Yes it’s a mouthful but it is the best description that I can give to the following 28 lessons. Enjoy.
1. Better results does not make a better plan. A better plan makes better results.
2. Happiness is meant to be designed. You create it, you sculpt it, you make it.
3. Discipline: without it there is no bridge from your goal to your accomplishments.
4. Success is sending yourself an invitation to grow, develop, move up, build more, create more, invest more, innovate more and raise above mediocrity.
5. Life works like a magnet, the more you put forth to your goals, the closer you get to the results you want, the harder you work at your dreams, the more force in which they pull you toward them, it gets easier. It always gets easier.
6. Learning is the beginning. Everything else will fall into place itself.
7. Things only change when you do.
8. There really are no destinations, only points in which you change direction again.
9. Be influenced by the successful. Peer pressure is necessary as long as it pushes us further toward our real potential.
10. Be influential. Peer pressure is necessary as long as it pushes someone further toward their real potential.
11. Remove “easy”, “simple”, and “effortless from your vocabulary. Also never make something a piece of cake, have it all or take nothing.
12. Try. Only when you don’t try, do you fail.
13. Answer this question, very clearly. What is the purpose of life?
14. Lead a tribe of as much inspired if not more willing people than yourself. Create an unbeatable alliance with others.
15. Create a new faith, a new religion, a new belief and call it “The YourName Faith/Religion”. This is the only way to destroy any limitations.
16. A good person runs a mile. A great person runs an extra mile. Only a legend keeps running long after the first, second, third, ninth mile. Always do more, always.
17. Make every part of your character visible.
18. Be Human.
19. Self-initiative, Self-resilience, Self-motivation, Self-assurance, Self-inspiration, Self-control, Self-discipline, Self-growth, everything begins with yourself. Want to be successful? Work on you harder than you work on your job.
20. Pursue an interest that makes you feel alive. Nothing radiates more positively to others than a personal keen interest in something, something you pour your passion into, something that if upon waking up at 2 am and asked what your muse is, you answer with it.
22. Combine accurate and imaginative thinking to create your art.
23. You won’t last without good health.
24. Not to mention exercise is the absolute greatest habit you can create to stimulate the positive senses.
25. Living in the moment is derived from the collection of experience you have had controlling, focusing and centering your attention on the positive, on the material that will help you produce results you care about and on the search for what you can learn from every moment.
26. Everything remarkable was the result of overcoming adversity. If you come face-to-face with adversity or even sometimes get defeated, you are on the right path. Nothing worthy comes easy.
27. Visualization doesn’t need to be done all at once. Visualization is something that is meant to be anointed to all the various positive thoughts that float through your mind every day.
It’s been over a month and a half since I attended Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event in Tribeca (NY). There’s a specific reason I waited so long to reflect on the event. I wanted to prove a point, not just about Seth Godin, but what any business must produce, whether in product or experience.
Simply put, it must be astonishingly remarkable, something so memorable it is still thought of and excites a person’s senses a month, five months or a year after the product is purchased or the service is used. Essentially, that is what Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event manifested, so it is with easy honor that I will hit some points from it again along with my own curves and twists of ideas.
I had no inclination to write this so soon. I decided to after I created a new motto the other day, tweeted it and it got retweeted by a few people. It was just another tweet, another 140 characters that my mind spit out and that I needed to share.
My motto: Give yourself authority.
It was only after I expressed the motto on twitter that I was tapped by the memory of Seth Godin’s Pick Yourself event, which it’s theme was to not wait for someone to pick you, not wait for an authority to notice you, to get lucky; but to pick yourself, solve the problems yourself, find the opportunity yourself, to lead yourself and quite plainly, as my motto states, give yourself authority.
72 Steps To Starbucks Coffee
While in New York City every 72 steps, either if I turned left or right, I would be facing a Starbucks. In Manhattan alone, there are approximately 300 Starbucks stores. That means that out of all the registered Coffee Shops in New York, Starbucks consists of about 60% of them. In a city dominated by the outlier of the Coffee Industry, how can any other coffee shops even make it?
That’s a simple answer that you can come up with. The better question is how Starbucks was able to take a symbol from Moby Dick, use it as it’s logo, and create a brand – an understanding of when you see the symbol, you are going to smell the richest Coffee in town and get free Wi-Fi along with the absolute best customer service.
It’s A Revolution
The dictionary says that a revolution is a single turn of event. Our revolution, the one we don’t quite understand, the one we thought could be easily understood, the one that is making us question nearly everything, is not a single turn of event, it’s a million turns. This revolution is something that is a collective change in one sense, but deep down to it, it’s about the turn each one of us makes, a turn that may be different than the person next to us. While putting it in the most simple form, the revolution is about giving yourself authority, ridding yourself of the chains of tradition and following your passion to create art. Yet, to do each of these things is not something that we can do collectively, being collective is what got us in this grave. No. This must be done individually; each person must make the choice, must give themselves authority and use it. In its entirety, this revolution will turn Perfect into impossible
Instead Of Giving It Our All
Seth gave a long description about the industrial age and this new age of connection. The one take I want to share with you from the event is this.
“So one quick example, just to show you how deeply ingrained this is. If you don’t mind, raise your right hand just as high as you can. Okay, now raise it just a little higher.”
Instead of giving it our all the first time, we give enough and then a bit more when told to. Some people raised their hands 20% higher, others 5% higher when told to raise it a bit higher. In a room of about 200 people there was about 4,000% of potential not being used until told to. The way I see it, even if you gave 100% and raised your hand as high as possible the first time, you would still find a way to raise it higher.
I No Longer Market To You
I had no clue what real type of marketing I was doing on my website until I heard Seth Godin say this, “Because marketing has shifted from me marketing at you, to you marketing to each other.” So, when creating a product, running a business or writing a blog, you can provide all the strong content you would like, but unless you know what you want to do with your audience, your tribe, unless you know how to give them strategies to market to each other and other people that will join your tribe, you have nothing.
Juggling
Seth Godin also inspired me to write this post: The Juggler’s Perfection. On the note of Juggling, of doing what you love, of taking that risk…
“Is it worth getting arrested for?” – Seth Godin
Bluffs, Excuses and The Promise
You think you have a hundred reasons not do something, not to take leap, not to go out on your own or start your business or take a risk to achieve what you really want. Actually, you probably only have 15 to 20 excuses, or rather, they are bluffs. When you sit down, write the list of the 15 to 20 bluffs, and work through it, you will find that either you don’t have anything holding you back, or you just need to work out a way to get around one or two excuses (a lot easier than working around 20). What it comes down to, what it really comes down to is that you want a promise it will work. You want the paper to say, after you have crossed all your bluffs out, that it will work indefinitely.
There will never be a promise that it’s going to work. Once you realize that, you realize there’s no point in making a list, not because there’s no point in achieving your goal anymore, but because you realize that you are going to have to take a risk and that there isn’t a promise, you will say “something is better than nothing” and get on with it, ship the product or start the business. As humans, if we are not promised lobster (perfection), we would rather have crawfish (anything) than nothing at all. Once you realize there is no promise of perfection, no lobster, it makes doing the thing you made a list of bluffs for, all the more easy. You may even find that you like crawfish more than lobster.
A couple of sayings to use/share
Money is a weight you can run much faster without
You will be wrong a lot, but you will be right a lot too
All you need to care about is being human
The Two Achievements I Made After The Event
Seth made a simple, yet such an extremely interesting point about entrepreneurship and freelance. A freelancer gets paid when she ships, delivers the product, finishes. The entrepreneur gets paid while she sleeps. I am happy to say that, while I still do freelance writing, I have crafted a segment of it into a businesses in which I have hired two employees already! I now sleep easier (because I know I’m getting paid for it) and I have more time to do $100 an hour work that makes a much larger impact on the world – which leads me to…
The second achievement is nearly ready to be shipped. My 30,000 word manifest on what school is for: a view from an 18-year-old graduate who received his associates degree and plans to go back for a master’s degree. Not for the diploma, but for the information and experience being within the system will produce, in order to write a 90,000 word sequel upon graduation. The eBook, Start Schooling Dreams will be released at the beginning of August, 2012, completely free. More background information to come soon.
Stay Positive & Take The Authority, Make A Badge Even
Parents Cost Us Money Too (what we wish our parents would have told us) is now in a free downloadable PDF version which can be read on your computer or transferred onto your favorite eReader. Deep down, this short 32 page eBook is my rant against how parents minimally or completely fail to empower their children with an education on money management. In reality, it sounds and reads nothing like a rant. I have written it purely to help kids learn what my parents never taught me and for the parents to learn what and how they can teach their kids about money management, goal setting, work & life lessons and much more. Everything you will read in this eBook has a face value but an even deeper meaning that is rooted to all the experiences I have had and often times wish I didn’t have.
In this free eBook you will find:
How to have an interest in interest
Nerf guns and sports cars
The realization that school does not educate students about money
My philosophy of prevention over clean-up
Hard work and working smart
Commission sheets, budgets and goal setting
The ages in which to teach the lessons
Personal stories, examples, and one chart
and much more
Please share your response or any ideas you get from the eBook in the comments section below. Feel free to share the eBook as well.
Stay Positive & A Step Toward Prevention, Is Still A Step
How To Make A List: Write the list, right now. Write down everything you need to do and ship. Order, size, time, length, color, priority, distance, meaning and result doesn’t matter. You don’t need a list of things to do and not do just to write a list. A list is a list, write it.
The Order To Do It In: Now start doing the things you have written from the top to the bottom. The ones you placed first are the ones that are on your mind the most and the ones you are already focusing more of your energy on. Why take that away to put on something else and have to go back? The first items you put on that list are also the ones that will make you feel the best about completing because they are obviously urgent enough to write down so their achievement will relieve stress, to make you feel peaceful, set and accomplished.
There is no momentum in hopping to different tasks, but there is plenty of momentum in going down a list. Complete what is there and do it fast. It doesn’t matter if it’s ugly, what matters is that it is shipped.
Stay Positive & Don’t Worry, Things Will Always Be Added Onto The List
It’s easy to jump one step, sometimes it’s essential. It’s called the Vanishing Step.
It’s not, however, as easy to jump two or possibly three steps. It’s even worse when you jump the vanishing step only to realize the second one you planned to land on isn’t there. It’s a risk. One that you don’t need to take.
That step that isn’t there, that unwelcome surprise, it’s called the Limiting Step. It’s the step that will trip you up no matter how perfectly timed your jump is.The Limiting Step prevents you from getting any higher on the stairway to success.
Unless…
You build the skill-set up that is holding you back. The Limiting Step symbolizes everything you lack that prevents you from reaching the top of the stairs: your goal. Those few books you haven’t touched, those couple of skills you have never sharpened and those few fears you have never faced all make up the Limiting Step.
To eliminate the Limiting Step, you have to ask yourself a few questions:
What is it you know the least about that is necessary for you to reach your goal?
What have you been consistently avoiding?
What is it you fear most?
Well? What is it you need to learn and practice before you make the jump?
Stay Positive & You Need More Leg Muscle To Make The Jump, So Work The Lower End (of your skills)
Have you ever walked down a set of stairs and tripped, skipped a step, or fell straight forward? Damn vanishing steps. Heck, it’s not just when you go down steps, I am sure you have tripped, stubbed your toe and fell forward going up the steps too. No matter the design or direction of steps, when they are taken, there are always some that seem to vanish.
It’s unlikely for you to make a realization as you are grabbing on for your dear life, but have you ever taken a moment after hitting that vanishing step to realize that you actually got to the bottom of the stairs quicker than if it had not vanished? Again, the same goes for if you were heading up the stairs. All the sudden you are either forced to take a jump to the bottom of the steps or army crawl your way up the stairs, both ways you get to where you are going quicker.
Taking it a step further (pardon the pun), what if you applied this same heart wrenching moment of a vanishing step into the goals in your life? What if you strayed away from doing it by the book, following all the rules, and taking all the steps? What if, maybe, just maybe, some steps vanished?
Stay Positive & There Is A Cost To Taking Each Step
Previous generations had it easy didn’t they? Much easier than us anyway.
They didn’t have electronics to take them to a new world. They didn’t have the ability to Google all the things they love, the items they didn’t have or even focus on working hard to get them. They had a simple life. Hard, yes. But simple.
Our generation and any hereafter can Google more and further than our imaginations could previously take us. We Google surreal images, pictures representative of predictive futuristic consumerism. We now Google thinking it will help, yet we do very little or nothing that blogs suggest, that articles advise, that pictures inspire, that the world needs. We waste our time Googling for two reasons.
1. We seek safety, security and the knowledge that “everything is alright”. The same reason, in fact, as why you check Twitter and Facebook 20 times a day to see that everything is okay, nothing serious has happened. We never think that maybe, if something serious were to happen, if our security was breached, if we felt unsafe, that we may just feel it and know? Do we really think Googling, checking News, Twitter feed and Facebook will really be the primary acknowledgment that we are in trouble? No.
(It does good to take a moment to realize that this process is what has put us in trouble)
2. Our imaginations have been released, but not far enough. We search and stretch our minds as far as the web will let us extend them and then we feel like we got there ourselves, accomplished. We feel that since we imagined it, that it is real, attainable and easily reached. The ability to see and understand that which would not be attainable without the web is creating a surge of jobs not filled, inventions not made, and ideas not created. It is as though whatever is on the web is as far as the mind can reach, but this is false.
What you can Google, discover on Twitter, view and share on Facebook can well be used as a bridge to a further discovery. They are not your destinations, they are someone else’s and this means that there is a calling upon you to take what you view and learn to improve it, make it better, and most importantly add your imagination to it.
Or you can simply avoid this roadblock and let your imagination run as wild as possible. Of course, by doing this you will only find out that you can actually go further than what is proposed on the web, what can be dreamt of, created and achieved by another.
