What does Success mean to you?

It such an important question.

If you don’t take the time to answer it for yourself, you could end up feeling miserable about your entire life.

But if you get really, really clear about what genuine Success means to you, then you can design your life so that you achieve a level of happiness way higher than the average person.

The brilliant philospher, speaker and entrepreneur, Joseph Rodarick Law, addressed this issue in his magnificent new book, ‘Authentic Power And Greatness’.

He interviewed some of the leading people in the world- everyone from high level monks to famous authors, and asked them what genuine Success meant to them.

I was fortunate that I was one of the people he also interviewed.

So if you’d like to read what all these people’s advice was for leading a truly Successful life, click to the article below:

https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/define-genuine-success-worlds-greatest-minds-answer-021456869.html

There are some very elegant and powerful answers, that could really help you define your own answer to that all important question:

‘What is a successful life?’

This is my shortest blog ever.

But if you put the concepts I’m about to suggest into action you could make a large amount of money in the next 60 days.

Here’s what I want you to do.

Allocate 30 minutes and sit undisturbed with a pen and paper.

Then spend 10 minutes thinking about each of these questions:

1. What got me business before and how can I do more of it?
2. How can I justify charging more?
3. How can I reduce the risk of someone buying from me?

Then, take immediate action on what you come up with.

Business transformation needn’t take a long time.

It can happen in minutes.

If you want to succeed in business, it’s absolutely vital that you maximize your productivity.

So here’s a really unusual but supremely effective way to get a lot more done.

I call it The 90/10 Rule.

When you use the 90/10 Rule, you will handle problems at work a lot more efficiently. And become vastly more productive.

Here’s how it works.

Whenever you encounter an obstacle or problem at work, you make a commitment to yourself to spend only 10% of your time worrying about the problem and 90% of your time actively working on the solution.

(And insist that your team do the same).

It’s such a powerful technique.

When you force yourself to focus on solutions, your stress dramatically reduces, because you are not spending ages ruminating on how bad the situation is.

And your productivity soars because you are almost totally focusing on solving the issue and coming up with answers.

Worrying is such a wasted emotion in business. And over time it plays havoc with your emotions and quality of life.

That’s why it’s crucial that you discipline yourself to focus only on solutions, and not dwell on how bad the problem is or who’s to blame.

Great business leaders are always positive, solution oriented individuals.

The 90/10 Rule not only helps you achieve much more, it helps you feel strong and confident as you’re doing so.

Ross Perot just died.

An amazing man, Perot created not just one multi billion dollar company, but two.
Think about how hard that is.

Not only that, he ran twice for U.S President as an Independent, a truly radical thing to do in the Nineties.
And amazingly, the first time he ran he got a massive 19% of the votes!

He also was the major financier of Steve Job’s new company when he left Apple in the Eighties and formed Next.

A true legend, a brilliant entrepreneur and well worth us all studying.

To introduce you to how Ross Perot thought about business and life, here are some quotes from Ross that give you a sense of the man:

‘If you see a snake, just kill it – don’t appoint a committee on snakes.’

‘The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river’.

‘Eagles don’t flock, you have to find them one at a time.’

‘Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers.’

‘Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.’

‘Most new jobs won’t come from our biggest employers. They will come from our smallest. We’ve got to do everything we can to make entrepreneurial dreams a reality.’
‘Failures are like skinned knees, painful but superficial’.

‘Life is like a cobweb, not an organization chart’.

‘If you can’t stand a little sacrifice and you can’t stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we’re never going to straighten this country out’.

‘If someone is blessed as I am is not willing to clean out the barn, who will?’

‘Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game one foot from a winning touchdown’.

‘You don’t have to be the biggest to beat the biggest.’

RIP Ross.

Basically, you only need to focus on two things to succeed at an incredibly high level.

Let’s go through the steps now.

1. Get exceedingly clear about the 2 or 3 things that actually increase your revenue.

In every company, executives are spending most of their time doing activities that simply do not grow the business much.

Things like administration, most meetings and handling current clients.

All necessary elements of a well functioning company, for sure, but not likely to greatly increase how much money you make.

What does increase revenue?

• Trying new marketing methods
• Split testing variants of current marketing methods
• Creating new product offerings
• Reaching out to potential buyers
• Generating PR in your client’s universe
• Systematically getting referrals
• Re-contacting old leads
• Learning business development systems
• That sort of thing.

Until you get very clear about what activities actually move the needle of your revenue, you are doomed to waste thousands of hours a year doing stuff that just doesn’t make much difference to how rich you get.

But once you have reached this clarity, we move to the next step.

2. Focus as much time as possible per week on those 2 or 3 things.

Here’s the reality. You already know a handful of activities that have been known to increase your revenue.

But you are so busy handling all the other stuff that you don’t get around to doing them much.

Too many of us are majoring in minor things.

It is likely that you could spend literally 3 times more time on revenue generating activities than you currently do.

Yes you may have to hire an assistant or two, delegate a lot and eliminate even more. But you could probably do it.

And if you did, it would totally transform how much money you make in your company. With absolute certainty.

We all think we are short of time. But we are actually awash with time, we have mountains of it, if we learn to use it more wisely.

So there are two steps to this company success formula.

Get uncommonly clear on the handful of activities that actually increase how much money you make.

Then obsessively focus on these areas, each and every week.

Easy to say, hard to do. But very, very possible.

If you want to win more clients, there are two areas you can work on.

The first is logical.

Logical improvements include changing what you say to potential clients. Changing the order you say it. Changing what your offering is. Or how often you follow up.

These are important changes to experiment with. And I can almost guarantee you that if you intelligently alter how you do these four elements, you will end up winning a lot more clients.

But these are all in the realm of the logical, the practical, the procedural.

But there is a whole other realm that you can explore, when it comes to converting leads into sales.

And that is using emotion.

The truth is, in almost every industry companies are chosen not just based on what they offer in a practical sense, but by what the potential client feels when they talk with the company representative. (You).

Do they feel that you are a decent person, someone kind, somebody ethical?

Do they feel that you genuinely care about their situation.? That you are not just going through the motions?

Do they feel like they would enjoy doing business with you?

These more subtle, more emotional aspects of the sales process are not only as important as your logical arguments, they are usually much more so.

In a world where there are usually tens of companies that could deliver a good job, trying to win through logic is often a weak strategy. You are still just one of many similar alternatives.

In the end, people buy from people. They are either attracted or repelled by you at the heart level.

So I urge you to review how you come across in that dimension, rather than being stuck in the logical and mundane.

Change how much you feel for them. How much you care.

Elevate your heart and you will elevate your income.

As a mentor to business leaders, I often ask myself this question:

Why do some intelligent people fail at business?

I regularly see smart people who work hard and do many of the right things, yet sometimes they still do not have much success with their companies.

Why is that?

Well sometimes I think it’s because they don’t do enough sales and marketing. And sometimes they have personalities that just rub potential customers up the wrong way.

But at other times I think it’s something far more mysterious.

I think they fail to succeed at an ultra-high level because they lack intense desire.

In my opinion, intense desire is a more hidden but crucial component of success in business.

When you really desire something, you think about it all the time. You constantly try things. You are always conceiving ways to bring yourself closer to your desired goal.

You take more risks. You reach out to more people. You persist longer. You work harder. You notice more things that could help your business.

And as a result of all these little differences, you experience more luck. More things go your way.

Now some people may think that desire is relatively unimportant in business- that if you just do the right things for long enough then you’ll eventually achieve a great result.

And while I think that is true to a certain level, above that are people who succeed with extraordinary speed and enjoy incredible luck as they do it.

I strongly believe the difference is often the intensity of desire they have deep inside of them.

Why not put this concept to the test in the next 4 weeks?

Ramp up the desire in your heart to be extraordinary at business. Really light the fire.

Then observe how your business has changed in a month.

If you do this experiment with full commitment, I think you’ll experience some examples of unusual luck and success.

Intense desire could well be the missing ingredient to you achieving your goals.

I’ve coached well over 1000 CEO’s and entrepreneurs.

And I think the great ones share similar characteristics.

In case it helps you, I’ve listed what I think are the key character traits of great business people below.

To see how excellent you are at business, simply give yourself a mark out of 10 for each of these.

In just two minutes you’ll know how good you are and specifically what you need to improve.

So, here we go…

In my view, great business people:

1. Are extremely clear on their quarterly and annual business goals.
2. Are decisive – they make most decisions relatively quickly and stick with them.
3. Plan their work days carefully and stick to that plan.
4. Give out positive energy to those around them.
5. Keep trying when others give up.
6. Focus on new sales constantly.
7. Have intense desire to reach their business goals.
8. Are hungry to learn new business skills.
9. Watch their finances closely.
10. Lead their employees strongly- insisting on high standards.

How did you go?

What areas are you strong at? Which areas need more focus from you in the coming months?

After mentoring CEO’s and entrepreneurs for a decade, what I know for sure is this.

Most great business people are made, they are not born that way.

As Brian Tracy says, “All business skills are learnable.”

So make a note of what areas you need to improve, to become a world class business leader.

And get to work 🙂

As you know, at The Fortune Institute we mentor entrepreneurs and CEO’s on how they can achieve more.

As part of that, I do a lot of research and experiments on myself, to see what really works when it comes to elite business performance.

Well recently I invented a way to work that I’ve found really helpful, so I thought I’d share it with you, in case it helps you too.

I call the method ‘Search For Uncomfortable’.

It’s simple to say, hard to do, but if you do it right, it can revolutionize how much you achieve in your business.

It works like this:

Every day you make a list of all the work tasks that make you feel uncomfortable. That you are nervous about doing. That will be a real stretch to perform, or that you just don’t want to do.

Then you do those tasks.

I’ve found it’s an incredibly effective way to send your work results through the roof. Because most of the tasks that make you feel uncomfortable doing are the ones your company really needs to get done.

Like sales outreach. Or marketing. Or having a tough talk with a team member. Or learning a new work skill, or to use some software you know nothing about.

The kind of tasks you’re always putting off. The tasks you avoid even thinking about.

These uncomfortable actions are gold for your company’s growth. They take you far higher than just doing what’s easy, or usual in your industry.

These are usually the ones that all your competitors don’t want to do either. So if you can bring yourself to do them, you often rocket past your competition.

The breakthrough for me was to actively seek these type of tasks out. To move towards them all day long.To focus on my entire day on doing them.

I put a little Post It note on my desk that says ‘Search for uncomfortable’, so I’m constantly reminded of the principle through the day.

I’m not saying it’s pleasant. But it has really lifted my results.

And paradoxically, the more I focus on these uncomfortable tasks, the better I feel inside.

So try searching for uncomfortable. And prioritizing it daily.

I think that focusing on doing the uncomfortable consistently will virtually ensure you have a great future.

As my wife’s mother so wisely says,“Hard now, easy later. Easy now, hard later.”

When it comes to winning clients, everyone talks about the same things.

Have a great product. Market well. Be price competitive. Go the extra mile.

That kind of stuff.

But there’s another major element that is at least as important to succeed in business.

Yet virtually nobody talks about it.

It’s the quality of your energy.

By that I mean, how do people feel around you? Are you a neutral or down force, or do you uplift people within your environment with your positivity, passion and interest?

We all know that business is hyper competitive. It’s hard to get any material advantage over your competitors at all – and even those you manage to obtain are usually copied and nullified within months.

There’s always someone who can do it cheaper . And many times better and cheaper.

So in a business environment like this, how can we win?

By exuding a better energy. By making people feel fabulous in your presence. By emanating a sense of possibility.

By being upbeat and light, even as you discuss issues that are heavy.

By being somebody people feel really good around.

We are kidding ourselves if we think business is done purely on the rational level. Numerous times I have seen multi million dollar decisions made based on how a CEO ‘feels’ about a person or company.

Whether they’d enjoy spending their days working with them.

If your company is not doing as well as it could be, take a moment to consider what kind of energy you are giving out.

A better quality energy changes everything.