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By default, when you do something for the first time, you’re mentally prepared for trial and error, you’re focused on learning, you already know there must be a second time and that the second time will be better than the first because you paid attention to what you could learn.

But, as your second, twentieth or hundredth time doing it comes around, are you still open?

Are you seeking out the lesson?

Are you maintaining the attitude that there is always something to learn every time you do a project?

 

Stay Positive & The Successful Still Do

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One of the largest mistakes a business (especially a service-business) can make is to not hold their customers or clients accountable.

There’s nothing worse than clinging yourself to a sinking ship or one that is permanently moored in its ways.

When my mom was a personal trainer, the complaint I heard most often was that clients would cancel their training sessions. My mom, always wanting to give the benefit of the doubt, wouldn’t charge them.

The constant cancellations (having put so much preparation into a session!) finally got to her.

There are two ways to look at this. The first being selfishly. She could have made more money, got compensated for her time and got an hour back of her day to invest in someone else.

The second way is that, had she established a cancellation fee, she would have held her clients accountable. She would have been what they were actually paying her to be. (Anyone can do some workouts, but most need the right kind of accountability to do them.)

The same goes if you’re a marketer. Do you have a penalty for clients who don’t let you meet the bottom line you’ve promised? Perhaps you agree to 100 pitches this year, but the client rejects 40 of the 110 you suggest. Do you let it be or do you kick them in the butt?

Holding customers accountable is a move not many make and not many blame their failure on for reasons of selflessness and guilt, but it’s the one marketing tactic that ensures a baseline of success.

 

Stay Positive & Accountability Is Everything

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The gateway to getting what you want is to leave the gate open.

The way you face at work.

The time you spend with headphones in.

Where you position yourself through the majority of the day.

It all makes you more (or less!) approachable.

When you make yourself approachable, more opportunities land on your pile, more connections are made, more rewards are shared.

 

Stay Positive & Is Your Gate Open?

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If you’re going to invest the time and effort to become a pro at something, by default there’s another self-taught talent it would be in your best interest to consider.

No matter the industry, once you become one of the greatest, people will want to talk to you and about you. (Oh, and they’ll carry on producing their work about you whether you chat with them or not.) Best, then, to accommodate them.

While it can be complicated to be an extrovert, that’s not exactly what’s needed.

Three required attributes:

• The ability to speak ad hoc about your passion and your story.
• To ability to read the room.
• Belief in yourself that you deserve the recognition.

You can do this while remaining humble, certainly. If you need to, remind yourself that you’re helping the person interviewing you by being a great interviewee.

All it takes is the commitment to perform.

 

Stay Positive & Fake It Until You Make It

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Of course, it never is.

Making it look easy is a privilege and a bonus to doing all that looks hard.

It’s also the greatest compliment one can hear.

It pays to ask yourself if you were your audience, would you be saying it?

 

Stay Positive & Easy Peasy, Right?

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It’s no doubt that the better you treat your employees, the better they treat your customers and the better your customers treat your business.

Be it starting from scratch or trying to convert your current employees into better employees – well, it’s a frustrating and often scary gap to cross, especially when the current batch is slightly less than competent.

Many owners will only give their employees one shot. An owner will spoil an employee, reward them abundantly, attempt to share their passion and motivate them, but at the first slip-up, the owner frantically abandons their mission.

But to cross that gap, one must cross it.

One must continue to show respect, share passion and incentivize far past a few fires. That continuous action is what creates your story, a story other passionate (and more competent) people are waiting to hear.

(Aside, you could also pull a Zappos and make an offer; an offer to bail, leave, quit the training if they are not into it. That’s one way to guarantee adapt employees.)

If you wish to work word-of-mouth marketing in your favor, there’s no question that you have to find a way to hire or develop the best employees. They will make or break you.

 

Stay Positive & It’s A Gap Worth Crossing

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By default we must have one foot in reality.

We’re living human beings. We don’t have a choice.

We do, however, have a choice of where we put our other foot.

Many people put both feet in reality.

Others try putting their other foot in another’s shoe.

Still others – Einstein, Rothko, Robbins, Hesse et al. – have kept one foot in a different world, an imaginative world, often a world they created.

Each morning you wake up and have a choice of where you put that foot. It will change the way you work, interact and think.

If you want, it could be for the better.

 

Stay Positive & See You At The Edge

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