume there may be parallels between the lessons in that book and those I’m sharing here.

However, “Purpose” is much bigger (and for some people, more elusive) than an “epic”. An epic starts as simply as sitting down and writing down an achievement that would tickle you to death if you went out and accomplished it just as you saw it while you were daydreaming.

About 10 years ago, I purposed in my mind that I would be time-flexible when my children came. I was neither a parent, nor married at the time. It would be another 8 years before marriage, and 10 years before this first child.

However, the epic I wrote in my head has directly or indirectly informed my decisions such that I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 9 years and self-employed for the last 5. While the journey itself had twists and turns that I couldn’t have anticipated, I find myself HERE…at home on a weekday…where I thought I would be.

In a previous post on “How To Prosper in 2010” I communicated another epic upon which I’m actively working as I speak: To go from a one-man consultancy to a Business consulting firm that grosses 7 figures in record time, while generating record growth and profits for my clients.

The beauty of the epic-driven mindset is that an epic is a valuable asset all by itself. My coaching clients at MarriageInspiration.com took their tears and turned them into gold.

I have seen people completely change how they handle setbacks when they realized that “it all works together for their good” by contributing to their epic. Any story that can be told can be sold if it’s dramatic, audacious, or otherwise interesting enough.

I’ve seen the epic-driven mindset cause formerly timid sales professionals to happily glide their way to the proverbial batter’s box, because they have connected the seemingly mundane events of their lives to something far more exciting…an epic with a living, breathing, hero smack in the middle of it.

If you’re reading this post, I choose to believe that it’s because the seeds of a great epic lie within you. Release yourself to the epic of your dreams, record your achievements, your setbacks, and your insights. And then please share them.

The world awaits…

with bated breath.

Till Next Time.

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Filed Under (Marketing-Success Mindset) by Gogo on 25-02-2010

In my last post on “Business success tools”, I shared the single most important character trait that you need to successfully achieve your entrepreneurial or business goals. Today, I’ll share another success-creating attitude that you probably have never heard applied to business success.

Business Success Tool #3 is Surrender

A few months ago, I read an excellent book for entrepreneurs entitled “Rules for Renegades”, by Christine Comaford-Lynch. One of the most intriguing chapter headings in the book was the following instruction:

“Resign As General Manager Of The Universe”

What that chapter headline highlights is the importance of knowing when to surrender for entrepreneurs and business owners. If you’re like the typical entrepreneur, you have probably reached your level of success by your refusal to give up… your refusal to be dictated to…whether by people or by circumstance.

While persistence and a degree of stubbornness is an admirable trait for an entrepreneur, your long-term sanity depends on your ability to know the difference between factors you can control and those you cannot.

This issue goes much deeper than it might first appear, because it’s all about emotional intelligence and emotional discipline. Emotional intelligence is about understanding yourself, your weaknesses, your motivations, your risk thresholds and decision making patterns.

Emotional discipline is about applying your self-knowledge when and where it counts. Not later.

I believe that a final, oft-hidden frontier of emotional discipline for entrepreneurs and business leaders is the ability to surrender what is not in control, and sometimes, to surrender when continuing on (knowing when to quit).

The vast majority of entrepreneurs (myself included) are inclined towards “eternal optimism” and a touch of stubbornness. It takes emotional discipline to change strategy or change directions when the road you’re on clearly will not lead to the ultimate goal.

Many of the most longest surviving businesses in the world have grown on emergent strategies (strategies other than those planned on when they started out). They succeeded because the leaders at the helm had the emotional discipline to change their strategy. Whether that involved changing their target customer, marketplace, or even core competencies/processes, they had the courage to pull the switch.

Mastering the art of surrender will also help you delegate what can profitably be delegated as soon as it is practical to do so. Surrender is as important as Strategy and Sacrifice in your success toolbox.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this series and my conclusions. For your review, here are the first 2 parts of this series:

Business Success Tools Part 1 – Strategy in Success

Business Success Tools Part 2 – Sacrifice as part of success

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Filed Under (Marketing-Success Mindset) by Gogo on 28-01-2010

In my last article (Hidden business success tools), I shared how important it is for entrepreneurs and managers to employ the “strategic mindset” in building a business or managing a work unit.

In this 2nd article of this series, I want to share another little known secret to business success…

Tool #2- Sacrifice
What is sacrifice?
According to Wikipedia, the word “sacrifice” comes from a Middle English verb meaning “To make Sacred”.
I like the implication in that meaning because right from the outset, entrepreneurial achievement requires that the entrepreneur “make sacred” whatever resources (time, money, attention) are needed, and allocate them almost exclusively to the goal of business success. This is personal sacrifice.

Sacrifice is about spiritual, mental and even physical discipline. It’s about the ability to stick to the “most important” choice among many “good” choices. Despite the temptation to do otherwise.
Sacrifice is about giving up one or more “good things”, in order to get the best thing.

In the context of business strategy, sacrifice is what enables strategic focus or business focus. In helping my clients construct an effective strategic marketing plan, I’ve found that I sometimes have to help them resolve an emotional resistance to making hard choices.

About 2 months ago, I wrote the Precious Pearl Productivity post to illustrate why it’s so important to sacrifice the “merely important” for the “most important“.

Sacrifice is the act of giving up something for something more valuable. This could apply to so many decisions or actions. For instance,

Sacrificing sleep every morning to write blog articles daily.
Sacrificing the income you could have obtained from people outside your target market niche.
Sacrificing short-term profit to ensure a greater payoff down the road.

So practice giving up something small, and then gradually progress to making bigger and bigger sacrifices.
If you can make sacrifice a mental habit, you’ll better able to stick to your resolutions and more likely to implement your business plans.

See 3 Hidden Business Success Tools Pt 1

See 3 Hidden Business Success Tools Pt 3

Till next time.

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Filed Under (Marketing-Success Mindset) by Gogo on 27-01-2010

The 3 hidden business success tools I want to share with you today are not likely to be anything you expect.

I think it’s a bias of the American business culture to pursue opportunities or approach challenges with a techno-centric orientation – with machines or software, or some other “technology”.

In the modern America, we’re unlikely to start with a people-centric approach until we exhaust other alternatives…even in our war against terrorism, we’ve seen this approach result in billions wasted purchasing security equipment instead of getting into the cultural “soil” in which the enemies are sprouting up like weeds…but that’s a topic for another forum.

Today, I want to share 3 not-so-obvious business success tools that are more “habits” than things. Whether you’re seeking online business success, or some other form of personal or entrepreneurial success, these tools are certain to apply to you.

Tool #1 – Strategy
Strategy is a word that’s been bandied around, almost recklessly, by business executives and authors since we successfully stole it from the military world.
It comes from the classical Greek word, “Strategos” meaning “general” or “commander”. Strategy has to do with the “big picture” plan of action that connects where you are and what you’ve got to where you want to be (and what you want to have/achieve there).

In a military context, it has to do with the planning, integration and linking of tactics to achieve the overall victory. In a business context, it’s not so much about how you engage your customers and competitors (those are tactics), but the bigger picture road map of preparing for, planning and designing the terms of engagement so that every “how” is more advantageous and effective.

Being Strategic Vs. Strategy
When talk of strategy comes up, most business owners think of “having the right strategy” but I’ve got news for you:

“Being strategic is more important than having the right strategy”

“Being strategic is more important than having a strategy at all!”

There are thousands of business success stories where entrepreneurs built successful six, seven and even eight figure businesses without so much as a business plan or even a specific marketing plan. You might be surprised to hear this coming from a business growth strategist and marketing consultant, but it’s the honest-to-goodness truth!

So what gives?

Many of these business owners were actually “strategic without strategy”. Being strategic is an orientation, a set of “habits of approach” that defines how a person deals with opportunities and challenges. This habit is one that applies, not just to individuals, but to organizations. Your organization can learn to “be strategic” as a cultural trait.

Being strategic means habitually planning before doing. It means habitually doing those things first that are closer related to the desired “big picture” outcome. For some business owners who have experienced success, being strategic is an established life habit.

Being Strategic: 4 Reasons why this Business Success Tool Comes First

1. Failure Lessons and The Success Cycle
Being strategic allows you to learn lessons faster when you fail and give you a better ability to extract success from failure more often. Many aspiring entrepreneurs spend hours and hours studying and benchmarking success when they should be benchmarking “turnarounds” (or Failure lessons).

This systemic undersampling of failure lessons (See See Stanford University study on Bias against failure lessons) results in a more unrealistic handling of future threats and is a direct result of one of the most damaging myths of modern management – The ease of achieving business success through vicarious learning and external benchmarking.

2. Being strategic encourages founders, managers and employees to be optimizers
Strategic business owners and managers are more likely to be business optimizers than “home-run hitters”. The legend of the home-run hitter in business is simply untrue when you examine the majority of business success stories. Instead success most often comes to those who master the very boring business of gradual improvement through strategy, integration of tools, monitoring, testing & tweaking and continuous trials.

3. Being strategic makes every tactic, tool and campaign more valuable
Another powerful benefit of being strategic as an orientation is captured in the following quote by Chet Holmes,

“Strategy makes every tactic work 5 to 10 times harder”

… I agree!

Imagine 2 entrepreneurs who both decide to create a website for their business. After 3 years, one entrepreneur has a business that’s slowly growing and doing just fine.

The second entrepreneur, on the other hand, has grown so fast and so far that she’s had to create a new strategic marketing plan that will completely change her business model and organizational structure…just to keep pace with the accelerated growth!

Going back to interview them, you find that the first entrepreneur decided to create a website and simply paid a few hundred bucks to have one built. It contained a “Home” page, an “About Us” page and a few brief blurbs about what he offered.

The second entrepreneur first consulted her strategic marketing plan and analyzed where her web site marketing strategy would fit into it. She defined her ideal targets as her direct customers and her distributors and continually communicated a unique selling proposition.

She made sure to incorporate free strategies like YouTube marketing, free video syndication and search engine optimized press releases. Of course, she made sure hers was NOT one of the 84% of websites that are not listed by the search engines.

Surprisingly, over the next 3 years, she spent just a few hundred dollars more annually than our first entrepreneur. But she connected with hundreds of thousands more prospects, clients and partners. And gained so much new business that she’s contemplating selling off a digital profit center for a 6 figure payday.

To summarize, it’s more important to be a strategic thinker and implementer than it is to latch on to any particular strategy. It is important to think strategically about what you invest in to market or to grow your business. Applying strategic thinking to your business, your time and your life will no doubt accelerate the pace of your business success.

In part 2, I share a truly overlooked business success tool that may forever change how you approach both your company and maybe even your life.

Hidden Business Success Tools Pt 2

Hidden Business Success Tools Pt 3

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Filed Under (Marketing-Success Mindset) by Gogo on 05-01-2010

Happy New Year!!

Aren’t you excited?

In my previous post, “How To Prosper in 2010″, one of the last references I made was to how your wealth is not to be searched for “afar off”, but “is already here with you”.

I’m now going to go a bit deeper into what all that means. I have never before shared these insights with anyone outside my executive coaching or consulting clients. I hope you spend some time thinking about the implications and bringing benefit to your life from them. Here goes…

It is my opinion that every human being alive has direct access to at least 3 forms of “wealth” from which they can reasonably access a fourth (the vast majority of the time).

They are:

Spiritual Wealth (or capital)
Social Capital
Intellectual Capital

Whether these forms of capital are mobilized and accessed or just merely “present” depends on your ability to maintain an “ambient state” of gratitude. The practice of counting your blessings will allow you to see assets even where others might see only loss and devastation.

Believe it or not, this wealth matrix also informs my unique approach to Business growth consulting. The best businesses are living entities with spiritual capital (culture, values, mission, vision), social capital (client, vendor, strategic partner relationships), intellectual capital (Knowledge bases, patents, unique systems and processes) and much more…

These previously mentioned forms of wealth, are broader and much more powerful than the fourth – financial capital.

Financial capital (i.e. Money, credit line) is merely an expression of how well we’ve matched the previous 3 with the needs of the marketplace; with the needs of others.

If you’re an entrepreneur or business owner wondering how to apply this wealth matrix to yourself and your business, here’s a bit of help:

Your Spiritual capital can consists of:

The elements in your belief system – Faith (A christian may assume God’s love for them for instance), assurance, vision, personal stability
The elements in your personality – Courage, Initiative, Love of others, etc

Your Social capital is the most immediate expression of your spiritual capital.
Before ever you could say a word, you had at least one servant render you hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars worth of services. Most people call these servants “Mom” and “Dad”. They also weren’t alone. Many, many others likely contributed to your early access to your social capital.

Today, if you’re an entrepreneur, all your social networks are potentially available to you as:

Clients and customers
Referral and Strategic partners
Investors and business partners
Mastermind partners and teachers

Perhaps the most important early contribution of your social network is that it made the first deposit into your Intellectual Capital bank.

Your intellectual capital consists of all those things you know and the things you think you know…
These things you know can be packaged into professional expertise, speeches and talks, books, systems, etc that give you a platform of monetary exchange with the rest of the world.

A few weeks ago, I created a gratitude list of my teachers. You should try the same thing and see if you can isolate the most important lessons you have learned from them.

For my executive coaching clients, I have created what I call a “SHELL framework” to help them mine the intellectual aspects of “their hidden wealth”.

S.H.E.L.L. stands for S-Skills, H-Hobbies, E-Epics and Experiences, L-Lessons and Learning, L – Loves and Passions.

My coaching clients the Marriage experts – Ronnie and Jackie Calloway, turned their epic story of Adultery, betrayal, divorce and marriage reconciliation into books, products, seminars and more. Have you been wasting your personal epics?

Have you ever asked yourself “What’s in my shell?”

I hope you will apply these two systems for recognizing your hidden wealth into your business and your life. Please leave your comments and let me know how this post may have helped you.

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Filed Under (Goal setting and achievement) by Gogo on 24-12-2009

As we usher in this Christmas and holiday season, I wish to say a big Merry Christmas and God bless you. Not because I presume you are Christian or even religious, but because I can only share with you what has the most meaning to me; what conveys my highest and best wishes for you.

As you prepare to usher in the new year, I have a question to ask you.

Have you made absolutely sure that you maximized (extracted absolute, maximum, leverage out of) all the resources that were available to you?

And if, upon examination, you conclude that you did not, have you prepared yourself with plans to both appreciate and maximize your blessings in the new year?

Since I will be taking a break from this blog till the new year, I want to share with you my step-by-step plan for How To Prosper in 2010. Enjoy:

1. Count Your Blessings (Past And Current)
About 2 weeks ago or so, I posted a list of my “Teachers” for whom I felt grateful. It was an exercise in gratitude, and an exercise in creativity. I could not think about who they were without examining what explicit and implicit lessons I learned from them.

2. Be A Worthy Steward (Servant) Of Your Blessings
This means that you put your blessings in a “capital” context. The term “capital” has to do with a resource that can be invested in such that it produces a return over and above what is invested into it. Are you investing in your gifts, talents and resources such that they are producing a return over and above your investment?

3. Adopt a Leverage Mindset
There’s a quote from the Christian bible that comes to mind when I think about this point. In 1 Corinthians 3:21-23, Paul advises his “beloved Corinthians” with the following words:

…For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours…

Are you wasting “your teachers”?
Are you wasting Google? Youtube? Facebook? Meetup.com? Jing (Techsmith.com)? Blogger.com? And WordPress.com? All of which are yours?

Are you wasting your social capital? Are you wasting your business networking contacts? Your client and prospect lists? Your vendor relationships?
Are you wasting time that could be better spent in the warm embrace of your friends and family?
Are you wasting your nearest public library? The business resource section? The free reading at Barnes and Noble? The local small business development office? The nearest business association or networking group?

ARE YOU WASTING TIME?

4. Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals
Now that you’ve gone through the steps above, it’s time to apply those to goal attainment. A S.M.A.R.T. Goal is:

S- SPECIFIC
M- MEASURABLE
A- ACHIEVABLE
R- RECORDED
T- TIME-ORIENTED

Set and record goals for your spiritual life, health, intellectual life, financial life, business life (if relevant). All these goals should meet the SMART criteria. Being specific means that instead of saying something like “I’ll be more grateful in 2010″, you can commit to “Sending X number of Thank you letters and notes in 2010″, or “Saying a prayer of gratitude every morning when I wake up in 2010″.

Being measurable means that your goal is concretely observable and track-able. For instance, “200 new clients in 2010″. You’ll either reach it, or you won’t.

Achievable – I struggled with this one when I first learned about S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting. Eventually I hacked out a meaning that resonated with me…If you can’t reverse-engineer your goal into a daily set of activities or investments of time, money and effort, then your goal is not achievable for you. Choose another one. Here’s what I mean. I set a goal to build a million dollar revenue business in 14 months (ending December 2010). However, For me to reach that goal, I have to draw out a plan of approach by which I can see that it is possible for me. That’s what I mean by achievable.

Recorded -This one means you should have it written down, recorded on audio, or even on your blog (like I did above). Some teachers and coaches even say you should tell others about your goal. Although I practice that, I’m not sure that’s the correct advice for everyone.

Time-delineated – “New year” goals tend to have deadlines by default. One year.
However, if you notice that you’ve been a “Serial resolution breaker”, you’ll want to make sure that you decompose your “new year resolution” into Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly Goals And Plans.

5. Forget About Motivation And Think Like Thomas Edison
Forget about “feeling motivated” before you take action. Resolve to “act your way into feeling motivated” instead. Nothing motivates like success and the rewards that come from success.
Stop waiting around for motivation and just take action on the plans you reverse-engineered from your goals. Remember that all things are Yours!
Convert both success and failure into marketing and business epics – Blog posts, videos, case studies, Ebooks. Do you realize you can make people pay you to hear all your “epic setbacks” (or failures)?
Stop thinking “Pass/fail” and start thinking “continuous, systematic improvement”. Every failure is just one more step toward your eventual success. Think like Thomas Edison (Read “Edison on Innovation”) who failed his way to success in finding the ultimate light bulb material.

The road to prosperity for you in 2010 will not be found in “searching for the far off wealth”. It will be in discovering your own wealth (already “here” with you) and mining it for maximum leverage.

Be blessed and have a prosperous new year!

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Filed Under (Marketing-Success Mindset) by Gogo on 07-12-2009

I have learned so much from so many people that it seems ridiculous to even try to narrow down to any sort of list. However, I think I should mention teachers from whom I have learned so much about success, business, marketing and life.

Jay Abraham
Dan Kennedy
Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt
Tim Hurson
Dr. Maxwell Maltz
Christine Comaford-Lynch
Terry Dean
Michael Senoff
Lee McIntyre
Alex Mandossian
Armand Morin
Kathy Kolbe
Ron Shapiro
Geoff Smart
Perry Marshall
Jim Rohn
Glenn Livingston
Dennison Hatch
Jim Mills
Col. Jim Boyd
Napoleon Hill
Seth Godin
Rosser Reeves
Jack Trout
Joe Sugarman
Chet Holmes
Richard Johnson
Donald Trump
Bill Zanker
Jimmy D. Brown
Steve Cook
Malcolm Gladwell
Howard Dayton Jr.
David Schwartz
Edward Silberger
Barack Obama
Dr. Ken Evoy
Sean D’Souza
Rich Schefren
Joe Sabah
Chip & Dan Heath – Made To Stick
Napoleon Bonaparte
Phillip of Macedon
Thomas Edison
Eugene Schwartz
Michel Fortin
David Yoffie & Michelle Kwan
Don DeBelak
Steve Jobs
Nelson Mandela
Genghis Khan
Ken Kragen
Stephen Pollan
W.Chan Kim & Renee Mauborgne
Aristotle (Parts of drama)
Maxwell Sackheim
Chris Anderson (Long Tail)
Warren Buffett
Ali Mazrui
Russell Conway
Edward Stratemeyer
George Ross
Dr. Venkat Venkatraman
Roger Kaplan
Abraham Lincoln
Winston Churchill
Mark Twain
Robert Levine (Power of Persuasion)
David Ogilvy
Leo Burnett
Alan Lakein
Claude Hopkins
Ben Hart (Automatic Marketing)
Dan Ariely
Robert Cialdini
Nan Lin – Duke University (Network Theory of Social Capital)
Robert (Bob) C. Pritikin
Al Hollingsworth
Scott Channell
Ari Galper
Roger Kaplan
Dave Meier (Accelerated Learning HandBook)
Tim Ferriss
To-sheng (Watchman) Nee
John Eldredge (The Sacred Romance)
Doug Stevenson (Nine steps of story structure)
Brian Clark
Jack Cummings (Real Estate Dealmaking)
Will Smith (Famous actor’s business success secrets)
Tony Hsieh
Dr. Joe Oppenheimer
Jack Canfield (Power of Focus)
Barry Schwartz (The Paradox of Choice)
John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing)
Harvey Mackay
Dr. Rudy Lamone
Dolf De Roos
Steve Cook
Vernon Vaughan (The Wholesale Renegade)
Dr. Tonye Victor Erekosima
Anthony Parinello – Selling to V.I.T.O and V.I.P.
Jeff Gitomer
Jesus Christ My Lord

I saw a blog post by Alex Mandossian around thanksgiving that I thought was an excellent idea. It was a “Give thanks” list of those to whom he was grateful for various things. It got me thinking about those from whom I’ve learned so much from. I intend to continue to edit and add to this list, both as a lesson in gratitude and as a way of keeping re-inforcing what I’ve learned from these teachers of mine.

“In a multitude of counselors, there is safety”

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Filed Under (Goal setting and achievement) by Gogo on 22-08-2009

To understand how to achieve your goals in as direct a manner as possible, you have to identify your relationship to what I’ve termed the “Pain paradox of productivity”.

What’s that?
It’s the opposing streams of 2 strongly influential instructions under which most of us must conduct life and business. The first instruction comes from life, and the second comes from within us.

Both are unyielding, unrelenting and uncompromising.

The first says,

“No Pain, No gain”

… and comes to us from the outside world, from the elements, from other people. It is externally imposed and externally enforced. Shirking this instruction will quickly lead to failure and poverty on multiple fronts.

The second says,

“Pursue pleasure, avoid pain”

… and it comes to us from within. Left untamed, it’s voice will ring so loudly as to drown out all extraordinary effort from which extraordinary character is born and without which there can be no relative expertise or value. Following the leading of this dictum too casually will lead to enduring regret.

The foundational forces of your productive destiny – the market reality & the psychological reality are in conflict. No wonder you have a difficult time going directly and consistently toward your goals. There’s an internal conflict between what you have to do to succeed, and what you want to do to succeed.

I first began to appreciate the extent of this problem when I was coaching real estate investors who wanted to expand beyond the 4-property limitation imposed on them by conventional real estate financing. These soon-to-be creative real estate investors often started off on the wrong foot by asking, “How can I do enough to get maybe one property a month, without doing all the rest of that stuff”?

..And by “all the rest…” they meant the whole, entire business of “marketing, networking, studying, inspecting, planning, selling” etc!

I had to turn away at least one memorable prospect who just didn’t get that economic life outside his “boss makes me do it” world depends on people doing everything possible within legal and ethical boundaries to meet their goals.

Trying to play the “effort police” by looking for just the right amount of hard work to get minimally acceptable results is what gets most of us in trouble. Through the millennia, wise men have shared with whoever would listen, that the path less traveled, that narrow way that leads to earthly paradise, is the path of focused, unadulterated hard work.

I hope that I’ve inspired you to work hard to guarantee your success rather than aiming to do “just enough”.

Achieve your goals! Subscribe to this “Business coaching blog”.

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Filed Under (Personal Productivity Systems) by Gogo on 17-06-2009

Productivity inhibition in your life or business, is often more a result of internal turmoil/ unarticulated/unresolved fears/conflicts than anything else.

In one of the most insightful 5 minute speeches by one of my favorite authors Tim Ferriss, he talks about bringing some of the concepts of stoicism to bear in your productivity mindset and process.

In particular, he shares an ancient technique for using “negative visualization” to accomplish great or uncommon things. In this speech made at Google I/O ignite, he speaks on “The Practicality of Pessimism: Stoicism as a Productivity system”.

If you’re a student of personal productivity systems, you’ll also want to check out Dan Kennedy’s “The Positive Power of Negative Preparation”.

Just for your brain-tickling pleasure, I’ve gone ahead and outlined some of the quotes used on the slides:

“Define your fears instead of your goals” – Tim Ferriss
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened” – Mark Twain
“Named must be your fear before banish it you can” – Master Yoda, Star Wars
“Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action” – Benjamin Disraeli
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid” – Epictetus
“Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not to suffer” – Niccolo Machiavelli
“Everytime we choose safety, we reinforce fear” – Cheri Huber
“The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research” – Rolf Potts
“Don’t Avoid what you fear — define it” – Tim Ferriss
“You’ll find that many of the fears you have are based on under-valuing things that are easily attainable” – Tim Ferriss

I hope you’ve found this resource useful and would like to subscribe to this blog for more inspiring and enlightening speakers like this. If you’re an entrepreneur, the greatest part of the success of your small business will be mental. It takes courage to invest a few thousand dollars of your profits on a direct mail campaign, on a Pay per click campaign, etc. Wouldn’t you rather know the response rates for your marketing dollars?

Wouldn’t you rather build your business through low cost lead generation methods like strategic alliances, automated referral systems, etc?

Is your business greater than 4 years old?
Do a 80% or more of your clients think you do work that’s “satisfactory to great”?
Would you like to grow your business rapidly in the next 6 months?
Could you handle 20% to 100% increase in customers and sales in the next 12 months without suffering a significant drop in customer satisfaction?

If that sounds like how you want to grow your business, I can help you increase your dollar sales by 21% or more in 8 weeks or less by taking you on a treasure hunt within your business.

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Filed Under (Marketing-Success Mindset) by Gogo on 01-04-2009

If you own or run a small business fighting for the attention of your customers, your success depends as much on the adoption of a marketing mindset than on any other factor.

This sort of adoption must start with you and be actively installed in your staff, your processes and your material, to actually have it’s desired effect on your business. Many professionals (especially medical professionals) avoid focusing on marketing, somehow believing themselves to be above those who dominate the area with the persistence and reach of their marketing initiatives.

If you’re satisfied with mediocre profits in your business, then this post really isn’t for you. If on the other hand, you understand that your real business is marketing, you’re definitely on your way to building the kind of systematized, algorithmic and predictably successful business that works for you.

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