Archive for June, 2008

The major difficulty facing most people as they strive to be successful — in this fast-paced, gung-ho, success-striving world — is finding the time in which to complete the multiplicity of tasks that are demanded of them. The truth is the majority of people are just too busy to handle any new disciplines that are required of them to reach success, no matter how attractive the promised results may be. However, as you are reading this I’m sure you will be willing to master the disciplines required to gain more time!
Before when you used to say “…I could never find an extra half an hour every day, never!” Now you can…. there is a solution. It is not easy but then nothing truly worth having in life is ever easy. The smartest solution to finding this extra 30 minutes a day is to wake up earlier. As you journey toward the positive life transformation, instead of getting up at 6:00am, as the old you always did, make it your new habitual response to wake at 5:30am, thereby creating this massively important extra half an hour every day in which to perform something highly productive. This personal sacrifice will now become your greatest winning discipline, dictating the magnitude of your future success and unleashing your power to attain ultimate financial empowerment.

A fine line exists between information and knowledge. That fine line is nothing more than “use.” — You can memorize bits and pieces of information all day, every day, but, until you actually use that information, it is not knowledge. Once used, information becomes knowledge and, thereby, power.

SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE; whether they be self-employed or wage-earners, executive or common laborer, are seekers after knowledge. They absorb information from every direction. The information they can use becomes knowledge, while the information they have no apparent use for is simply stored on the chance that someday it may become useful. UN-SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE, on the other hand, claim to be seekers of knowledge, but, they believe that knowledge itself can be imparted. Because the books they read, the courses they take, and the plans they buy contain only “information.,” they are forever disappointed. Because it is ONLY INFORMATION (not the “knowledge” they thought they were going to get), they never use the information and, thereby, the knowledge they sought is lost to them forever.

The RULES OF SUCCESS used by successful people & businesses since the beginning of time have never really changed. Those rules have been written-down for all to read, learn and use, but they appear as “information” only and can only be changed to “knowledge” by use. If there were a way to “force” every person and every business to “use” those known and proven rules of success, there would be NO UN-successful people or businesses in the world. Statistically, 90% of small businesses fail, and 90% of people live a life of sustained mediocrity, simply because they will not “use” the information available to them. In your quest for financial independence you MUST learn to force yourself to use the information you have at your disposal. — No one (but YOU) is going to force you to assume that responsibility. Of course, some smart aleck reading this is going to say, “Yeah! But, I’m not going to use any bad information.” Granted, there is bad (counter-productive) information out there. BUT – there is NO WAY of telling good information from bad information, UNTIL YOU TRY IT.

Judging the value of information without using it is like trying to judge the flavor of a pie without ever tasting it. YOU can be your best friend, or your worst enemy. No one forces you to be what you are, or do what you do (or don’t do). – What you have today is a direct result of what you did yesterday. What you will have tomorrow will be a direct result of what you do (or don’t do) today. It’s up to you!

Consider the following scenarios:

Car and truck manufacturers spend fortunes to produce beautiful commercials. Everyone remembers the scenery and the stunning visuals. But who remembers the car or the truck?

An ad wins in the Oscar of the advertising agency, the Clio. All well and good for the ad agency. But sales don’t pick up. Where does that leave the company that commissioned the ad campaign in the first place? A company spends $100,000 for a perfect dot.com name, but less than a tenth of that amount for website design. In the process, it turns away potential customers who find it difficult to navigate the website or find that “hot merchandise” that is being promoted. These are examples of marketing that sucks. Most marketing “sucks” for the following reasons:

Many companies don’t understand what marketing is. One company spent more than a million dollars for 10,000 copies of a beautiful brochure, only to keep them warehoused in the end. The reason? The brochures were too expensive to give away to just about anyone. Companies operate by generalities. An expert says that a 1% hit rate for direct mail marketing is good enough. And companies limit themselves by this adage, if it is true at all. Many companies undertake only one form of marketing, such as print advertising, instead of a swarming offense that targets everyone wherever that person turns, from print ads to outdoor advertising to infomercials.

Many expensive programs are devoid of innovative thinking. They’re hung up on doing what their competitors do, but better. In the end, no one remembers. The key lies in innovation, in being remembered. Many companies don’t make use of available research. There are databases that can be accessed to enhance the marketing effort. Many marketing professionals remain unaccountable for results or the lack of them. It’s all about moving what you sell!

The super successful also have a different take on failure.

Failure is what happens when you do something. The greatest successes in the world also experienced the greatest failures. The all-time strikeout record in major league baseball is held by … Babe Ruth. But we don’t remember him for his strikeouts. We remember him for setting a home run record that stood for decades. No one cares about his strikeouts. The point is he kept swinging the damn bat! Most of us never get out of the dugout—let alone up to the plate. Those people not only wonder why they never hit a home run—and even begrudge the determined hitters who do!

The key to success is understanding your shortcomings

Donald Trump has lost billions in his financial deals. But who cares. He has made billions more with his successful ventures, and he just keeps swinging the bat. After stumbling into the New World, Christopher Columbus failed in his subsequent
explorations and died a poor and disappointed man. But on Columbus Day do we celebrate his dying destitute? Of course not. We celebrate his success.

This reminds me of a story about Tom Watson, Sr., founder of IBM, being asked by a young management trainee, “Sir, how do I get to the top of the management ladder here?” Watson replied immediately, “Double your failure rate, son. Double your failure rate.” His point was, of course, that more failures could only result from more tries, more initiative, more risk taking … all the actions required for growth. Most of Thomas Edison’s experiments failed miserably— thousands of them. He thought direct electrical current was the answer to lighting the world, and that alternating current was
a passing fad. He was wrong. And nobody cares. Instead, we’re indebted to Edison’s genius and his determination whenever we turn on a light bulb or hear recorded music, watch a film. For the super successful, failure is a valuable lesson. It’s a road not to take again, or at least under the same conditions. And then they move on. Failure is nothing more than testing. As Edison said, “Success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.”

To the high performance person, “Fear” is “False Expectations Appearing Real.”

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