How I deal with distraction.

[TheKingOfMadrid]

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Hi! I'm new to the forum so for my introduction I wanted to impart some personal advice as I think this is the topic I see most soloprenuers people struggle with.

Distraction.

You know those days when you wake up ready to conquer the day? Your plan is set, maybe you've even taken the time to fill out some objectives on your shiny to-do app that you'll almost certainly forget about in a week.those days roll into weeks your months slip by and before you know it you're re-imagining your new years resolutions 'next year will be my year' you resolutely tell yourself.

January 1st rolls around and you sit down at your computer ready to conquer the world. You load up your word processor to create your next big vision plan, but first you'd better check the first news of the year. OK, that's done now back to work, oh but we'd better check our social media's - there may be opportunities! six hours fly by and you've forgotten all about that to-do list. You've accomplished little of anything and now you're tired, slightly annoyed at yourself and halfheartedly claiming that tomorrow will be the day you build your empire.

This phenomenon (being a lazy person) is the interest of many authors, self help coaches and life hack gurus. Everyone want's to tell you WHY this happens and sell you the HOW to fix it. The truth I believe is that the best place to begin is understanding the root cause for yourself.

A lot of coaches try to sell you a solution based on these camps;

1) Remove everything meaningful!: Smash your video games console! Throw your TV out of the window and your family? Friends? they are just going to slow you down dude! bin 'em. No more distractions now!
2) Hustle harder! What do you mean you're tired? Get to work you lazy wretch! You're not where you want to be because you simply don't work hard enough! You sleep 8 hours a night? you're bound to be a loser! it's 6 am starts and cold showers for you from now on!

To be fair, both camps do have some sense to them, but neither go far enough in diagnosing the issue that lies underneath distraction - suffering.

Why we seek escape

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the work of Timothy Wilson, a Harvard professor that famously conducted a study in which he asked students to sit in a room from 6 to 15 minutes and do nothing but think. They found the students preferred to do even the most mundane of tasks rather than be alone with their thoughts and many students actually preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves rather than be alone with their thoughts, in fact 67% of the men and 25% of the women preferred to shock themselves.

If you couple this with the fast paced atomised life that we encourage in today's world then the suffering people feel inside can be so great that they have engineered their life to never be alone. We all know at least one person that needs to take their phone everywhere, needs the TV on to sleep and music in when walking. The driver of almost all human behaviour is to escape discomfort. This can be great for completing mundane to-do items but this type of person will never be able to take the time to step back and plan, or decipher value adding areas of their field.

Time management is essentially pain management. You have to learn how to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.

We live in a world where we are taught that feeling bad is bad. Any negative feelings either need to be killed immediately or we must have some kind of serious mental illness that needs pharmaceutical intervention. Rarely is this the case, you're just feeling normal emotions that everyone has but you aren't dealing with them from a healthy perspective.

What most people reflexively do when faced with a painful emotion is seek comfort, which has its roots in pornography addiction as well as video games and the other 'evil' devices that the first camp will advise that you remove.

You need to learn how to harness this discomfort and use it to your advantage and one way you can do this this is to step back and understand that 'my' thoughts are not 'me' and that they are a product of the monkey mind that is always seeking to grasp onto a neural pathway and extract a file for me to look at.

This doesn't sound very life changing- I give you that. But it changed my life which is why I took the time to write this for anyone who is struggling with similar issues.

I figured all of this out one day when I became homeless. Suddenly I was alone sleeping from my car with nothing but thoughts. You know the typical ruminating nonsense that fills your head from day to day. I was't overly bothered but I was now out of work and had no plans as to how I was going to take (because you never truly make) money and time felt like it was ticking away faster than normal.

But I remember every morning watching the zombie crowds head to work and I'd see the same similar faces heading back from work, their eyes sullen and their souls drained from presumably stressful office jobs. Sometimes they'd come into my central office ( Costa Coffee!) on their lunch break and i'd see them order sweet treats and ponder if they'd even be able to taste them given the speed they ate as they frantically rushed to ensure they could finish their meal before needing to call their manager about some trivial paperwork.

I remember thinking to myself - how did the people that wanted to grow up to be astronauts, police officers and doctors end up here, justifying their mandatory coffee break to their boss? So I began asking some of the people (charm will get you everywhere!) what they do and if they're happy and the same issue kept coming up; almost everyone begin actively choosing not to think, and then consequentially not to act.

Why is it that we have all of the tools we need to be successful but never do it? We know from the fantastic writings of MJ that we should look to create value and fit our model to the CENTS system - but how many of us sit down to seriously spend time thinking deeply about doing this for any period of time? How many of us can spend time stratergising all of this and then create a process of execution to get where we want to be?

How many times a year do we seriously sit down to ask ourselves, are we happy with where we are at? Is our path in line with who we want to be? What can we change immediately?

Most people simply end up preferring to block out that kind of noise and ultimately find themselves in unfulfilling jobs with unfulfilling partners and unfulfilling futures as they walk ever further from the dreams they'd once had for themselves fuelled by modern forms of escapism that allow us to temporarily ignore the problem.

Distraction isn't some new epidemic that's occurred because of social media or mobile phones. Religions have talked about this for thousands of years. Buddhsim titles it the monkey mind, Plato called it Akrasia which in Greek is described as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one's better judgement.

So if I have one piece of advice for anyone suffering from this it would be to learn how to think again. Understand that it's OK not take a step back and get in touch with who you are, what you want and learn that feeling bad doesn't mean you're broken or something should be fixed - it's fuel to go further and achieve more.

Begin adding in blocks on time where you do nothing but reflectively think and work rather than reactively think and work.

Hope it helps some people!

 

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[TheKingOfMadrid]

How to take action

Knowing that you need to change your thinking is one thing but being equipped with the tools to do so is another thing entirely.

My background is Buddhism, I practised as laity under a branch of Buddhism called Mahayana for 8 years and learned a lot about how the mind works and what is happening in serious mental conditions like extreme rumination and compulsive behaviours and of course depression and distraction.

Test 1 - Removal of technological stimuli

The fastest way to know how your mind deals with a lack of stimulation is to emulate Timothy Wilsons test by actively sitting in a bland room with nothing but your thoughts for 20 minutes.

For most people the monkey mind will be doing overtime conjuring all kinds of images and emotions which may be unpleasant. This is also something a lot of new mediators can suffer from as they are not used to being bombarded with sights and sounds and memories both painful and (hopefully) pleasurable.

Generally the more suffering a person has experienced (or perceives they have experienced) the harder this task is. Coming home to yourself can be a truly frightening experience. All of your unprocessed decisions, trauma and failures can come to the surface asking to be dealt with.

So try this test now and see how you do! Observe;

1. How long before you began needing to reach out for stimuli
2. What type of thoughts were you having
3. Did you feel the need to run from your thoughts?
4. After 10 minutes spend the next 10 minutes trying to keep just one consistent thought stream regarding your current situation (money, finance, health etc) and note any distracting thoughts.

For some people this will be very hard, and for some it will be very easy. For those who find it easy - congratulations!

For those that found it very difficult, perhaps due to painful memories or distraction then repeat the process but this time;

1. Imagine your thoughts are appearing from a tropical waterfall and try not to catch any of them, simply let them float by into the stream below and wish them well as they disappear.
2. As you do this you will begin to see that you are not your thoughts, they happen and you observe them from a distance. This is powerful because now you have control over them, and eventually you will use this to have more control over your emotions - a vital component to successful business.
3. As with above, practice 10 minutes of consistent thought stream about your life. When you become distracted by the monkey mind simply reset your path without any judgement or anger - remembering that your thoughts do not control you, you have complete control over what you engage in.

Hopefully you'll find the second time works a little better once you learn to have more control over the mind instead of running away. A vital part of this is to not become angry by your thoughts as this only leads to frustration and a spiral of emotion. Your thoughts are harmless and the result of electrical pulses - the equivalent of your monkey in the mind running through a computer and extracting hundreds of files from the past and future to present you with.

Your thoughts are not you, you did not conjure them and they do not have some hidden meaning that you need to engage with.

So instead of saying to yourself 'Why am I thinking this' you can try saying to yourself 'What should I think about now?'

Test 2

For test two you're going to dedicate two hours of your time to building a business that fit's the C.E.N.T.S system. Two hours sounds like a short amount of time but a lot of people I've done this with struggle tremendously. Give them half hour and they cry that it's pointless, it's a waste of time because it's not even real and they don't have money and they don't have time and and and.... for the remainder of their time.

You will use a computer for research but you have to write your business plan on paper with a pen. You can choose to have a break of 5 minutes after every 25 minutes or work through - but you must time your break! You cannot check your phone so switch it to flight mode and you can only access social media for research.

Set a countdown for 2 hours and begin;

1. Go to Grade My Business Idea: Business Ideas and Opportunities Rated Fast
2. Read through all of the questions to re-familiarise yourself
3. Begin conceptualising a plan that will perfectly fit the C.E.N.T.S system.
4. Create the business plan to reflect your current realities (i.e time to market depends entirely on you if you don't have the money to outsource the work)

You may ind this difficult, that's part of the process. Finding true demand and creating value for it is rarely simple and then once you do have an idea you need to consider how lo market it etc. The advantage of doing this is that you give yourself time to really apply yourself to creating an idea or solution - how many people ever make time to do that? Not nearly enough!

The real question is if you managed to avoid distraction, did you complete the whole two hours? How did you deal with any distractions like the urge to check your phone?

How you did is usually a decent reflection of where your weaknesses lie as an entrepreneur.

If you did not complete the test try it again but this time;

1. Start a stopwatch instead of a count down
2. Break each section of your work into dedicated 25 minute blocks (25 mins searching demand, 25 mins for scalability etc and then remaining time to flesh out your idea further)
3. When distractions come remember to simply smile and let them pass by as you gently push yourself back on track - if you begin felling negative emotions simply visualise using them as rocket fuel for your current task.

Hopefully that time went a little better. The idea here is that a stopwatch feels like you have more active control and the breaking of sections gives you a sense of novelty. Being kind to yourself but persisting through the storm is the big difference.

How did you find the tests? Let me know in the reply - do you find this helpful?


Bonus -

Building the ideal version of yourself.

This is just something I did that helped me massively.

What I want you to do is create a fierece rival that is a version of you and list down all of the things that he has and you don’t.

- He has a house

- He has his own business

- He has a six pack .. etc.

And you will do the things that he does to ensure that you do not lose against your rival.

If he goes to the gym today you must go.

If he has a freelance job you need one too.

If you take it seriously and view this ideal version of yourself as your greatest enemy then you will find yourself pushing harder than ever. If you truly visualize this person as your enemy your brain will begin thinking of them as a genuine enemy and you will become determined to rise up the challenge every day.

It works well because the enemy you create everything you truly desire and all you need to do is beat him every day to become that person.

Simple in essence but supreme in execution.

Hope it helps someone - it's all anecdotal of things i've done that helped me.


Adios!

 

[mguerra]

That was a really valuable post, brother.

Thanks for writing this up.

Ps: This week I'll do the business exercise just for the sake of it. Really liked the idea.

 

[TheKingOfMadrid]

That was a really valuable post, brother.

Thanks for writing this up.

Ps: This week I'll do the business exercise just for the sake of it. Really liked the idea.

Thank's for the feedback - I am always hesitant to do posts because I know my writing is not so good, but then the only way to get better is practice. It's like I know what I want to say but at the end it's not so perfect - similar to my cooking really Haha!

As for the business exercise I've been doing it regularly now for 6 months and with my students and it's crazy how quickly your brain starts working with you and giving you ideas every session. Now when I do it I know before I start if an idea will have demand and how many people it would need to execute.

Hope you find it useful and thank's again for the feedback

 

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[TheKingOfMadrid]

How to deal with painful memories

In this part I want to discuss something that many people don't like discussing 'vulnerability' and pain.

For some of us by the time we reach the age of 30 will be carrying some kind of emotional pain. It can be from serious life events such as sexual assault, domestic abuse, exposure to extreme violence or even more common but nonetheless hurtful emotions like the breakup of a relationship or the death of a loved one.

The problem with carrying pain is it becomes very heavy to do so, like wearing a backpack that is always 3/4 full. This is why many people turn to substance abuse in order to deal with their demons. It can be better than not being able to close your eyes without seeing the events unfolding like a mini movie that is always on replay.

It can be difficult to focus on any task if you always feel like you are exhausted and running. Domestic abuse can lay havoc to peoples confidence. The people you sometimes meet that constantly say sorry and claim they cannot do anything correctly are often carrying telltale signs of abuse.

A lot of our pain actually comes from what the Buddhist Monk Thich Nhat Hanh calls 'the inner child'. As children we depend upon everyone else for our very survival and we learn ways to emotionally manipulate those around us to do what we want. We cry when we need food, or when we feel starved of attention.

As we get older we are still carrying this inner child that bears the burden of our pain. This inner child also contains the hopes, dreams and true 'essence' of your path that you'll find authors such as Robert Greene talk about in mastery.

A part of the reason there is a lot of emphasis in destroying your innocence as you grow up is because most peoples inner child wants to conform to morals and be nice to others but the world glamourises cold calculation and machivellian tactics.

Anyway, when a person carries this pain they usually try to block it out with forms of escapism and substance abuse.

But the best way I have found to deal with the problem is to not run away from it, but to show compassion towards yourself. When the movie begins to play in your mind and you feel all of those emotions coming back up try to smile to inner child who is scared and and say „i’m sorry but I am not interested in this right now, please come back another time’.

This sounds silly, but what it does is grant you permission to think about it some other time, but allow you to continue focusing on this task.


Escaping the prison of pain


Pain and abuse especially ends up forming a prison around the persons mind, it tells the person that they can't do anything. That person will freeze once they are triggered by something that brings back those memories.

The brain cannot decipher a perceived threat from a real one and so when this person begins to feel the feelings it can be as though the scene/their attacker is right there in front of them again. The person then feels terror and guilt about still being controlled by this person or event and the cycle continues.

What I suggest for this is that the only way to win is to push forward no matter what.

Example

If someone who suffers from this is sitting in front of the computer about to begin some new challenging work they might begin to feel fear. The brain will also begin searching for other times that person has felt anxiety and will bring forward the memory that carries the greatest electrical pulse (the bad ones!) and then the person will be fighting with their mind to continue the task at 50% of their peak performance.

This leads to failure, the people lose more self confidence and most people end up in this loop for years.

However the key is that when those feelings come you grasp to something stronger in your mind (motivation/god/family/inner strength) and you push through a task that previously thought was impossible and create a mini-victory.

This will create conflicting messages in the mind because the reality is that you accomplished something your severely damaged self belief said you could not.

And the next time you have the same problem you now have a reality based example as to a time you defeated self doubt.

The more mini victories you collect the more your self belief will grow and you will begin seeking healthier coping mechanisms across the board.

In sometime you will begin to heal as the electircal pulse that you kept bringing to the forefront begins to fade and new neural pathways are formed.

You should utilize this time to create new friends that will rebuild your hope in personal relationships and at the same time continue to build yourself on the basis of the 5 pillars of self esteem.

Again, disclamer - I am not a psychologist I just know what works for me and I share it with you to see if it can help.

 

[mguerra]

Thank's for the feedback - I am always hesitant to do posts because I know my writing is not so good, but then the only way to get better is practice. It's like I know what I want to say but at the end it's not so perfect - similar to my cooking really Haha!

As for the business exercise I've been doing it regularly now for 6 months and with my students and it's crazy how quickly your brain starts working with you and giving you ideas every session. Now when I do it I know before I start if an idea will have demand and how many people it would need to execute.

Hope you find it useful and thank's again for the feedback

Actually I think your writing is pretty good, man! And yeah, it's a matter of practice. I myself also write some posts here only to craft my writing sometimes.

As an exercise, could you elaborate a bit more on this business exercise?

Any helpful tips or walkthrough on how you do it yourself/guide your students to do it faster and better? Maybe a cheklist would be helpful...

 

[TheKingOfMadrid]

Actually I think your writing is pretty good, man! And yeah, it's a matter of practice. I myself also write some posts here only to craft my writing sometimes.

As an exercise, could you elaborate a bit more on this business exercise?

Any helpful tips or walkthrough on how you do it yourself/guide your students to do it faster and better? Maybe a cheklist would be helpful...

Sure, I actually combine part of it with 'The personal MBA' and it's part on internal drivers. The drive to bond, the drive to feel, the drive to learn, the drive to acquire and the drive to defend.

I then sit down with my student and we will first first look at popular businesses we all use and and the ones we have recently purchased from (how did they take our money? why did we not look elsewhere) And then we will note down how many of these drivers they fulfilled.

Then we will think about markets that interest us (usually from a students background) and begin looking at the biggest industry leaders in that field, what do they do? how many drivers are they hitting? Why do they take so much money? Why do people choose them? What chance would we have against them?

This usually takes like half hour to 45 minutes.

Then I ask the important mind flowing question ' If you wanted to disrupt this market what would you do?' And then we think over how to attack the field and begin building up a business model.

If it's the first time you do this I always let my student finish the model then we run through it to see if it makes CENTS. The idea is not to be too strict the first time, playfulness encourages, rules often discourage.

But the preceding times i'll have the website open (grade my business) and we will go through it. The real key is forcing honesty because it's easy to just say 'Yes it has demand' etc.

If I had some kind of guide it would be something like;

1. Do market research to see if your idea is Unique or valuable

Most people aren't used to doing this, you want to think outside of the box regarding your idea - see if people are calling for a need for it on social media or even check google scholar to see if summaries might say " The future of this field requires.." Then you're gonna want to see if there's anyone that's tried anything like it before - if not - why not.

When distractions begin entering the mind (with students this is easy to see) then having a timer is so handy because you can say to yourself/the student "OK 5 minutes left on this part".

2. Then I think about how easy entry to the market would be

Harder if you've never done this before, but I recommend estimating how long it would take you to create social media accounts and promote them and the cost of advertisement.

During this phase I want to keep a 50/50 mix of deep thinking and then active work. So think deeply about how you want to market then actively look up your key words and the cost per word for example.

3. Control and third party responsibility

If you've never done business on any level it's hard to know who exactly you would be dependent upon. This is the point most people will falter the most with distractions because you don't understand something and your brain is thinking "uh-oh we don't like this, lets check our social media etc".

So usually I recommend a short break here and gently talk about how youtube owns all of it's people and the famous Joe Rogan move.

During the break no phones etc are allowed as they are time sinks. I recommend learning to just relax the mind - no work or thoughts what so ever - simply you coming home to yourself.

4. Automation

Here most people lie "i'll just export this part to X, and i'll send this process to X" So I made the student look up all of their options and tell me what happen if X fails (that 50/50 of active and thinking again).

5. Replication

Here I always say "you just told me your idea, I can do it right now!" and then watch them work from there.

But as a sample imagine you wrote your plan down somewhere and it was stolen and now your business idea is not only online but people are working on it! Can they do it as well as you? Why do you know how to execute this better than anyone else? How fast is your factory going to be? How much does that cost? What if China can produce X10 the amount?

6. Market size

Again relying on market size - here I always trip up the student because i've lost count of the times people think they have a market but these people aren't the actual decision makers. Here it's a bit like dragons den - where are your numbers? If you captured the whole market how much is that?

7. Type of use

This is easy, very few distractions here and mostly thinking work about if there's a way to implement a subscription model etc.

8. Access to Markets

As I said earlier it's really hard for anyone to know this, so I make the student decide between their preferred model outbound/inbound and then come up with a quick marketing strategy, I will critique it, we go back to the board and then if we have time and the idea looks good we might even gently touch the channel to see the waves.

That's the gist of it!

The key is to keep 50/50 of active and thinking work and when distractions/discomfort do come to push on through and gently bring yourself back to attention rather than fight it and get frustrated. If something seems difficult ask yourself 'Why is this difficult for me' , 'What do I need to understand for this to be easier for me?'

 

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[Bekit]

Amazing thread! Really insightful points here. Thank you for sharing.

 

[TheKingOfMadrid]

So we’ve covered the very basics of getting your mindset on point and defeating any inner demons, but now we move onto the fun part which is coming up with ideas and crafting them into a business.

So firstly a quick look at Money.

Money is perhaps the leading cause of stress, especially in Capitalist societies. Capitalist systems ensure that currency is king and those who have less of it are going to be crushed. We create a desire in people for the possesions of the elite and people attach their self worth to their bank balance.

But money really is not that complicated. In the world right now is an uncountable sum of money and all you need to do is take it.

Have you ever heard people say „I need to make some money?” I guarantee you those people were not rich because most rich people understand that you take money from other people and you place that money from their bank account into yours.


=====================================================================
Let’s do a quick visulization test


Think of all the ways businesses took money from you in the last month. Why did you part with the resource you most covet? How did Costa Coffee make you want the coffee more than the money? How did Cyber Punk make you want the game more than your money? How did Amazon make you want to buy Christmas presents for people you don’t even like, more than your own money?

And now ask yourself – how could all of these services have been improved? What would I do if I had to beat them?
=====================================================================

I used to teach Business students and the truth I’ve experienced is this – most people’s ideas are terrible – for them.

Most people actually have ideas that would at least make money when executed properly, but most people also lack any understanding of the investment their ideas require, how to execute them and also how to keep them secret – they’ve just given me the blue prints!

How to begin taking money from other people

What do you do if you need money but you have 0 freelance skills, 0 job experience and 0 currency to invest in your idea – are you doomed!? Of course not.

Did you know that in western countries now it has become so profitable to be homeless on the streets that many of the homeless you see now are unfortunately victims of gangs?

These homeless people don’t even do anything in terms of skill-value but people give them money, and you sit at home and cry that you can’t make 25 euro.

But how do they do this? Well it’s two things, Being seen & Emotion! The first reason most people that create a website/blog never make it is because no one ever sees it! And secondly people want to feel better for helping a homeless person more than they want their own money.

And this is a part of business 99% of people miss. People rarely give their money for what they need, but for what they want in the moment. Think about most peoples weekly shop – do they need coca-cola? Do they need chips and choco-buns? Of course not, but they damn well want them!

If you could take a business student back in time just as the .com boom started – most of their ideas would work and they’d at least be happily retired by now. Because like the homeless person, their ideas could not be missed – they would be passed by thousands of people a day.

However, today we have people creating blogs as a serious business idea and doing nothing in the way of marketing and wondering why they are not getting visitors – it’s because you’re now living in a city full of homeless!

The same thing goes for execution – if you’re broke poor now and your idea is going to take you at least 6 months to create – you’re in trouble! You need to begin taking money far faster than that.

But I don’t have any skills I hear you cry!

What skills would you need to clean peoples toilets? Or to take their leafs or put up christmas decorations?

NONE. You would just advertise to your local area and you’d begin taking peoples money for your time. Then once you became a reliable worker and had more work you could enlist a friend and pay them whilst keeping a % .

And if you’re educated to bachelors level and can’t find a way to use or teach those skills – that’s on you.

You know those teach English abroad type jobs that were all the rage a few years ago? Most people complained about the wage because they would rock up to a country and work for one small school on one small wage for an insane amount of hours.

The secret to getting rich at that point? All you had to do was ASK!

You simply asked locals if they would like extra lessons for their child and within a week you had more students than you could handle – in those days you could rock up to a smaller town and create a school in a week – this was entirely possible and all you needed was C2 English ability.

Could the parents have found better teachers? Better online schools? Sure – but you’re the one in front of them offering to teach their child – you are creating emotional drivers that push people towards giving you their money.

This is a big reason I don’t go in for all of this ‘create a blog’ stuff, because sales is so much more than months spent writing posts about things you might not even be interested in hoping you’ll bag yourself an audience to sell off onto affiliate marketing.

There’s a habit today to think everything needs to be online, but this isn’t the case at all – you need to figure what works best for you.

It’s better to take 50 peoples money from a lemonade stall in a day than 0 peoples money from a blog that took you months to create content for.

So as you go through life you need to think – how can I take more money? What perception of value can I give that these people haven’t seen before?

It’s all in the mindset. If you’re sitting at home with 0 Euro in your bank, going out and begging for money would give you some money. Cleaning shoes would give you more money, crafting stupid wooden designs with cute faces would allow you to take more money, opening two stalls of stupid wooden designs with cute faces would allow you to take even more money!

So when you’re spending your days thinking ‘hmm.. why is my digital marketing agency not getting hits’ the likelihood is you’re just not that needed.

A hot person on a summers day needs a tall glass of sparkling and refreshing lemonade immediately. A cute couple want a wooden design they’ll chuck in the back of their closet in that moment, but a digital advertisement company needs to create immediate need because on the internet it’s one of thousands the user could come across.

And so these people sit in their rooms for weeks on end and wonder “why’s it not working!?” and then they give up. Did they go to local business owners? Did they say “hey, I live here and know how to build engagement in the local market for your business?” or did they just expect that
people would visit and think “oh wow look! I’ve never seen something so unique before!”.

So the first principle of this journey has to be that every day you wake up you need to think of at the people you could take money from by offering them something more important than their money.

For the next month you need to choose 3 people a day that you are going to contact with a reason to let you take their money, your objective will be to make someone – anyone! part with at least 25 euro for your service. I don’t care what your service is – you have some skill that you can use to make some money, you just need the confidence to use it.

A lot of people will say "But the Pandemic!" to which I would say - what time have business people needed more help? Those businesses that are struggling to survive need help from everything from entry-level organisation to web design, digital marketing and anything else that will help the business owners focus on the moving parts they can control.

On the flip side too - at what point in the last 20 years have people needed escapism more? At what point have the collective population of your country needed to just spend an hour or so engrossed in someone elses world? Find a way to make that happen and you'll have the money you covet so much.

If you seriously have no money and are new to the field just charge a small nominal fee for your service which will not only build you momentum and a name - but also thankful clients that will spread the word about you in a far more meaningful way than most ad-campaigns could.

Which is the topic of the next post: Why most people never finish the race.

 

[Bekit]

This is one of the most underrated threads I've ever seen. Surprised this hasn't gotten more interaction. Serious value and great insights here. Thank you for sharing.

 

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[TheKingOfMadrid]

This is one of the most underrated threads I've ever seen. Surprised this hasn't gotten more interaction. Serious value and great insights here. Thank you for sharing.

Thank you for the kind words!

I'm glad you are getting value from my posts, I will continue to write my business thoughts here into 2021 so I hope I can continue to share some different approaches that people might not have thought about before!

 

[TheKingOfMadrid]

Why most people never finish the race

This week we are going to talk about something that feels very obvious, but actually a lot of people struggle with - self belief.

But first, how did you do with the last test? Was it difficult to find people to offer your services too? Did you even do it?

It’s OK if you didn't, this isn’t some school where you get in trouble, You’re an adult and you get to choose what you do.

However it can be a good idea to look into why you didn't do it if you set out with a real intention to do so. If you can really find the reason you didn't manage to do it, you can find the solution as well.

When I ask my students this question the same answer always comes to the top once you boil down through the initial resistance excuses – the vulnerability of saying “I just wasn’t confident enough”.

What usually happens is the student asks around their peer group, maybe even contacts a local business owner and they get rejected and then they feel devastated and decide not to continue anymore.

Anyone who’s had to run outbound marketing knows this feeling all too well. You start with fire in your blood but after 20 rejections that fire turns into a luke-warm drizzle. 20 more rejections and your mind is already creating the front page news story that you can tell yourself for why this was a stupid idea to begin with - Rejection sucks!

A lack of self belief is like riding a motorcycle without its engine, everything is OK if you get an initial push down-hill but once you need to go up-hill on your own, the momentum stops and you come rolling down and say to yourself “I expected that, of course it wasn’t going to work! I’m just no good!”.

The excuses we build up to avoid the pain of rejection are almost as fascinating as the fact that so many of us feel so useless in anything we ever do.

It’s like there’s this chronic illness of self belief that has infected the worlds population.

One of the reasons for this is the way we are taught to look at skills and ability.

In mainstream education we have a crisis of good teachers. What I’ve found happens for most students that grow into low-confidence adults is that they weren’t initially good in a subject – let’s say Math, and then their (often well-meaning) teacher parroted back this lie and told them “maybe this isn’t your subject” and allocated the limited resources to the students that were instantly excelling in the subject. The student got worse, the best got better and the student moved on both hating the subject and carrying a crucial lie that would go onto to rule their lives.

If you add into this a teacher that humiliated the student by signaling them out despite knowing they didn't have the answer – you have the recipe for trauma based aversion to this subject.

The lie we tell each other is the lie of fixed learning and you see this thinking in every-one that lacks self belief. And the worst thing about this lie is it keeps people trapped in to their limited self beliefs.


Quick Test #1 – Determine your peer groups learning beliefs

I want you to choose a friend or family member and teach them something that you can do well. If you can draw well, teach them to draw something, if you are good at math show them something useful in math and so on.

As you teach them observe the kinds of things they say to you, do they try to self depreciate their work? Perhaps they even get frustrated at doing something they are ‘obviously’ no good at.

If they are showing signs of not believing in themselves I want you to spend time over the next two weeks to continue working with them on the same task over and over. Make it as fun as possible with the intention of showing them at the end the improvements they’ve made.

The thing with most rational people is that they cannot ignore information that directly contradicts their beliefs.

Remember when I told you to push through the emotional pain to create little victories in the prior post? Well the same underlying principle is here – if someone can see obvious improvement in what they have done, then they have to admit to themselves that their ideas of fixed ability are not true because the evidence suggests otherwise.

So they can no longer say “I’m just not a logical thinker” they have to at least say “I don’t have much training in logical thinking” – and if you can get just one person to admit this you’ve potentially changed their life forever.

This test is actually kind of trick – because not only will you help destroy the illusion of fixed self belief for your student – but if you’ve managed to help someone get better at a skill there’s no reason you can ever say that you don’t have at least some value to offer the world now!

Quick test #2

Now I want you to do the first test in reverse. Learn something you’ve never felt good at and set yourself progress checkers.

Don’t just commit to this for a week or so – but make it an overall lifestyle change to bring up all your weak areas into a well-rounded package.

Observe how you talk to yourself. Are you instantly reaching for excuses? Trying to worm your way out of the learning process? Telling yourself you’ll never get ‘it’. Shut it all down and focus on the process.

Unlocking the door to self belief

Once we smash the belief that our brains capacity for a subject is limited to what we told ourselves we are now in a position to conquer whatever we set our minds to because we understand that even if we are not initially good at something, hard work will at least get us to a level of comfort with the task or subject.

This is the mindset of the people who manage to make money from all of the overcrowded/over saturated fields that everyone loves to proclaim dead. An unwavering belief in themselves and their abilities and the vulnerability to know when to ask for help in areas they aren’t so confident in.

Aside from your network I would say that self belief is one of the biggest determiners you can influence to set yourself up for success.

This Weeks Task

I want this weeks task to be something novel and interesting that will show most readers just how limiting their beliefs are.

So this week I’ve gone with Web-Design (Sorry if you’re already a web-designer!)

For this task you will:

1. Use Google-Maps & the yellow pages to scan for businesses in your area and look for small – medium businesses that don’t have a website – or if they do, not a very good one.

2. Now you are going to spend some time designing a website for their business. You can use skeleton templates that you edit (to the horror of everyone on FL!) or you can build something yourself, all you need is a fresh looking landing page and a static website with contact details.

You will need to think about things like:

- How the website will stand out among local competition

- How to help the website index better (SEO/Digital marketing processes)

- How to use the limited space to sell the product/service in a way that ensures maximum business

For more on everything web-design check out Fox’s Amazing guides!. This task is more about learning how quickly you can really work and destroying limited self belief NOT becoming a pro-web-designer.

3. Once you have designed the website you will then begin thinking of two other ways you could help the business such as:

- Copy-writing of their products

- Taking high quality photos of their business/product

- Creating promotional advertisements

- Improving the brand/logo

- Implementing a digital marketing process

4. Once you’ve built a website and thought of two ways you could help the business you will submit the solution to the company.

You can decide to charge for the solution or not – I ask my students to offer their first web project for next-to-free – especially during COVID ‘times’, those 2 weeks of time are nothing compared to the traction you can build up with this.

I always choose next-to-free as my experience has been that people prefer to have given something and not feel suspicious or indebted.

If the company like it then you can also suggest the other methods you’ve researched to help them progress.

If the company don’t need the design then learn to accept the rejection and begin the process again building on the learning experience you’ve had.

Deadline

If you’ve done a bit of web-design before you only get two-weeks to complete this.

If you’ve never even touched HTML/CSS you get a month.

You should however be aiming to complete this ASAP – the idea is to mold you into a person that gets more done in one day than others do in a week.

This task will produce the following LO:

1. You will quickly feel responsibility for creating a great looking website and showing your best work

2. You will be able to see objective improvement in your web-design skills

3. You will rapidly build up a real-world portfolio

4. You will learn to deal with rejection but also enjoy the learning process

5. You will have a better understanding of what it takes to promote a business and increase sales.

This test is usually given to younger students but I think it’s applicable to most non-business adults too. Remember that the idea isn’t to become a web designer – the idea is to challenge yourself and make 2021 into the year you become a more rounded package.

The skills you learn from this experience are fully applicable to your own FL business later on and the network you would have built if you’d been doing this for the last year would be huge.

One last note: There’s this idea students get that what you create needs to be some master-level web-design and this isn’t true in any way. The people you are dealing with will often have no knowledge of web design at all (hence no website!) and will be grateful for anything that looks the part and gives them an online presence.

Your barrier of quality is the businesses other local competition.

Conclusion

This weeks task is a little daunting I know, and industry professionals will cry at the prospect of me suggesting people develop a website in a month, but my objective here isn't to teach you to be a professional, it's to teach you to make money which requires customers and sales.

My experience is that most students can hack together a decent looking static website in that time which is all we need for this task.

The ideal scenario is that you begin really caring about your design and work hard to gain the skills to put out quality work.

But do people make money from tweaking non-atr skeleton templates & simple wordpress customization? You bet they do - because again, if you can do something even 10% better than the person who can't do it at all or doesn't have time - you can profit .

So hopefully by now if you had followed the other posts for some time you will have begun the process of allowing yourself to move on from past trauma, remove distraction and now remove limiting self beliefs.

Once you've reached this stage you are equipped to turn any dream into a reality, the topic of the next post will be about getting results in 1/2 the time and then we will loop back around to discovering how you can quickly mobilise a CENTS proof plan in a economic-disaster type scenario.