My option for being careful was either to keep a distance and eat raw chicken or put it close and deal with a few burnt parts.
A lot of things can happen when you aren’t being careful.
Juice getting spilled on the counter. The cereal bag being ripped down the sides. You curbed the car making that turn. You got pranked with gum that tastes like pepper. The screw was dropped down the drain. You accidentally spelled “duck” wrong in your term paper. And so much more.
Actually, there are so many more things that can happen when you aren’t careful that I just have to continue…
You managed to standout at the board meeting. The reward, the gift, the acknowledgment came to you. You got inspired. A memory that you will always look back on and cherish was created. You got lost and found a new restaurant. You took a risk… and succeeded.
Those who achieve their goals, who make something of their lives, who are “successful” are no more careful than you and I. Actually, they are less careful.
They understand that the more they fit everything into a schedule, the more they are patient and careful with every social interaction, every small contract and every gift, the less creative and energized they are. Less potential is unleashed this way.
In being obsessively careful, you are preventing miracles from happening, putting a stop to unexpected delights and memorable surprises to occur. In being careful you are saying to the world and everyone around you that you want to play it safe, that you don’t want any turbulence and above all that you don’t want to make any risks, even if taking a risk meant succeeding.
Stay Positive & Think Twice Next Time You Tell Someone To Be Careful
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
They say “Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom”, I say that success is taking the risks you took that made you hit bottom. How high is completely dependent on how hard you hit the ground. In fact, even if you didn’t bounce back when you hit the ground, you are still successful. You took a risk. You took a fall. You took a failure. That is something only rare people do, something only successful people do and something this world needs done more often.
After all, look at Galileo. He became famous for dropping things and letting them hit the ground. You can too.
Stay Positive & Bouncing Back Is The Unpronounced Law Of The Universe
How often have you muttered under the earshot of others that “If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself”?
Unfortunately, you hear that a lot more than “If you want something done right, ask someone who is a professional at it to do it”. Of course though, you, I, we, are all only human and humans take extreme pride in their ego and are ignorant that they cannot do everything to perfection. As a result, help is never asked for.
Now, it’s not so much a matter that other people can’t do something right, but more of a matter that you can do it better. Or can you?
Today I have asked a new good friend Hulbert Lee who wrote the eBook “How To Focus Better” to write a guest post. Without further ado, – Enter Hulbert –
The Value of Asking People for Help
One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned from starting an online business is not being afraid to ask others for help. I think when people first start out, they have a tendency of wanting to do everything themselves. Either they have grown up and have adopted that sense of “do-it-yourself” mentality or they’re simply just afraid to ask.
For me, I’ve always kind of adopted an attitude that I can do anything I want just as good as anyone else out there as long as I put in the time and effort to do it. This is a good mentality to have if you’re trying to build on one skill, but it can also have its downfalls if you’re trying to do too many things at once.
For example, when I started an online business specifically to help people focus better, I was told to create a product, create a website, get people to the website, and then market the product for the people to buy.
So I spent a few months researching and writing an e-book. After that was done, I remember spending months trying to experiment with designing my website or trying to write copy for my sales page. I spent a lot of money on software and books to learn all of this. But in the end, it just caused a lot of stress and wasted time.
It came down to the point where I realized that I was a writer — not a designer, not a copywriter.
So when I let these realizations go, I began to look for people who were experienced in these areas.
I remember when I first hired my designer to design the e-book layout (which was still in black-and-white document text back then) I was blown away by her results. Just the design made what could have been a bland text turn into something colorful and exciting to read.
I know not everyone will have the budget to hire a designer, but if you constantly seek help out there on the vast Web, sometimes you’ll get lucky.
Like when I was looking for someone to write my sales page copy, I remember digging through the forum pages, and surprisingly enough, found someone who was offering to do a free sales copy. I figured he was probably just starting out and trying to earn credibility as a copywriter.
I jumped on the opportunity and emailed him, and within only about 50 minutes, he had sent me a fresh, new copy for my sales page — all for free. Ever since then, my conversion rates have gone up for my business.
So my advice here for people, who want to succeed in the online world of business, is to always continue to ask people for help. There’s a good chance that another person, who is more experienced and talented than you, will be more than willing to help you out and offer you valuable feedback that will drive your business in the right direction and to where you want it to go.
By Hulbert Lee
After reading Hulbert’s post, I was reminded of the one great attribute that I love about the online community. You can ALWAYS find someone to help you if you search hard enough. It never hurts to do a little research to find who are professionals on the topic you need assistance on and ask them for their help.
Personally, I have even emailed Seth Godin whom I talked to before to write me a letter of recommendation. This was, of course, before he released his eBook Stop Stealing Dreams and if you have read it, you know why he did not write me one. This action made me realize why you don’t ask for help – you don’t like to take a risk. You risk getting rejected, you risk getting told your idea is unworthy of someone else’s attention (especially a professionals).
You need to know that this is not how the online community works. For example, Hulbert searched for experts that knew how to write and knew about “focusing” to read and write a testimonial for his eBook. Hulbert told me that 20% of those he asked, read and wrote a testimonial. Well, you know how they say 20% of the people have 80% of the money and success. Those people who fall under Hulberts 20% category know the power of, not only giving, but also how important it is for others to ask for help which is a main reason they choose to read and write a testimonial for him. As a result, the 20% of people are no doubt well on their way to success (whatever success means to them). The other 80% missed the opportunity to give, to connect, to learn the lesson and benefits of asking and giving help. What they, and you need to know is that when asking for help, people will not criticize you, they will help you.
All you have to do is take the risk.
Stay Positive and Use Your Ingenuity To Seek Assistance
Garth E. Beyer
I now call Hulbert a friend and surely he calls me one as well. It is the simple act of asking for help that will propel you to the direction of the success you want.
