“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back…the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, being it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A lot of things happen when you commit yourself to a course of action that help to make success an inevitability.  Often people mistake these things as luck on the part of the successful person, that they were blessed by circumstances, but people who commit to taking bold action make their own luck.

People Take Notice

When you are fully committed to a course of action people around you start to take notice, and they can’t help but be affected by you.  Everyone says that they are going to do one thing or another at some point in time, but when you prove your committment through your actions people buy it.  How many people do you know who have said they plan to go to med school?  Perhaps they even tell you they are “pre-med” which somehow makes it sound like an inevitability in spite of the fact that they go to the bar every weekend instead of the library.  What about the people who want to start their own business, they will be their own bosses and will make millions, I know I was one of these people.  But the fact was that I wasn’t doing what I knew needed to be done.  It took falling deep into debt, and working a job I hated for 18 months to teach me my lesson.  Entering my second business incarnation I have dedicated myself much further, moving to a totally different country in order to produce and launch my first direct response educational product (visit http://www.badmintonlife.com for a peek), and to push me out of my comfort zone.  I have been amazed by the response I have been getting from those around me.  My friends and family back home that I always felt were somewhat doubtful of many of my past efforts suddenly had no more doubts.  The support of those I have told about my project has been very reassuring.  People want to get involved, they want to work with me on related projects because they see what I’m doing, it’s tangible, it’s real, and it’s not just some story or dream in my distant future, it’s here and now.  The more you see people have confidence in you, the more you will have confidence in yourself.

New Opportunities Will Appear

The more you put yourself out there, the more opportunities will come your way.  If you are busily working away on your project, talking to people about it, getting them talking about you and your project, things will start coming your way.  This is much more obvious when working with an online based business since the networking effect is so much more accelerated.  Someone links to your latest blog post, or you get a comment on your Facebook fan page, then suddenly other people are doing the same and you’ve gone viral.  With our car website CarEnvy.ca we just got into the thick of things, recruiting writers and shooting videos for the site, and within a few months we’re getting offers from advertisers wanting to advertise on the blog, web publishing networks hoping to partner up with us to syndicate our content, and emails from auto manufacturers inviting us to events (which we unfortunately couldn’t go to).  None of these things have resulted in us making heaps of money yet, in fact thus far the site has yet to turn a profit, however as you move forward you start to feel the momentum, and you are that much more motivated to keep on going.  One of my favourite stories about the random opportunities that have arisen for me was my trip to Hollywood to watch a taping of a tv show because I had a blog talking about going to film school.  The trip was all expenses paid, and very posh.

You Take The Lead

In many racing sports whether it’s auto sports, cycling, or running, there are several different strategies, and while I really know little about these strategies and will refrain from pretending like I do, I do know that a common strategy is racing from the front of the pack.  By doing this you set the pace that all of your opponents must follow.  When starting a business venture, or any pursuit at all, you might not necessarily want to look at those who follow you as your opponents, but by taking the lead you are viewed in some way as the one they should be following, and listening to.  Suddenly your ideas carry more weight, and your arguments are taken more seriously.  The great majority of people choose to follow through most areas in their life.  Their preference is to be an employee, as opposed to an entrepreneur, or even a manager within someone else’s organization.  They would rather follow the crowd and settle for mediocrity because they somehow feel silly or self-conscious shooting for excellence.  In many respects, aiming for mediocrity is where the most competition is because you have the largest number of competitors.  Perhaps this doesn’t make sense to you, you ask “how can aiming for mediocrity be more competitive than excellence?”  The logic is as follows, the actions you need to take to insure that massive, life changing success is inevitable, are performed by such a small number of individuals that you really don’t have that many people to compete against.  Whereas the number of people doing the less scary actions necessary to insure mediocrity are plentiful.

Enter Action With Boldness

Another quote I’m quite fond of comes from Robert Greene’s “48 Laws of Power”.  Law number 28 states that you should

“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.

This I think more or less summarizes pretty much everything I have talked about in this post.  If you take bold action, you avoid hesitation and your execution will be much better.  If you do screw up, just keep up with the bold action, and you will likely fix whatever mistakes you have made.  This does not however mean you should gamble in some way, their is a difference between taking chances, and straight up gambling.

Success is simple really, you remove all of your extraneous activities that add little to no value to your life, and to the lives of those around you, and replace them with activities that add value.  I would also emphasize that putting extra focus towards providing value to those around you will actually allow you to reap more rewards.  So, are you tricking yourself into thinking that watching television by yourself for 3 hours a day is necessary for you to wind down?  I can assure you that the Michael Phelpses, and Steve Jobses of the world are not spending their time burning brain cells, except maybe when they’re taking hits from bongs, or dropping acid, but that’s not something I would suggest you do either.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.