Setbacks happen in business and in life. It’s just a part of life, and something everyone can relate to. Everybody tries, everybody fails, and everybody has successes in their life.
Business owners (especially in the startup phase) know this already – that feeling that we are connected with our businesses. A new strong competitor in town, losing a key resource, or dealing with new or protracted legal issues can drain us emotionally. We connect ourselves to strongly we feel it in our guts, and our failures can consume our thoughts and overpower us.
Roller coaster is only the beginning. We go to sleep scared for our businesses, and ready to throw in the towel. We wake up with more energy and ready to fight, or with some new creative idea that we can try and we’re ready for more fun 
But it’s important to remember that there IS a separation between ourselves and our businesses. Some things we may fail at, and some things we may succeed at. But when it’s time to move on, don’t forget to lose the lesson.
- When life serves you lemons, make lemonade. But don’t call it “Minute Maid” lemonade- the people at minute maid don’t like it when you do that.
- It’s not how many times you fall down, it’s how many times you stand back up. But next time you’re about to stand back up, you might want to consider staying low and crawling over to a place where whatever keeps knocking you down can’t get to you.
- Fail early, and fail often. It’s from failure that we learn. But be careful – everyone has their own capacity to learn, and you don’t want to fail more than you can learn from.
Now with those quotations, they are a little tongue in cheek – meant to be funny. But after I wrote them I am proud of them – there really is wisdom there. The final word is that “we are not our failures.” Our business might fail; Our investments might fail; and our health might fail. But they are not a reflection on you. They do not define you.
Others may try to define you, but they only define their perception of you. The only perception that matters is how YOU define you. And your failures shouldn’t be anything more to you than a badge of courage – as long as you learn from them.
Motivation and education are not the same thing. To get the most out of our educators, mentors, and financial gurus, we have to know what they are trying to teach us. Are they trying to motivate us, or educate us? Does the financial guru sell their information, or are they selling themselves? Are they getting rich by teaching people how they got rich, or getting rich by selling the IDEA of being rich?
Above the need for good credit is the need for personal security. While paying off credit cards improves your credit AND provides that financial cushion (since the credit could be counted on to be available if you need it), “pay off my credit cards” has been the first steps in a strategy towards financial independence. However… Read the rest of this entry »
Everybody wants to know how to stay motivated. Whether you’re currently focused on getting out of debt, saving for a home, self-financing a business, or guiding your company through recessions and downturns – All of us sometimes need to find some new ideas on how to stay motivated.
Here is a quicklist on how to stay motivated:
- Motivate someone else
When you give openly and freely you are letting the Universe know that you have in abundance what you are giving away. The Universe responds in kind by providing you with more of what you give a away. This theme of reciprocity is seen in religious, business, and self-help teaching repeatedly. It works for all things – money, time, love, and – as applied here – motivation. On Friday night, before leaving work for the weekend, talk to some of your coworkers about finances. They may not want to talk about specifics, but bring up the topic of savings, paychecks, and secondary incomes. Find out what they do to build their nest-egg, and how they budget time and money. Tell them about the steps YOU take to balance time and money, to build for the future, and to encourage them to do all they can during their time off to increase their income. You will immediately feel charged up yourself, and when the 5 o’clock bell rings, you’ll feel like you’re heading TO work instead of coming HOME FROM WORK.
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In no order of preference I present an audiobook roundup – a 7-list of required audiobooks. If you have not heard these yet, you won’t be disappointed. They are never far away in my MP3 or CD changer. Each one you’re able to listen to over and again. If it seems silly to listen to the same audiobook over and over again, consider how many times in your life you’ve heard that song on the radio. Without further ado -
1. Richest Man in Babylon, By George Clason
(see six more incredible audiobooks here)
Tags: audiobook, Covey, Jim Collins, Kiyosaki, Richest Man in Babylon, Tony Robbins, Trump | 
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When you start creating something great - a life, a strategy, a business – you plot your path.
You need a place to get to – and to get THERE, you’ve got to leave the place you’re at now.
It’s hard to soar with the eagles when you’re surrounded by a bunch of turkeys.
– I have no idea where this came from
Don’t be afraid of your life and your path. You never know what you’re going to find along the way, and there’s no way of knowing what (or whom) will be with you when you get to your destination. This can be far-reaching. The fear of loss can be a powerful motivating factor, and a powerfully de-motivating one, as well. Read the rest of this entry »
As a master motivator and a star lecturer, Jim Rohn has been influential in the lives of so many.
If you’re not familiar with Jim Rohn, you are likely familiar with his work, as it’s been passed on through Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, John Assaraf, and Denis Waitley (John and Denis are both speakers in “The Secret(DVD)
When you’re ready to grow, and ready to start embracing all that this world and this life has to offer, you need to start receiving Jim’s E-Zine.
When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. – Buddhist Proverb
A Seven-Board is task list that focuses on getting you moving instead of focusing on being complete or comprehensive. It is essentially the first 7 tasks you can think of for the first 7 projects you can think of.
I got the idea from “The Rule of Seven“, which was adapted from a really great book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
Consider this:
It’s Friday night. You know you’ve got a lot to do (generally speaking), but you can’t think of anything specific that you have to do “now”, and you can’t think of what things have priority and need to be done quickly versus items which can wait.
You are in trouble. Without some quick direction, you’re going to get a glass of wine, turn on the television, and shut off your brain for the rest of the night. Bad idea. If you don’t get some direction and some tasks to complete you risk losing your momentum for the night, and having a slow morning the next day while you figure out what to do. Until you get your workload broken down into some manageable chunks, you will lose valuable time idling in frustration.
Tags: 22 immutable laws of marketing, seven-board, speed tasking, tasks, taskstorming |
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This is the foundation of the "Richest Man in Babylon" by George S Clason. This has been such a success for me over the last 2 years, as I moved from being controlled by debt to getting out of debt (at least out of bad debt) and began saving. If you’ve heard that before you should save money, you should get out of debt I will challenge you to think otherwise. Get yourself out of debt WHILE you are saving money. Start today. I was working with a friend of mine that was telling me just exactly that – he was saving some money out of every paycheck. He related that when he first started thinking about saving, he found it difficult because he could not see the value in small deposits. But believe me, they add up.
So here is my advice to everybody that wants to become rich – The first thing you should do (and my money IS where my mouth is) is deposit 10% of every paycheck into a savings account. Stock markets are fine for some investing, but this is not your investment account (yet!) Before you get out of debt, start your savings account.
Already have a savings account? Nice! Make sure you’re using it. Make your deposits regularly, and you will begin the process of accumulating wealth.
Debt got you down? Don’t let that stop you. First things first – you have to show the world that you can get $100 together and keep it safe. Strangely enough, the law of attraction can start working immediately, and $100 becomes $1000 before you know it. You can pay off your debts AND start your savings account at the same time. It’s a necessity.
We Americans now total 300,000,000 (roughly)
That’s every man, woman, and child. Every elderly. Every person in America owes $3.33 every time the Government spends $1B. If you’re a family – you’ve got the parents and maybe one, or two – or six – of the country’s 73,000,000 children under the age of 18 living with you… Cough up $3.33 for each person in your family every time the nightly news says “One Billion”
- Single Person - $3.33 per Billion
- A Loving Couple - $6.66 per Billion
- Add a Kid - $9.99 per Billion
- My family (2 adults, 2 kids) – $13.32 per Billion
- Family of eight (2 adults, 6 kids) – $26.64 per Billion
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