I read my horoscope today and got a little pumped, ridiculous I know, nevertheless it was pretty cool.

According to the planets you are very close to the tipping point, where one small adjustment or alteration somehow changes everything.

I know it’s silly, completely coincidental, but I still love that kinda stuff.  We’re all looking for some sort of external validation of what we believe our purpose is, to feel like we are on some kind of pre-destined mission of some kind.  I like to believe that all of the suffering and hard lessons I have learned in business were to bring me to a point where I am finally prepared for success.  I’m hoping that I am heading towards some sort of tipping point that were it not for my previous trials and tribulations, would not be possible.  That would validate all of the crap I dealt with, all of the wedding videos I had to shoot on what would have otherwise been a perfectly good summer weekend, all of the debt I built up, all of the time I spent working a job I hated to pay off that debt and get restarted in business, ALL OF THAT STUFF!

To quote a movie, nerdy as it may be, during The Matrix Reloaded, the old dude in the room with all the TVs wearing the white suit said to Neo

Hope. It is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength, and your greatest weakness.

So true.  There have been so many moments, I still have them in fact, where I think about all of the stuff I need to do, all of the massive challenges I need to overcome to create the business I envision, and the lifestyle I envision, and I worry that there is no way that I can pull it off.  It’s like suddenly my delusions of being able to achieve this seemingly impossible success, suddenly disappear and I realize a sobering truth that I have wasted the last 5 years of my life.  I could have been working at some real estate firm like everyone else I know.  I could have been a Chartered Accountant two times over by now, made manager, well on my way to partner.  I could have a house, maybe a sweet car too.  Then I get back to work, reminding myself that I don’t need to live in that reality.  I can create my own where those dreams are achievable.  I don’t need to buy into that 9 to 5 crap.

I was on course to earn somewhere between $70-80K this year.  Instead I quit my job, with no assurances that the projects I am working on will make any money.  I am flying across the world, spending thousands of dollars to develop a business model I’ve never executed before, not that that would matter, because all of the business models I have executed before never really made me any money.  I have HOPE, and that’s it.  I have bought into the delusion that I can create my own path.  So many people are leading a life where they think they have no options, where they have to work a job they hate because there just isn’t any other way.  I refuse to buy into that mindset.  There were a few times this year where I would get a pay cheque for over $3,000 after taxes, and I’d think to myself, maybe I’ll just do this until my projects are successful, and then I’ll quit.  That just wouldn’t happen though.  I’d get comfortable, I’d get weak and buy a nice car, and have the payments to follow it, I’d get a nice condo, a hot girlfriend with expensive tastes, and suddenly I’d be trapped.  I’d rather be poor, but free to do whatever I want, whereever and whenever I wanted to do it.

Money is overrated, time is underrated.  I feel like I should be ordained in the church of the Four Hour Work Week considering how much I preach about it’s sermons.  There is so much stuff I want to do with my life, and working some 9 to 5 job “building a career” is not something I am passionate about.  In my last post I listed the things that I wanted to do, would it be possible to do that building a career at someone else’s company? Not likely.

So I’m just HOPING that my horoscope was right today, that I am reaching a tipping point, and that shortly things will be taking a much more accelerated trajectory.

I booked a flight to Copenhagen, Denmark for June 30th.  I also gave notice to my employer that June 29th will be my last day.  This may not seem like that big a deal, but frankly I spent the last 15 months or so working at a job that had absolutely no purpose other than to pay off debt, save money, and position me to get back into business again.  I haven’t really spent much time writing on here about my business plans or aspirations, although I’m sure you may have gotten that sense based on the way I talk about business within a lot of (all) of the posts I write on here.  The last 15 months I have felt like I was in prison, serving time for poor business decisions, and inexperience.  I have less than two weeks left to serve and I am getting antsy.

So what am I doing in Denmark?  I’m starting production on a badminton instructional program with Peter Rasmussen.  Some of you may know him, most probably won’t.  The point is I’m going all out for my dream.  Two years ago I read Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week, and I decided that I wanted to join him in the ranks of the New Rich.  I wanted to have the freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted to, wherever I wanted to do it.  I’m going to do a terrible job defining for you what the hell I’m talking about here, but maybe if you read this post over at David Risley’s blog about Lifestyle Design, you might understand a little bit better.

I am scheduled to return to Canada on July 17th, but I am considering just staying there indefinitely.  Not really sure at this point, but the idea of just doing something major like that on a whim really excites me.  I have never really bought into the whole, get a job, build a career, retire at 65 thing.  I refuse to spend my life doing something because I need the money.  I don’t want to spend my days working so that I can have some freedom in the evenings.  I don’t want to work so that I can live, I want to live for my work.  I want to be passionate about what I spend my time doing.

Everyone I know is either in real estate, or oil and gas it seems.  That’s the case in Edmonton more or less.  The other alternative is a dentist, doctor, lawyer etc etc.  Not for me.  If you want to help people then by all means go be a doctor, but if you’re doing that because you want the money and prestige, I pity you.  Maybe you get off on the money and prestige, but there are easier ways to get money and prestige than going to school for that long.  There are so many things that I want to do with my life, and the idea of working for someone else forever just isn’t going to happen.

In no particular order here are some things I AM GOING TO DO:

• Play on the professional badminton tour – I used to dream of being world #1 when I was a kid
• Help to make badminton a REAL pro sport – I want it to be like tennis
• Learn chinese fluently – took it at school for a while, but never reached fluency
• Live in Barcelona for a while – loved it there for 4 days, maybe that’s all I need, but I want to go back
• Direct/Produce/Act in feature films – I went to film school, then dropped out because the school sucked, or maybe I was just scared??  And yes, I do want to act, in spite of my shy nature.  I want to make movies that shape the way people see the world.  I’m unlikely to be some activist, so this could be my way of making a difference

I know a lot of these may seem selfish and you don’t see “save the whales” or anything like that on here, but is that so horrible?  I’m only 26 years old, I hope I have another 74 or so years left, and perhaps when I get older I’ll have more of an interest in social issues, but for now being a pro badminton player and Hollywood film director seem like pretty cool aspirations.

Anyway, I’m going to Denmark to produce this badminton thing.  Thinking that I might just stay there til Christmas time.  Play some badminton, develop the badminton project, and have fun.  Check back here and you’ll find out what happens next, cause right now I don’t even know.

This is one of my favourite credos for business. When I started my first business we made this an art form. We were exceptionally good at making people believe that we knew what we were talking about, and that we could get pretty much anything done. Of course I can’t go into too much detail about some of the specific things we did as some of our very first clients might be appalled at how inexperienced we really were, but we always made sure that we delivered what we said we would (this is very important).

The key with faking it til you make it is to exude confidence. If you pretend you are experienced and confident, people will generally believe you, and hopefully you will start to believe that yourself as well, and that is the key to this technique. It’s all about selling yourself to people. When given the choice between two vendors, one who seems like they know what they’re talking about, but also seems very nervous, or one who you’re convinced knows their stuff and is confident, you are going to choose the latter. When starting out in business, this is in my opinion the only way you can really move up in the world, because you will almost certainly have self-doubt, and until you prove to yourself through results, you have to pretend.

This ties in very well with another of my favourite credos for business, and that is to jump right in. You have to have faith in yourself enough to commit to your business. If you are still shy about telling people about your business, and still refer to your business as though it’s just this little thing you’re sort of kind of doing, you don’t sound very committed to it, and don’t sound very confident. It’s very common for people just starting their business to feel like they want to protect their idea from confidence crippling criticism. When we first started out I felt like a leper for starting a business. A lot of my friends thought I was a dork, and I felt like one. I’m sure people like Brad Pitt and Tom Hanks felt a very similar feeling when they told their friends and family that they wanted to become professional actors, and I doubt anyone thinks their dorks now.

The point I’m trying to make here is that you need to commit at some point, and that is when you start referring to yourself as an entrepreneur, or a businessperson, or whatever title you want to give yourself so you start to feel like an entrepreneur. People might laugh at you, or maybe you’re just being paranoid, but it doesn’t matter because unless you put yourself through that initial awkward phase you are never going to be able to get to the point where you are a very successful entrepreneur. So, fake it til you make it.

Enter Action With Boldness

If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

The above is an excerpt from the table of contents of Robert Greene’s “The 48 Laws of Power“, one of my all time favourite books.  The book is full of valuable lessons that can apply to numerous areas of one’s life, not just to business.  This particular law is one of my favourites, not because I am very adept at following it, rather because it is the one law which I most likely break most repeatedly.

I am a very analytical person by nature.  I enjoy breaking things down, and visualizing how all the pieces of something should work to achieve a desired result.  In building my business I have spent countless hours brainstorming, researching, and studying how best to achieve my goals.  It’s likely that I spend over 90% of my time planning, less than 10% of my time executing  my plans, and probably no time at all on monitoring my results.  A shame to say the least.  At the risk of sounding egotistical, I think that my plans are quite good, and that were I too execute them as I envision them, I would achieve some great things.  Sadly this has not been the case.

In writing this I’m not attempting to elicit sympathy, rather I’m hoping to provide a venue through which to hold myself accountable, and to provide you some insight into something that perhaps you yourself could use some work on.  The one thing that I need to become better at more than anything else, is to begin allocating more of my time and attention to the executing of my plans.  This goes into the 80/20 law, or Pareto Principle.  If you’re not familiar with this, it basically says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions, and therefore by isolating what those most productive actions are, and doing more of that, you will achieve greater results with less overall effort.  I won’t go too much further into that, but you can find a more in depth explanation of the Pareto Principle on Yaro Starak’s blog Entrepreneur’s Journey.  Another great place to read about similar concepts is in Timothy Ferris’ book “The Four Hour Work Week“.

If you spend too much time analyzing the variables that go into your situation, you have too little time to execute whatever strategy you develop.  Accoutants have a catch phrase for this too, “Relevance vs Reliabilty”.  This basically states that as you spend more and more time analyzing a company’s financial situation, the less relevant the information you find will be to that business.

So what is the point of this article?  Well hopefully you gain something from it, but primarily I wrote it as a reminder to myself that the fastest way to get to where you want to go, is to stop thinking about it, and start walking.

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gandhi

No, this post is not about how to be a revolutionary and change the world for the better, but certainly you could apply this concept to making a difference in the world. This post is about how you can be a leader in your life, and lead yourself in the direction you want to go.

If you want to have a certain kind of life, or to make change in something you are a part of, you need to be that change. You can’t be a hypocrite, or else any change will not be long lasting. In a business environment this means that you need to act as someone who has already achieved what you want. Being successful won’t make you become the person you want to be, rather becoming the person you want to be will bring you the success.

I have some pretty lofty goals/dreams in my life. I want business success, I want to be successful in the film industry, I’d love to be a world champion badminton player (yes, badminton), and more. Will I achieve these things? Possibly, but I’ll need to make some major changes in myself first. This blog is part of that in fact. It’s a means to keep myself accountable to my dreams. I need to work consistently towards my goals, just envisioning them won’t make them happen, whereas constant and incremental actions will.

If you were to outline a list of actions to take that would make the achievement of your goals an inevitability, would you be disciplined enough to stay on course? Or would you make compromises along the way? Perhaps you could write some compromises into that plan along the way to make it more realistic. You don’t need to be the world’s most hardest working person to achieve great things, but you also can’t just sit on your butt. Like I said before, all you need to do is to make constant and incremental improvements towards a desired outcome.

Lead yourself towards your dreams, and that means doing what you know you need to do. Do it now!

Whenever I watch tennis I am amazed at how these players make it look so easy. Of course it isn’t easy and this is why these players are making millions of dollars. The better a player is, the easier they make the game look. When I watch Andy Roddick play against some guy in the first round he seems pretty comfortable, but when I watch him play Roger Federer he looks like he is working extremely hard, while Roger almost always looks like the game is effortless to him. I have experienced this in my own sporting endeavors before, a state of being where you feel as though you are hardly trying, and yet you are performing better than you have ever performed before. Oftentimes this means you are “in the zone”.

The zone is not just applicable to sports though, it can happen at anytime in your life really. It is being in the moment so that you can allow your training to take over, so that your choices are more automatic, and you are less likely to doubt yourself. So how can we apply this principle to business? It’s difficult because business is more of a marathon than a sprint, and to maintain this state constantly is quite difficult. Even if you can’t be in the zone all the time, you can implement the art of not trying.

If your mind is overloaded with things you need to get done, and your life is quite complicated, using the art of not trying is probably not going to be feasible. In order to successfully not try you need to cut out the trivial many, and focus on the critical few as Tim Ferriss says. The sports analogy I would use is that you need to have smooth and efficient technique in order to appear effortless. Roger Federer looks like he isn’t trying because he is so smooth on court, and regardless of whatever pressure he is under he still looks smooth because of his impeccable technique. In business this means focusing on what really matters, and not being overwhelmed by numerous small things that should be delegated to someone else, or batch processed at a later time.

If you feel like you’re working too hard, you probably are. Unfortunately that also means that you are probably doing things in an inefficient manner, and until you become more efficient you have to keep working hard. In reality the better word to choose would probably be effective, because if you are really efficient at doing trivial tasks, you aren’t really going to be getting ahead. This of course applies to sports as well. If Roger Federer only had smooth technique he wouldn’t be the champion he is today, but because he also hits very effective shots, he gets amazing results.

So, think about your daily routine, how could you become more efficient, and more importantly, how could you become more effective? Decide what are the most important tasks that you need to get done, and do those tasks first. In a worst case scenario, if you didn’t get to respond to some email or to do some other trivial task, at least you got that important item done, and you will be feeling a lot less stressed as a result. Really break down your day, and find the time hogs. Write out what you need to get done the night before, and when the morning comes, attack the most important items first.

For those of you who buy into the law of attraction, which is the foundation of “The Secret”, you’ll understand what I’m getting at here. It’s important to be clear on what you want in life and for your business, but you can’t try so hard. When you start trying too hard what happens is you start to focus on the opposite of what you’re hoping to accomplish, and by focusing on the negative you tend to attract something negative.

Sometimes it’s easier to keep our bad habits, we’re too lazy to change them, even though changing these habits would mean we could be lazier later! So don’t be lazy now, find and fix your bad habits, you’ll thank yourself for it later.

I wanted to avoid the clichéd “ideas are a dime a dozen”, but I really couldn’t agree more with that. For as long as I can remember I have been coming up with “genius” business ideas, ideas that if executed would make me, or anyone else billionaires. That is always the problem, if they are executed, but they rarely are.

So many people are the same way. You come up with this gold mine of an idea that you protect by not telling anyone because you don’t want anyone to steal your future fortune, but you also protect it by sheltering it from criticism and daylight. You tuck that genius idea of yours away and let it rot while you keep doing the same thing you’ve always been doing. While I do agree that you have to be protective of your dreams as people will often stomp on them unconsciously (a totally different post for another day), but you have to eventually let them out.

It is important to try and be creative, that’s basically what the entrepreneurship process is all about, creating a business. However, what is more important is making a business model that functions, and that people can understand, because if nobody understands your business model, how do you expect your managers and employees to execute for you? Oftentimes the best businesses are from the simplest ideas, but these ideas are executed like clockwork.

Whatever your business ideas are, you need to have a clear plan of attack. You need to know what your action items are, and you need to do them. One of the keys to business success is execution of simple tasks, not planning some complex business model that you will never execute. Businesspeople need to get things done, and if you are always trying to come up with the best idea or novel business model, you won’t be getting the things done that you need to get done. So on that note, if you could only get a small number of things done tomorrow for your business (or for you future business) what would they be? Are they concrete real actions, or are you just brainstorming? Do stuff now, don’t just think about what you need to do.

Over the last few years I’ve been studying internet marketing, but only recently have I started to look seriously at it. I’m in the process of setting up a couple of different subscription based membership websites, and the first steps in building these websites is to develop a sales funnel to start collecting leads. For those of you who are totally green, a lead is basically someone who you have determined to be a potential customer. How do you do this? You find people who are willing to provide you with their contact details (phone number, email, address etc.) in return for something of interest to them. You could be providing them with some information that they want, a training video of some kind, or in an offline example it could be a free product sample.

So the next question is, why is it useful to know the contact details of someone that wanted a free sample of acai berries, or a free training video that shows them how to improve their golf swing? Well because it is much more likely that this person is will to buy more acai berries, or to buy an extended golf training DVD than someone who didn’t even want to enter their contact information. However, just because someone wants a free sample of what you’re offering doesn’t mean that they are going to buy from you, in fact it’s quite likely that only a small percentage of the leads you collect will ever end up buying from you. Anyway, that’s enough about leads to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll go into more depth on this whole process another time.

The first part of my sales funnel was to build what is often referred to as a landing page, or email squeeze page where I try to entice people to provide me with their email address in return for more information on the product that I am developing. Now here’s the thing, I haven’t completed any free offering yet. I don’t have a free sample, a related product I can give away, nothing. All I have is the promise that I will give them more information on my website once it is complete. This is not very enticing, which means that my opt in rate (percentage of people who come to the page who actually provide their details) won’t be as high as it could be, actually much lower. Nonetheless I can begin testing to see what I can do to improve my opt in rate.

How do I test? Testing is basically a statistical process where you drive a certain amount of traffic to your landing page (in my case via pay per click advertising), and track how many people opt in. Then you make changes to your landing page, and once again you track how many people opt in. If you send 1000 people to each version of your landing page, and version A has an opt in rate of 3% while version B has an opt in rate of 4.5%, then you can say that version B is a better page, you have proof of it. It is best to test with as much volume as possible, to insure the most statistical accuracy, anything below 1000 people and you might have a difficult time determining if it’s a true trend, or just an anomaly.

I’m using Google Adwords to drive traffic to my landing page, and while I haven’t seen anywhere near 1000 visitors yet I have tweaked a couple things based on the recommendation of some people in forums. Now that I have implemented some fundamental lessons that I learned, I plan to allow a decent amount of traffic to go through to the site in order to see how well it performs. After 1000 or so visitors I will make some changes and see what difference it makes.

When I talk about the changes I will make to the site I am referring to the sales copy. I’m sure a lot of you have read some cheesy looking sales pages on the internet and thought to yourself that nobody would ever buy from this page, but you’d be wrong. These marketers are generally testing their sales copy in the same way that I described above, and they can show you statistical proof that these pages DO WORK, not to mention the money they are making.

By determining what your opt in rate is you are finding a piece of the puzzle that will help you to determine how much you will have to spend on customer acquisition. To give you a little more information, by determining for example that 4.5% of all visitors to your landing page provide your with their contact details, and 10% of those people end up buying your product (based on your follow up marketing efforts) which has a margin of $50.00 per unit, you now know that if you sent 10,000 people to your landing page that 45 of them would end up buying from you, providing you with a margin of $2250. That means that you need to spend less than $2250 in order to drive 10,000 visitors to your landing page, or to go even further than that each visitor to your website is worth no more than $0.225 ($2250/10,000=$0.225 but we’ll round down to $0.22), and each lead is worth $5.00 ($50*10% purchase rate=$5.00 per lead)

I apologize if I haven’t done the greatest job of illustrating all of this to you, I have a long ways to go before I master all of these concepts. I understand them in theory, but I have yet to fully execute a lot of them at this point in time. I’ll chronicle my progress as best I can without revealing too many specifics about my individual projects.

I’d like to be a pro-athlete. I think playing on the pro badminton tour would be pretty cool (I have played badminton since I was 4). I covered a lot of major events as a writer and thought it was pretty awesome. The travel would be cool. I am a very competitive person and I love the sport as well, so if I could make a living traveling the world playing badminton I would do it, but I don’t want it bad enough to do the things necessary to achieve that. A lot of people are like that about all of their dreams. It would be nice, but their not interested in the work required. This brings me to another point, people want success so they can take it easy.

The idea that success will allow you to relax or retire completely is in my opinion one of the greatest barriers to people achieving success in anything. The mindset goes something like this “I will build up this amazing business, make a whole bunch of money, and then I’ll take it easy”. If you work hard for success so that you can take it easy, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful. You become used to hard work, so your tolerance goes up. Things aren’t so hard anymore. So you shouldn’t be working hard so you can take it easy, you should be working hard so that what you used to think was hard work, is now easy for you. Now don’t confuse working hard with mindless inefficiency, that’s being mentally lazy, or if you want another analogy that’s like someone who’s a workhorse in a sport, but refuses to work on their technique (cause it’s hard for them!).

I know that Donald Trump once said that the time he ran into the most difficulties with his business was when he sat back and rested on his success thinking that he didn’t need to work hard anymore. Big mistake. The more success you have the more you have to lose. This attitude is of course entirely applicable to sports. Do you think now that Raphael Nadal has made it to the top of tennis, and Tiger Woods is dominating golf, that either of them are slacking at all? Of course not, they are working harder than ever because otherwise the rest of the field is going to catch up with them.

You need to have a hunger, an insatiable appetite for whatever your idea of success is. If you’re not obsessed with achieving your goal someone else out there is, and they’ll beat you to the punch. My attitude is that there are thousands of other people out there all vying for the same things that I want, and so long as I work harder than they do, and I want it more, there is little that they can do to stop me. This of course means that you are the only person you really need to compete with, your inner loser who is going to be whispering in your ear that you have done enough, that you can finish later, or you’ll do more next time. It’s now or never. Life balance is important too, but that’s something that we can address in other posts.

I am a pretty big Gary Vaynerchuk fan, as you may have noticed from the frequency of my quoting him/re-posting his videos. He has a great video he just put out talking about how the value of each viewer/user/customer is not the same. This can be attributed to the 80/20 rule quite clearly, and Gary does a good job of getting the point across.