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Take Control of Your Attitude
Your happiness is in your hands.
Jim Rohn
We all have tremendous potential. Each of us has the ability to put our unique human potential into action and to acquire a desired result. But the one thing that determines the level of our potential, produces the intensity of our activity and predicts the quality of the result we receive is our attitude.
Attitude determines how much of the future we are allowed to see. It decides the size of our dreams and influences our determination when we are faced with new challenges. No other person on earth has dominion over our attitude. People can affect our attitude by teaching us poor thinking habits or unintentionally misinforming us, or providing us with negative sources of influence, but no one can control our attitude unless we voluntarily surrender that control.
No one else “makes us angry.” We make ourselves angry when we surrender control of our attitude. What someone else may have done is irrelevant. We choose; not they. They merely put our attitude to a test. If we select a volatile attitude by becoming hostile, angry, jealous or suspicious, then we have failed the test. If we condemn ourselves by believing that we are unworthy, then again, we have failed the test.
If we care at all about ourselves, then we must accept full responsibility for our own feelings. We must learn to guard against those feelings that have the capacity to lead our attitude down the wrong path, and to strengthen those feelings that can lead us confidently into a better future.
If we want to receive the rewards the future holds in trust for us, then we must exercise the most important choice given to us as members of the human race by maintaining total dominion over our attitude. Our attitude is an asset, a treasure of great value that must be protected accordingly.
When you have the right attitude, you can do the remarkable.
When you recognize your gifts, you can change anything for yourself that you wish to change. If you don’t like how something is going for you, change it. If something isn’t enough, change it. If something doesn’t suit you; change it. If something doesn’t please you, change it. You don’t ever have to be the same after today. If you don’t like your present address, change it—you’re not a tree!
Having the right attitude is an essential prerequisite for success and happiness. The right attitude is one of the fundamentals of the good life. That is why we must constantly examine our feelings about our role in the world and about our possibilities for achieving our dreams.
It is our emotional nature that governs most of our daily conduct in our personal and business world. It is the emotional aspect of our experiences that determines our behavior. How we feel about life’s events is a powerful force that can either freeze us in our tracks or inspire us to take immediate action on any given day. With the right attitude, human beings can move mountains. With the wrong attitude, they can be crushed by the smallest grain of sand.
Success Magazine – October 2009
Take Control of Your Brand
Building Your Business in a Digital World
Gary Vaynerchuk
Your brand is your story to the world. The brand is what evokes emotion when people hear and see a name. Really, it’s all that we, as business owners and entrepreneurs, have.
A brand is to a business what words are to a human. But our words, in a digital age, have reach like never before. To put it in perspective: The classic résumé has no value in today’s world. Whether you’re branding yourself or a business, what you put out on the Internet and to the world in general is going to be your brand. Every comment in a blog, every Facebook message, is your legacy and your brand.
As I left my office yesterday, somebody left a comment on my Facebook page that said, “If you think Gary reads this, I have a bridge to sell you.” I responded. That’s powerful, and it exemplifies how important it is to be part of your own world and to pay attention. The funny part is that being a good brand today is really all about listening (and it always has been).
Social media is an old term. I call it “business.” Social media tools, including Facebook and Twitter, are an extension of classic business. Would you, as an entrepreneur, go to a Mets game and not be willing to talk about business? Why not use Facebook in the same way? If you choose not to take advantage of online branding, your business will become old and stale. You’ll be the person arguing that horses are just fine, so why buy a car?
There are signs indicating whether your brand is in bad need of developing. The telltale sign is if people have a tough time explaining what you do. I think one great exercise for today’s entrepreneur is to contact 50 casual friends or acquaintances and ask them to define your brand or business. You’ll quickly know if your branding message is zoned in or not. If you get many different responses, that’s not good. What you want to see is that people give correct and similar responses.
The first step is to believe in the power of online branding. Spending hours every day on social networking sites, responding to potential customers and other followers, is not wasting time—it’s conducting business. If you’re not on search.Twitter.com every single day and searching your brand and name as subjects that are relevant to your business, you’re making a big mistake. Searching and online communicating is the biggest real job going. And nobody realizes it. The chief listener is going to become a very important job title.
Here’s an example: Somebody tweets that pizza from a specific chain is no good. Here’s your chance to respond with a simple, “What’s wrong?” So starts the conversation and brand-building.
The small-business person or entrepreneur needs to stop watching YouTube videos and standing behind a register for hours a day. These people need to open a computer to start searching, communicating and brand-building. Even if you think locally, you can put in your ZIP code and get chatter within 10 miles of your location.
There are a lot of small-business owners who cry that they’re getting beaten by Amazon.com or Wal-Mart, yet, they’re on the phone for 90 minutes a day, sending jokes to friends or going out for long lunches, instead of hustling. It’s my fundamental belief that hustling and hard work are underrated. The fact that we have tools today that allow our hard work to extend beyond what was previously impossible is an amazing opportunity.
Success Magazine – October 2009
Take Control of Your Dreams
Charting a Course to Reach Them
Brian Tracy
Imagine arriving on the outskirts of a large city and being told to drive to a particular home or office there. But there are no road signs and you have no map. In fact, all you have is a very general description of the home or office, so finding it would be very much a matter of luck. Sadly, this is the way most people live their lives.
Most people start life traveling aimlessly through an unmapped and uncharted world. This is the equivalent of starting off in life with no goals and plans. They simply figure things out as they go along. Often, 10 or 20 years of work will go past and they will still be broke, unhappy in their jobs, dissatisfied with their marriages and making little progress. And still, they will go home every night and watch television, wishing and hoping things will get better. But they seldom do. Not by themselves.
Earl Nightingale wrote, “Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal.” Goals fulfi ll the greatest need of human beings—a sense of meaning and purpose in life. One of the great benefits of goal-setting is that you control the direction of change in your life. Setting goals, working toward them day by day, and ultimately achieving them is the key to happiness in life.
In more than 50 years of research, psychologists have determined that your locus of control is the determining factor of your happiness or unhappiness in life. People with an external locus of control—those who typically don’t set goals—feel controlled by external factors, by their boss, their bills, their marriage, their childhood problems and their current situation. They feel out of control, and as a result, they feel weak, angry, fearful, negative, hostile and disempowered. People who do set goals often operate with an internal locus of control—they feel in complete control of their lives. They feel strong, confident and powerful. They are generally optimistic and positive. They feel terrific about themselves and very much in charge of their direction in life.
The starting point of goal-setting is to realize you have virtually unlimited potential to be, have or do anything you really want in life if you simply want it badly enough and are willing to work long enough and hard enough to achieve it. So, what do you really want to do with your life? What do you want to be or to have in life? You should return to this question over and over again in the months and years ahead. Remember, you can’t hit a target you can’t see.
Success Magazine – October 2009
Take Control of Your Finances
Managing Your Money
Dave Ramsey
I believe with everything within me that your most powerful wealth-building tool is your income. Ideas, strategies, goals, vision, focus and even creative thinking are vastly important, but until you get control and full use of your income to build wealth, you will not build and keep wealth. To build wealth, you will have to regain control of your income.
When we fail to plan, we plan to fail and so there is always too much month left at the end of the money. Everyone needs a written budget.
Sometimes I hear, “Well, I kinda, sorta know where my money is, ya know. I know what it is going to, ya know. I do my planning in my mind, ya know.” Having a written plan is absolutely necessary. Kinda, sorta knowing what’s going on with your money isn’t going to get you to your goals. Developing a written plan gathers, organizes, categorizes and analyzes information about your money situation. As you do your written plan, you will be amazed that answers to money problems will appear easily.
Set up a new written budget every month. At first it may take a while, but the process will get faster. My wife, Sharon, and I used to spend hours on our budget, and now we only spend a few minutes each month. Don’t try to have the perfect budget for the perfect month because you’ll never have those.
Spend every dollar on paper before the month begins. Give every dollar of your income a name before the month begins—that’s called a zero-based budget. Income minus outgo equals zero every month. Look at this month’s income and this month’s bills, savings and debts, and match them up until you have given every income dollar an outgo name.
Every dollar of your money should fit in a category, even if you need to make up new ones. The basic categories include saving, housing, utilities, food, transportation, medical, personal, recreation and debt. Don’t forget to include saving for things that aren’t monthly, such as Christmas, birthdays, taxes and insurance premiums. If you have an irregular income due to commissions, self-employment or bonuses, you still must do a written budget before each month begins. In your case, adding up what your outgo is each month is a form of goal-setting. It tells you what you have to earn in order to cover all the outgo you will have. Prioritize your bills, savings and debts in order of importance, not urgency. Ask yourself, “If I only have enough money to pay one thing, what would that be?” Move this way through the list. Stick to it! As the income comes in, work your way down this list.
It may take two to three months before your budget is correct, but keep trying. This is key to your financial success.
Success Magazine – October 2009
Take Control of Your Network
It’s all about who you know.
Harvey Mackay
My father was a newspaperman who headed the Associated Press in St. Paul, Minn., and his whole life depended on deadlines and contacts. When I was 18, he told me that every time I met someone, their name should go into my Rolodex, now known as a contact management system. Write down a little bit about that person—jobs, hobbies, interests, family, education and so on—and find a creative way to stay in touch. I now have more than 12,000 names in my system, and they have saved my skin more times than I can count.
If you need a job, money, advice, help, hope or a means to make a sale, there’s only one surefire, fail-safe place to find them: your network. When your superior talent, enviable experience, guts, hard work and sparkling personality aren’t enough, you have to turn somewhere, and that somewhere is your network.
You need to build a network of people with a variety of skills and contacts before you need to use their particular talents and abilities. The corollary is that you will also become part of their networks, ready to be useful when possible. If I get you in my network, and you get me into your network, then we each have two networks, because you can then call me and ask me if I know someone, somewhere, who can guide you to someone or something you need.
The first real networking school I signed up for after college was Toastmasters International, and 40-plus years later, I am still using the concepts I learned at these meetings. In addition to developing your speaking skills, you learn about doing your homework, self-confidence, appearance, and becoming an interesting person and valuable resource to others. It can help you gain and polish the tools to become a successful networker.
A few years later, when I was an inexperienced new owner of a struggling envelope company, I learned I needed all the help I could get. I begged for appointments with people who were doing what I wanted to do, who could mentor me and teach me a few tricks.
I developed more than a network—I made some terrific friends. And they were willing to introduce me to members of their networks. Listen and learn from the masters, and then when you become a master, pass along the favor. Your network will either have a member who can help you or who knows someone else who could be helpful. But you have to ask! My lifelong philosophy is: Never say no for the other person.
Networks are important for personal interests as well as business contacts. Just about every topic you are interested in probably has some club associated with it, and they are filled with folks like you who have a day job and a life beyond.
In our global business world, having a network that extends beyond the city limits is essential. With phone, e-mail and the Internet, it’s just as easy to build a global network as a local one.
How do you get started? Begin with your friends and family, then try your banker, lawyer or accountant. Start a blog. Twitter, as I do. Check the nearest university, where you’ll find students and faculty with contacts around the world.
And don’t be afraid to hire a network. If you aren’t an expert at something, and don’t know an expert, you can always hire an expert. Your network can help you to know where to look.
My network has been central to my success in business as well as in my personal life. As the old saying goes, “It’s not what you know; it’s whom you know!”
Success Magazine – October 2009
Take Control of Your Success
Making Sure You’re in the Right Business
Paul Zane Pilzer September 8, 2009
Remember when you were young and adults asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The idea was that you were going to “be” one thing and “be” that for the rest of your life. How many people do you know who have done the same thing since they graduated from school? Anyone?
You can no longer just pick a job and keep it for the rest of your life. All of these established patterns have been swept away by the advance of technology. And you certainly can’t sit back and expect customers to beat a path to your door. If you want your business to be a viable fit in the marketplace, you have to stay current with your personal technology. You need three different types of skills.
First are your basic skills, including your ability to read, write, speak, calculate and process information. If you are limited in these core skills, now might be the time to improve them. Next are your functional skills, which include any specialized skill sets you have learned to date. Today, relying on mastery of one functional skill is business suicide—because the area in which your skill set lies could completely transform or disappear in a matter of years. You need multiple functional skill sets.
Your business success depends largely on the third set of skills: adaptability. To a great degree, you can define your competitive edge by how fast and how well you learn something new. You have to keep up with your customers’ needs and ask yourself if your business is solving a problem. But it’s no longer solely about finding and filling a need; it’s about imagining a need and creating it.
The trick is you have to be alert to what is new and emerging— because once everyone else has noticed, it will no longer be new and emerging. How well do you explore the area you don’t know about yet, and how regularly and rigorously do you explore it? Your business success and your greatest potential for growth are defined by your technology gap.
One way to assess whether your business is still viable is by putting yourself in the position of your customers. Would you buy your own product or try your service? Would you choose your business over your competitors’? Can customers find your business—are you recognized in your industry for your expertise? Or do you have too many competitors?
You also need to assess whether you, personally, are in the right business, whether you’re still passionate about what you’re doing. If you experience mental conflict between your business and your personal life, that’s a healthy sign that you are in the right business. It’s making decisions between two things you love. Do you think about the business meeting scheduled in an hour while talking to your children whom you love? If you don’t have mental conflict, something’s wrong. Keep your wife and your kids—just change your business.
I used to accept every speaking opportunity and travel around the world. I loved it. But now, I have four kids, and the most important thing to me is putting them to bed at night. It’s not that I don’t want to do the speeches—I loved doing them—but you can’t pay me enough to leave my kids for a week. So I gave up that part of my business because it wasn’t working for me.
You have to be passionate about your business. If you don’t love your business, you are doing a terrible disservice to your customers and clients, your team members and business partners, your family and yourself. If you determine you are in the wrong business, put in the extra hours to turn it, then put it on the market and sell it.
Don’t wait until you’re miserable or your business is suffering. Let yourself be pulled instead of pushed—pulled by your entrepreneurial spirit, that is. Finding and fixing those problems can make you a fortune, and make a lot of other people happier in the process—including you!
Fit for Business
Question Yourself
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Are you passionate and excited about your business?
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Do you feel torn between family time and business time? (It’s a good sign.)
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Do you assertively seek information and explore areas of your business where you lack knowledge?
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Do you often talk about ways to make your business, product or service better?
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Is your business (or you) known for your expertise?
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Would you buy your own product or service?
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Is your business current with technology?
Paul Zane Pilzer is an internationally known economist, software entrepreneur and author of dozens of scholarly publications and eight best-selling books, including Unlimited Wealth. He lives in Utah with his wife and four children.
Success Magazine – October 2009
Take Control of Your Time
What’s Important—Not Just Urgent
Stephen R. Covey
Prioritization, an aspect of time management, means deciding what’s important and spending time on those priorities.
Small-business owners and entrepreneurs find prioritization particularly challenging because they are seduced by the urgent and that which is not important. They find those things that become pressing are proximate or popular and often have the appearance of importance but are really only urgent.
Half the people I teach acknowledge that half of their time is spent on urgent, not important, things. In classifying what we do in terms of both urgency and importance, I talk in my books The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and First Things First about four quadrants: Quadrant 1 is urgent, important; Quadrant 2 is non-urgent, important; Quadrant 3 is urgent, not important; and Quadrant 4 is non-urgent, not important. In research that we did with companies that have immeasurable influence on the development of quality control and management, we found most spent their time in Quadrant 2. The others spent their time in Quadrant 3—doing things that are urgent but not really that important. They know it and admit it. You might, too.
In order to spend more time on non-urgent and important matters, first develop a mission statement that has purposes and values clearly identified. This gives you the context for setting up long-term and short-term goals, as well as plans to achieve those goals.
The second habit in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is beginning with the end in mind. It’s about vision and is the start of your mission statement. Beginning at the end defines the larger criteria. You can decide on your top priorities based on that end. Once you have those top priorities and keep them as priorities, you will not be seduced into the constant flood of urgency.
Habit 3 is the physical creation of your defined purpose, values, roles and priorities. What are “first things”? First things are those things you, personally, find of most worth. If you put first things first, you are organizing and managing time and events according to the personal priorities you established in Habit 2, beginning with the end in mind.
Once you arrive at those top priorities for each role that you have in your life (business, personal, family, community service), you have the context from which to distinguish between what is important and what is simply urgent.
It doesn’t matter how smart or experienced you are, without a mission statement, you can still fall into the trap of focusing on what is urgent, rather than what is important. It’s so easy to be seduced by what’s pressing—by that which is proximate. An example: interrupting a family meeting for a phone call. Or another example: interrupting an extremely important meeting to send text messages and e-mail.
Technology is a great servant, but a bad master. It takes you from your focus. It has no prioritization associated with it.
To follow through on your highest priorities, make a long-term plan. Base that long-term plan (looking at the next two or three years) on your mission statement—your purpose and your values. I find that most people do not do long-term planning; rather, they plan for the very short-term and, because of it, are driven by the urgent.
Entrepreneurs get so easily drawn into looking at low-priority opportunities, rather than the kinds of opportunities that have tremendous business potential to reduce costs and increase income in a substantial and consistent way. Instead, they might focus on short-term savings or a new income stream.
One more thing: Avoid daily planning. You may adapt in a daily way, but the shortest unit of planning and prioritization is a week. In a week’s time, you can think through each of your roles and determine the most important things you are trying to accomplish that week in that role. If you get into daily planning, you’re driven by the urgent.
By spending your time in Quadrant 2 on non-urgent, important matters, you will live a more balanced existence. You have to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is OK. There’s no need to overextend yourself. All it takes is realizing that it’s alright to say no when necessary and then focus on your highest priorities.
Stephen R. Covey, named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential Americans, is an organizational consultant, leadership expert and co-founder of Franklin Covey, a global professional services firm. He’s the best-selling author of several books, including his most famous, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Success Magazine – October 2009
Take Control of Your Wealth
The Transition from Employee to Entrepreneur
Robert Kiyosaki August 31, 2009
The power of our thoughts may never be measured or appreciated, but it became obvious to me as a young boy that there was value and power in being aware of my thoughts and how I expressed myself. I noticed that my poor dad was poor not because of the amount of money he earned—which was significant—but because of his thoughts and actions. As a young boy, having two fathers, I became acutely aware of being careful in deciding which thoughts I chose to adopt as my own and to whom should I listen—my rich dad or my poor dad.
I wasn’t born a natural entrepreneur. I had to be trained. When I was growing up, my poor dad often said, “Go to school and get good grades so you can find a good job with good benefits.” He was encouraging me to become an employee.
My rich dad often said, “Learn to build your own business and hire good people.” He was encouraging me to become an entrepreneur.
The CASHFLOW Quadrant explains that there are four types of people that make up the world of business, and they are often technically, emotionally and mentally different people.
E stands for employee; S stands for self-employed or small-business owner; B stands for big-business owner (more than 500 employees); and I stands for investor.
For example, employees will always say the same words, whether they are president or janitor of the company. An employee can always be heard saying, “I’m looking for a safe, secure job with benefits.” The operative words are safe and secure. In other words, the emotion of fear keeps them boxed into that quadrant. If they want to change quadrants, not only are there skills and technical things to learn, but, in many cases, there are also emotional challenges to overcome.
A person in the S quadrant may be heard saying, “If you want it done right, do it yourself.” In many cases, this person’s challenge is learning to trust other people to do a better job than they can. This lack often keeps them small, since it’s hard to grow a business without eventually trusting other people. If S-quadrant people do grow, they often grow as a partnership, which in many cases, is a group of S’s coming together to do the same job.
B-quadrant people are always looking for good people and good business systems. They do not necessarily want to do the work. They want to build a business to do the work. A true B-quadrant entrepreneur can grow his or her business all over the world. An S-quadrant entrepreneur is often restricted to a small area, one that can be personally controlled. Of course, there are always exceptions.
An I-quadrant person, the investor, is looking for a smart S or B to take care of their money and grow it. In training his son and me, rich dad was training us to build a successful S-quadrant business that had the capability of expanding into a successful B-quadrant business.
One day I asked my rich dad what the difference was between an employee and an entrepreneur. His reply was, “Employees look for a job after the business is built. An entrepreneur’s work begins before there is a business.”
Many entrepreneurs do not realize that many of the problems their businesses face today began yesterday, long before there was a business. The entrepreneur’s most important job is to design a business that can grow, add value to its customers, bring prosperity to all those who work on the business, be charitable and eventually no longer need the entrepreneur. Before there is a business, a successful entrepreneur is designing this type of business in his or her mind’s eye. According to my rich dad, this is the job of a true entrepreneur.
Rich dad went on to explain that the world is filled with different types of entrepreneurs. There are entrepreneurs who are big and small, rich and poor, honest and crooked, for-profit and not-for-profit, saint and sinner, small-town and international, and successes and failures. He said, “The word entrepreneur is a big word that means different things to different people.”
It’s time to take control of your thoughts and how you express yourself. In which quadrant do you sit? In which quadrant do you want to be? Today’s economy is a perfect time to restart, rethink and begin anew. Start the transition from employee to entrepreneur now.
Success Magazine – October 2009