14 TPE Part III - Chapter 7-converted

The main idea of this transcription is that taking action is crucial for success. Many people have knowledge and ideas, but they don't actually act on them. The author emphasizes the importance of starting now and not waiting for perfection. They also mention the Law of Attraction, stating that while focusing on goals is important, action is necessary to achieve them. The author provides tips for getting started and staying productive, such as prioritizing tasks, delegating, and taking breaks. They also share the story of Fred DeLuca, the founder of Subway, who took action and achieved success despite not being fully prepared. Overall, the message is to stop making excuses and start taking action towards your goals. Chapter 7. Shit and get off the pot. You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough. You must take action. Anthony Robbins When it comes to action, there is only one lesson. Start now. There really isn't much else to say. Start now. Start now. Start now. Yes, I am stomping my feet around like a bratty girl. Many people talk a big game of business and entrepreneurialism, but continue their routine of uninspired existence, never taking the leap. This is what separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls. You have to take action. You have to revel in the possibility of failure, since it is the springboard to success. The only true failure is to never have tried, and those who refuse to try are just plain stupid. Colin Powell Once shared knowledge we can all benefit from. A formula to determine when to take action. Simply put, he uses a metric called P equals 40 to 70, where P stands for the probability of success, and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired so far. Once 40 to 70 percent of the knowledge is collected, and probability of success is at least 40 percent, you are at the decision point of action. Go with your gut and then take immediate action. This means that you should always have enough information to support your theories. But if you sit around for all the information and the probability of success to be 100 percent, it will be too late. The Secret Behind The Secret Have you seen the movie The Secret? The documentary where they present the Hermetic Law of Attraction? Great movie. If you haven't seen it yet, stop listening to this book right now and go get it. I believe that the Law of Attraction exists and works, but damn it, they missed on the action component. I wonder how many people sat on their couch expecting money, love, and fame, but never lifted a finger to get it. Those are surely some very disappointed people. Sure, if you focus on something you will inevitably see it. Problem is, you've got to go out and grab it, mold it, leverage it, use it, and make it happen. Here's the secret behind the secret. When you truly want something that you are passionate about, the work that you must do to achieve what you want is often fun, energizing, and or easy. When you are doing what you love to do and are pursuing what you want, the actions are obvious. Getting started is often the most difficult part. Once you have the beliefs and the focus, the final ingredient is action. Don't worry about making mistakes. In fact, the more mistakes you make, the more progress you are making. Just don't repeat the same mistakes. Of course, you are making progress with each success as well. The only way to not make progress is to sit still and do nothing. So gleefully accept your mistake and learn from them. Celebrate your successes and learn to achieve them more easily the next time. Mistakes are good, successes are great, and idleness is a sin. Just in case you haven't started yet, here's how. It's not enough to simply say that you should take action. You actually need to do it. Even if your actions are not greatly productive at first, at least you are doing something. Yapping about your ideas and dreams don't count. Get off your ass and get moving. Here are a few tricks to get started. As the ideas or thoughts of what you need to do cross your mind, write them down on a list. There is a comfort in knowing you have a record of what needs to be done. That alone can help you focus and start taking action. A lot of things you need to do are small, quick items, but they can swallow up time just wasting it an eternity winding up and down from them. Prioritize a list of important stuff first and group together the smaller stuff to be done in one shot later. Or better yet, have someone else do the smaller stuff. Eliminate duplicates. Sometimes I have prioritized my list only to realize that several tasks have only slight variations. If I find duplicates, I blend the work together and start banging away. Do you have any tasks with certain actions in common? Do them in one shot. If it only takes two, do. Sometimes tasks are so simple and quick that the time it would take to record them and prioritize them would take longer than just doing them in the first place. If you have tasks that can be completed in under two minutes, do them right away. Don't waste any time trying to manage these things. Eliminate time wasters. Some tasks just aren't worth it. Scratch them off your list and forget about them. Don't delegate them to someone else either and waste her time. If it's a waste of time, it's a waste of time. Concentrate with thoughts. Instead of clouding your mind with rambling thoughts, stop for a moment and focus on one thing. Think about it repeatedly and then tear into it. This isn't as hard as it sounds. Ever hear a tune and can't get it out of your head? It's because you listened to the song closely when you heard it, repeated it in your head, and it became an overwhelming focus. Turn off the email. This is one of my biggest problems. Even though I set my email to check once every three hours, I catch myself clicking send and receive every ten seconds. Check email only once a day, around lunch and again at the end of the day. In between, turn it off. Make it inaccessible. You will get a lot more work done that way. I do. Delegate. Whenever possible, give the work you are not great at to someone else who is great at it. This does not mean giving up your accountability for the work. It just means you assign someone else the responsibility of completing the task. You still need to check on the progress, but you don't need to do it or micromanage it. Delegate everything you can. Abdicate nothing. Commit to someone else. When the task at hand needs to be delivered to a third party, it will get your butt in gear. So tie your task to deliverables. When other people depend on you, you will deliver. Commit to a deadline and backtrack to the actions you must complete to meet your commitment, then take them. The pressure of having someone else depending on you will definitely keep you moving forward. Make it manageable. Some tasks are way too big to be done in a single sitting or even in a short time frame. These tasks need to be broken down into bite-sized pieces that can be accomplished quickly. It is much easier to take action when you see a step through to completion, take a break if needed, and then move to the next. I once asked a brain surgeon how difficult her work was. She said that anyone could perform brain surgery because it is an extremely simple process. The only challenge is getting each of the 500 simple steps done completely and in the right order. Take a break. Once you are in the groove, taking action and getting stuff done, realize that you will get tired at some point. You will start drifting off focus and your productivity will wane. That's okay. It's actually more than okay. It's your signal to take a break, so do it. Take a break. Go in spurts. Many people perform better by working in shorter segments, taking a break from action and then starting up again. Try it. Go into a task with the promise that you will both take breaks as needed and get back to it when break time is over. Reward yourself. When I finish a task, I love to put a line through it on my list. When I look at the list, I see all the stuff I have done. It feels great to complete so much. Sometimes I buy myself a treat. Whatever works for you, do it. Make sure you reward yourself. Make failure very painful. You won't grab an iron if you know it's going to burn the living crap out of you. You will also complete a task if failure to do so results in the same scolding burn. Since I don't suggest you motivate yourself with the threat of physical pain, money can be a great motivator. Give a $100 bill to a friend and tell him it's his to keep if you don't complete the task at hand. You'll complete the task. And like any true friend, you'll have already spent the money by the time you're finished. Stop your bitching, bitch. At some point, enough is enough. If you still aren't taking action, you should just be embarrassed with yourself. Look in the mirror, acknowledge you've been a pathetic loser to this point, and stop the bullshit now, bitch. Get your ass in gear and start doing it. Yeah, that's right, I called you a bitch. Action, lights, camera. Fred DeLuca, founder of Subway, built one of the world's most successful restaurant chains, which by 2004 had achieved over $5 billion in sales with 15,000 restaurants in 76 countries. To have success like that, you better go in with a plan, right? Not if you're Fred DeLuca. With a $1,000 investment, Fred opened his inaugural store in 1965. When the first customer walked in the door to buy a sub sandwich, Fred realized he didn't know how to make it. That's right, he opened his first sandwich shop, greeted his first customer, and didn't even plan how to make a sandwich. What he did do was take action despite improper and incomplete preparation. The result, in his case, was five big bills. I'm not suggesting you launch a business blindly. As you've learned, you need a complete understanding of your beliefs and your focus. You need to have a good idea of what you are doing and have a plan on how to do it. But you should also know that you can't be 100% prepared for everything, nor should you be. If you work hard and work smart, the actions you will take will more than compensate for any poor planning. Don't wait for the lights to be on and the cameras to start rolling. It might be too late then. Oh yeah, did I mention that Fred DeLuca was 17 years old when he started Subway? Fred DeLuca is a toilet paper entrepreneur. You can be one too. Take action. Start now. Happily walk out of a once-in-a-lifetime meeting. Once a year, a group of leading business thinkers, world-renowned business authors, and the cream-of-the-crop, cutting-edge entrepreneurs from all over the world gather at MIT in Boston for five 14-plus-hour days of intense learning and idea exchange. The Birthing of Giants group, also jokingly referred to as the Gathering of Egos, is extremely difficult to join, and the cost is not cheap. If you are lucky enough to participate, you better bring your A-game. And it goes without saying that you don't leave before it's over. That is, unless you're Barrett Ersek of Happy Lawn. The first full-day session is extremely intense. It kicks off with mind-blowing concepts, over-the-edge experiences, horrible crash-and-burn stories, and amazing try-and-fly stories. Everyone hangs on the edge of the seat, jotting notes as fast as possible, laptops clicking away. You don't dare take a premature break for the bathroom. There's too much powerful information being shared. It is better to have your eyeballs floating than to leave the room. Forty-five minutes in and rolling, Barrett Ersek jumped up in front of the group of about 70 people and said, I gotta go. Another member shouted out the thoughts of the group. Good for you. The bathroom is down the hallway. Now shut up. Everyone's focus returned to the discussion at hand. No, you don't get it. I gotta go. Oh, I just figured out a key strategy for my business. I gotta go now and get to work on it, Barrett explained. A normal group would tell him he was crazy. How much these meetings cost and what a waste of money it was to leave. Everyone knows you can do it next week, but this is not a normal group. Instead, Barrett got standing ovation. He left, bought a dictation machine at the local store, and drove from Boston to Philadelphia dictating his ideas the entire way. He started on his project that night. Talk about taking action now. That is how you do it. So what was the idea? What if you could get a proposal to a customer in minutes, not days, without the need to ever go on site? Let me explain. Barrett's company is in the lawn care industry, competing against franchises like Camelon. The challenging industry is in the proposal stage. If someone wants an estimate for lawn care, vendors like Barrett first dispatch a lawn care specialist to the property and examine the landscape. A lot of time and money goes into preparing an estimate. And if you do get the contract, it takes two or three lawn treatments to recoup the cost of preparing the estimate. At that non-ideal, crazy moment, Barrett had an idea that was amazing. He wondered if he could use satellite images, like the ones in Google Maps, to measure the properties and review the landscapes without ever going on site. This idea may have crossed other people's minds, but Barrett did what many never do. He took action immediately. With new, patent-pending technology, Barrett's company increased sales by $10 million in a little over two years, a feat that had taken Barrett and his team seven years to achieve in the past. Costs dropped and profits were up a lot. Barrett Ersek is a toilet paper entrepreneur. Action is the only way to make progress. Take action now. Don't wait for a convenient time. It can't be overemphasized. Take action now. Stop listening to this book now and take action. Act as if, but only on the inside. When it comes to take action, sometimes you don't know how to act. Maybe you have to make the big sales call and close the deal. Maybe you are hiring your first employee. What are the actions you need to take? How do you do it? Though the execution may be a challenge, the answer is simple. In short, you need to act internally, in your mind, as if you have already achieved what you want. And you must act outwardly in the way you would want to be treated once you arrive at your destination. This is not the act as this message that you saw in Boiler Room. I once had a guy call me to sell me a phone system I needed. I distinctly remember the absolute attitude this schmuck had. He knew the proper answers and was persistent. He was behaving like he had already achieved his goals by assuming the sale. Using the old school methods of sales, he was following the ABCs, always be closing. He was using phrases like, do you want us to deliver the phone system today or tomorrow? Even though I had not ordered the system from him, he kept on with questions like, I appreciate your commitment to the system. Would you prefer a one-time payment or easy monthly installments? I thought he was a jackass. Politely, got out of the meeting and was grateful not to have a phone system from someone like him. The phone system salesperson was only executing half of the successful sales strategy and even that part was screwed up. Yes, he was technically acting as if, but he was doing it outwardly through words and gestures, not inwardly through confidence. When you act as if in your mind, the actions come through as confidence. The second component to successfully acting as if is that your outward actions need to be consistent with how you envision the ideal prospect would want those actions to play out. Put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other side. What would wow you? Treat the other person that way and then some. Never assume the sale, a horrible strategy from 1950. Instead, proceed with the internal confidence of having already made the sale, but behave outwardly with the decency of an exceptional human being. You will be able to sleep well at night and chances are you will get the sale. Here's what acting as if definitely is not. It's not lying. Some people take acting as if to an extreme and go on a lying spree, spewing lies of their greatness and success. That is the worst thing you can do. When people find you out, and they will, they will lose trust for you. Soon you will have people talking trash about you and your company behind your back and avoiding you at all costs. Acting as if is all about making a vision for yourself of what you want to achieve, a clear picture of how the person you want to be would act in a certain situation. It's all about being truthful to yourself and others about where you are heading and who you are now. The 16,107 steps you don't need to take. While looking at my bookshelf bowing under the weight of tons of business books, I noticed that many of them had titles such as the 13 ways to do this, the 1,000 tricks to do that, and the seven strategies for whatever. How could they all be right? I decided to do some informal research. I went on Amazon to determine the number of actions in total that the world's business, personal success, and financial books said we needed to know in order to successfully start, grow, and maintain our businesses and our lives. I lost count at 16,107. Absurd. Totally absurd. For example, one book claims that there are 100 absolutely unbreakable laws to business success by Brian Tracy. Another book says that there are 601 essential things that everyone in business needs by Barbara Patcher. And yet another asserts that there are 28 surefire strategies for business and personal success by Tom Leonard and Brian Larson. Or how about the book that states there are seven irrefutable laws that determine business success by David Ekbaum. Yet none of them are identical to the 16 lessons in the law of success by Napoleon Hill. So which book is right? Which book do I follow? How can they all be unbreakable, irrefutable, and essential? And how the hell am I going to do 16,107 things without going completely insane? Arrgh! This is confusing. It gets even worse when it comes to managing your colleagues at your new growing business. Did you know that there are 1,001 ways to reward employees by Bob Nelson, yet only 365 ways to motivate them by Deanna Padmoreff? 151 ideas to recognize them by Ken Lloyd, and a meager 150 ways to inspire them by Donna DePros. So if you get the formula mixed up, you may end up trying to motivate yourself to inspire them to reward no one, and you won't even be recognized for your effort. Crap! So what is the right answer? How many different actions do you need to take to be successful? There is no magic formula, but the number of actions can easily be tens or hundreds or thousands. While I like to bust the chops with these books, they all revolve around the truth of one fundamental principle. Belief plus focus equals apparent action. Don't get inundated by overthinking the various steps and processes. So many people get overwhelmed trying to decide which steps are the right ones. Quite frankly, even just seven steps to success are still too many to juggle at once. Tips and advice serve you best when you seek them out as relevant issues come up and not before. Here are the only five things you need to do to succeed in anything. One, determine what you want. Two, set an enabling belief. Three, commit focus and attention to your goal. Four, take the most obvious actions to achieve your goal. Five, monitor your progress, adjusting your actions to realign with your goal. So instead of worrying and preparing for all the different actions that may or may not be required of you, set a foundation for action first. With the right enabling belief and focus, the required actions will become apparent. When consulting all of those business and personal growth books, use your gut to identify the actions, ideas, and solutions to build on what you know intuitively to be true. Know when to say when. In 1992, Scott Allen, founder of the Windows Expert, thought he had timing on his side. The U.S. economy was just starting to crawl out of a recession and the demand for Windows-based computer networks was about to go through the roof. Scott was steeped in Windows networking knowledge, carrying expert certifications, an experience that was unmatched. The competition was weak and unfocused due to the quiet times of the recession. Demand was growing faster than supply. Opportunity was knocking. Scott jumped on it and started the Windows Expert. Within weeks of its launch, clients started jumping on board, but many were small clients and the sporadic demand did not suit a scalable business. Scott pursued big clients, and when the state of Texas seemed to have the perfect mix of long-term projects, Scott dumped his small clients in order to work exclusively with the big guys. Along with his growing business came a heftier bottom line. So when, just weeks into the new projects, the state of Texas reorganized and abruptly cut off the Windows Expert and the other vendors, Scott was in trouble. The loss of his biggest client put a huge damper on Scott's business and he no longer had small clients to fall back on. With two teens and a new board at home, Scott and his wife took a serious look at the business and their future. Their analysis changed the course of his business permanently. Scott and his wife calculated it would take three to six months to reestablish the business with small clients. They discussed the sacrifices of starting over, such as no family time. They talked about Scott's passion. Did he have enough drive to pull the business out of the hole? Did he want it badly enough? Considering the numbers, the sacrifices, and Scott's lack of sufficient interest in the business, the choice was obvious. It was time to stop. After Scott called it quits, he accepted a full-time position that took care of his financial needs and allowed him time to discover a passion worth fighting for. A few years later, he found it. Based on his love of transforming virtual relations into real relations, Scott launched Link to Your World. Today, Scott is one of the leading authorities on the topic of entrepreneurialism, a frequent speaker on social media, and a fixture on Google's front page for the keyword entrepreneur. No easy feat. That is, unless you know when to stop and rediscover your passion. Scott Allen is a toilet paper entrepreneur. Accountability. When toilet paper entrepreneurs get down to business, they take full accountability for their situation and the job in front of them. It was their responsibility to check for a full roll of TP ahead of time. If there are only three sheets left, it's their own fault. Weaker minds will blame the other guy for not replacing it. The toilet paper entrepreneur takes responsibility every step of the way. Where you are today is a direct result of your decisions. You are accountable for your success and you are accountable for your failures. If you are pointing fingers at others, you are simply building a wall of limiting beliefs and your actions will be stymied. Just because you were brought up poor or silver-spooned or went to a crap school or were ignored or picked on or were considered ugly or pretty or held back or pushed forward does not excuse you from anything. All that stuff is meaningless except that it brought you to where you are today. Moving forward is not based upon your past. Your future is exclusively determined by the decisions you make now, in this moment. The first decision is to take complete and exclusive responsibility for your success. Toilet paper entrepreneurs accept full and complete accountability for their lives, their businesses, and their futures. A good night's rest in the hotel parking lot. When you are a single mom in your early 30s with three children to raise, it is easy to give up on your dreams. Margie Aliprandi could have done just that, but instead she held herself completely accountable for her situation and its transformation. Broke, divorced, with mouths to feed and with a hefty mortgage, Margie took three steps that led her to multimillionaire status. First, she took full ownership and responsibility for her situation. Then she documented a simple vision to keep her family in her current home. And then she took decisive action. Instead of returning to the security of a full-time, low-paying teaching job, Margie started her own business. She launched her first company doing what she loved, educating people on how to become financially successful. She was living what she was preaching. Unable to afford airfare, Margie would drive great distances simply to meet with prospects. One meeting alone required a 46-hour drive from Salt Lake City to Louisville and back. During her travels, she would stop at a hotel at night to rest, but she never checked in. The parking lot served as her room, and her car was her bed. In the morning, she would get dressed, put makeup on, and curl her hair in a gas station bathroom. Then she would head off to a day of meetings. With her persistent and action-first attitude, the sales started coming, and coming fast. Margie took sole responsibility for her success. She maintained absolute clarity of her goal, and she took every action necessary to succeed. She made her first million by age 35, and has made that many times over since. Margie Alloprandi is a toilet paper entrepreneur. Take action now. If you're still not taking the steps necessary to launch your business, completing the following three steps will help you get off your ass once and for all. One. What excuses are you still nursing? What's holding you back? Time to bust through those stragglers and get moving. Make a list of anything and everything that is keeping you from your goals, and then find a way around it. Use the ideas in the first part of this chapter to help you get over, around, and through any obstacle. Two. Act as if. What would you feel, behave, and react if you already accomplished all you set out to do? What type of people would you surround yourself with? What would your days be like? Would you make different decisions? Imagine yourself already there, and then act as if you are. Three. Find a trustworthy, ass-kicking friend or colleague, and ask her to help you stay on track. When you're accountable to someone, it's easier to get off your ass.