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Success

You Can’t Do It All By Yourself

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I am not the person to use pessimistic headlines to get people’s attention, but I knew that I needed to make an exception in order to make my point.

For a very long time, I believed that I would be able to do everything all by myself. I believed that I would be able to publish books without anyone’s help, create training courses without anyone’s help, and optimize my social media presence without buying any tools. The problem was that I was giving myself too many things and not enough time to do those things (this comes from someone who writes 20 blog posts and 5,000 words for his books on a typical day of high school).

I thought I could quickly send out queries and respond to everyone on HARO. I was wrong. In my defense, I was able to quickly send out the queries, but responding to everyone was the difficult part. Then, I got sidetracked from all of the work I put in for HARO and the book I was writing because nothing seemed to be working.

I also thought I could create my own book cover and learn how. However, spending $25 to get a Kindle eBook cover and a CreateSpace book cover is much easier than learning how to create the covers and create the images.

Do you want to know why big companies are successful? It’s because they are big. WalMart is run by the CEO, but there are millions of people who allow the WalMart stores around the world to function properly. The people who founded big companies realized that they couldn’t do everything by themselves. C. Douglas McMillon can’t be in every WalMart store at the same time.

It is okay to ask for help. It is okay to hire virtual assistants to help you with the things you cannot do or simply don’t have the time for. If you have to read this blog post multiple times before you are convinced that you can’t do it all by yourself, then go for it. You don’t want to learn this lesson after you lost time because you thought you could do everything by yourself.

Get a marketing team. Get a support team. Hire assistants. If you don’t have the money to hire assistants yet, look around for assistants anyway and hire them when the money comes in. Whatever you do, don’t do it alone.

 

Why Having Good Fitness Helps Out In The Journey Towards Success

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Health And Fitness

I believe that fitness is one of the most underrated parts of success. Does this mean walking in to the job interview with a six-pack is going to guarantee you the job? Absolutely not (why apply for a job anyway)! Looking more muscular in your YouTube videos does not mean those videos are going to get more views.

So how exactly does having good fitness help out in the journey towards success? Being in shape has been proven to make people happier (happiness certainly helps out towards success and life), but good fitness also encourages the development of the winner’s mindset.

People with good fitness want to become more fit. They don’t settle with the strong abs. They also want strong legs, arms, shoulders, and every other body part to be strong as well. Some people do 20 curls and realize that they can do five more. They don’t stop at an assigned number if they believe they can do more than that. This is the entire concept of raising the bar higher. When the 20 pound weights get too light, these people move on to the 30 pound weights. It’s a bigger challenge, but it also leads to better results over time.

Getting in shape may be the trigger that allows you to thrive and change your attitude about life. Whether you decide to keep up the fitness by lifting weights or running, you need to do some kind of workout every day so you become committed and develop the winner’s mindset.

 

The Difference Between Crowds And Tribes

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The Difference Between Crowds And Tribes

Esurance has a crowd. The $1.5 million brought together over 250,000 people. Those 250,000 people were a lot more interested in the giveaway than car insurance. Right when the giveaway ended, over 100,000 people gradually unfollowed Esurance, and Esurance continues to get unfollowed by the masses to this day. Esurance could have had a tribe, but they didn’t give anyone a good enough reason to stick around after the giveaway.

Twitter, Facebook, and any other social network is also a crowd. They happen to have millions of tribes connected together, but all of those tribes added up equal a crowd. You can’t engage the entire crowd so it is up to you to decide what types of people are the right ones for your tribe. Those are the targeted members of your audience.

Seth Godin has a tribe. In fact, he has a big one. He wrote a book called Tribes (go figure) as well as other international bestsellers (some have been translated in over 30 languages). Seth Godin is the #1 marketer in the entire niche, and hundreds of thousands of people buy his books and read his blog posts. These are targeted people who can easily communicate with each other and enjoy what Seth does. Some refer to him as the Superman of marketing.

Crowds and tribes are two very different groups of people. It is better to have a small tribe than it is to have the big crowd. A small tribe can grow overtime just like Seth’s tribe, but a crowd like Esurance’s crowd gets scattered.

Are you building a tribe that matters or a crowd to make yourself think that you are popular?

 

5 Ways To Make Your Business Run On Autopilot

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Autopilot Business

Wouldn’t it be cool for your business to run on autopilot? Imagine being able to take a four week vacation and know that you are still going to make a strong income from your business. Nothing falls apart when you step out of the driver’s seat. Instead, everything keeps on moving forward and moves forward even faster when you go back to the driver’s seat. However, that four week vacation was definitely nice. In order to have more four week vacations by having your business run on autopilot, these are the five things that you need to do.

  1. Make sure you don’t have to ship out anything. If you have to drive to the post office to ship out your product to a customer, then you are never going to have a business that runs on autopilot. You need to have other people take care of the shipping for you. If you have an eBay business, hire someone to look after it while you are gone. If you publish your own book, self-publish it on CreateSpace or get it published by someone who will take care of the shipping for you. If you have a training course, make sure the technology involved with making the sale runs smooth enough that you don’t have to intervene in order to make the sale. You should be able to make the sale, and the customer should be able to get what he wants without you doing anything.
  2. Hire assistants to do the hard work. If you self-publish 1 Kindle eBook every month, hire a ghostwriter for that month. You still get the final say and get to edit the book so it reflects your style. However, hiring the ghostwriter saves you the time of writing the manuscript. How else can you use assistants to save you time?
  3. Schedule content in advance. I schedule my blog posts weeks into advance. The reason I do this is that I have more time to write longer blog posts (like this one). However, I take multiple vacations in the summer (including a two week vacation). It is at these times when having scheduled blog posts is really helpful. Instead of rushing to write a blog post so I can enjoy the vacation, all of my blog posts are already scheduled for that entire week (or two).
  4. Don’t work alone. This is why hiring assistants is very important. If you work alone, then you will never be able to have your business run on autopilot. It’s okay to ask for help. In fact, it’s also okay to ask for a lot of it. I’m sure you would save hours of time every day just by hiring 10 assistants.
  5. Be very effective when you are in the driver’s seat. If you are an effective leader for your business, then your assistants will know exactly what to do when you take the four week vacation. In addition, the more productive you are when you are in the driver’s seat, the less you will have to worry about during that vacation (hopefully nothing at all).

An autopilot business is the entrepreneur’s dream. Hours that could never be opened up before will suddenly become open for you to interact more with the most important people in your life. What would an autopilot business do for you? Do you have any additional tips on turning a business into an autopilot business? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

 

How To Get Everyone On Your Team To Support Your Idea

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The Answer Is Yes

One of the common human needs is to get accepted. Before you started your own business or got employed, chances were it was all about getting accepted on sports teams, certain extracurricular activities that have cuts, high schools, and colleges, just to name a few. However, when it comes to ideas, not everyone supports those ideas. In most cases, the ideas that get rejected are not necessarily bad. On the contrary, some of these ideas are extraordinary, but they get presented poorly and do not get the desired result.

There is a way to get everyone on your team to support your idea. No matter what you do, not everyone will support your idea. However, if you can get your entire team or a majority of your team to support your idea, then that’s enough to get your idea in motion. Seth Godin, the bestselling author of numerous books written in over 30 languages described a method in his book Free Prize Inside that you can use to persuade everyone on your team that your idea is worth doing. This method is called the Fulcrum of Innovation.

The Fulcrum of Innovation has three parts:

  1. Worth doing. This is the part of the Fulcrum where you explain the benefits of implementing your idea.
  2. By you. This is the part of the Fulcrum where you show people that you are the right champion to lead the implementation process of your idea.
  3. Doable. This is the part of the Fulcrum where you prove that your idea is possible with the team that you have.

By mastering the Fulcrum, you will be able to persuade everyone on your team to implement your idea. Of course, the idea has to be good, but thinking of a good idea is not as hard as it sounds. Implementing the ideas you think of takes a lot more time, but if you master the Fulcrum and get everyone to agree with your idea, then the implementation process will run smoother.

What are your thoughts about using the Fulcrum to convince the people on your team that your idea must be implemented? Have you ever used the Fulcrum to convince people that your idea works? Have you read any Seth Godin books (if not, you should definitely buy one, but be warned, you’ll end up buying more in the future)? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

 

Why The First Time Is Really The Hardest

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Big Challenge

A lot of people say that the first time is the hardest. It is used in speeches, books, and other places as well. While many people say that the first time is the hardest, few people go into why the first time is really the hardest. In this article, I am going to go into the why part about the first time being the hardest.

In 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day after Twitter was created the social media world went crazy. Twitter’s 1 billionth tweet was sent out. Out of all of the times Twitter sent out 1 billion tweets, the first billion tweets took the most time. Now, Twitter users send out a combined total of 1 billion tweets every 5 days. That’s a lot quicker than 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day.

Neil Patel wrote a brilliant blog post about getting 100,000 monthly visitors for a blog. In that blog post, he also mentioned how long it took for each of his blogs to get over 100,000 monthly visitors. QuickSprout took 4 years and 9 months, KISSmetrics took 1 year and 10 months, and Crazy Egg took 1 year and 6 months to reach 100,000 monthly visitors. The first blog took the longest amount of time to reach 100,000 monthly visitors because the first time is always the hardest. It becomes obvious that as Neil Patel creates more blogs, he is able to reach the same milestone faster.

The first time is the hardest because we do not know everything about the process. It is hard to get the first 1,000 followers because it takes a long time to learn about different methods to reach the goal. What used to take me a few months to do now gets done in 2-3 days. By staying dedicated and going through the journey, you will learn more about your niche. You will learn how to do certain tasks with fewer steps that allow you to save more time. Doing anything for the first time is the hardest. It takes a lot of practice and time to do something the first time. Then, it gradually becomes easier over time as you get more comfortable doing something that at one point seemed very difficult.

What are your thoughts about the first time really being the hardest? Do you have any stories of your own about the first time being the hardest? Please share your thoughts below.