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A Note for People Seriously Struggling

Vigilante

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I don't get why advice on these matters is so often fluffy and abstract. Even that Dan Lok guy says "your first million is just mindset". And Tony Robbins said he got the money to buy a castle simply by buying it, because "then he had to make the money". What?

It is not just about mindset. It is about actual tangible steps. "You have to want it" and other platitudes are not enough to succeed by. And neither is hard work. The idea that people can fix a million dollar debt by just wanting it hard enough simply doesn't help.

The only hint I heard in there was "I had my Rolodex", which implies you somehow leveraged existing contacts and relationships to start digging yourself out of the hole, by calling them one at a time with some business proposition. Is that correct? In which case you didn't have zero, you had the accumulated investment of that network.

For someone who's been whacked back down to zero, what immediate tangible non-mindset-themed steps should they take to get back up?

First, if you think that podcast was fluffy and abstract I almost didn't bother responding. To trivialize something so initmate because it didn't give you a how-to guide (which wasn't the intent) is somewhat absurd.

There's a thread on the inside that I wrote that chronicles the entire journey from the inception of the business to the sale 6 years later.

However, if you are looking for a road map to follow, there isn't one.

You're looking for actual tangible steps to follow? If it was that easy, don't you think everyone else would be following them?

That is how businesses that sell "steps" prey on unsuspecting. While the INSIDERS thread outlays the steps I followed, you can't follow them. It's not replicatable any moreso than making a limo referral business. What worked for MJ isn't something you can simply re-do and expect the same results. It's already been done. The time has already passed.

So, what is important is exactly what you are skipping past. What's important is that you are not the first to face the mountains, nor will you be the last.

But it CAN be done. It starts with resolve. It starts with an unquenchable fire in your gut and a commitment to succeed in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

The OP has $110,000 in debt. In somewhere between a year and three years from now, the number could be zero, or positive net assets.

How? About a million ways. I can think of a half dozen off the top of my head.

People sometimes read the millionaire fast lane looking for the "answer." The answer is found within. Create a business that masters the subjects of NEED, ENTRY, SCALE, separates your TIME from your income, and gives you CONTROL. That's HOW.

Or, just stay in the crowd that hears a story like mine and rather than grabbing the lesson, focus on trivial shit. I'd love to sell you a course, but I don't sell courses.

Your screen name is GOGETTER. So go get it.
 
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MidwestLandlord

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    • It is better to have partners than try to do it yourself. Sure, everyone wants to be a sole proprietor, 100% equity, no chance of disputes, lack of control, or other problems that can come with partners **. But observe what percent of the big names started with no partners. Google, Facebook, PayPal, Apple, Oracle, Microsoft. Dividends divide linearly across partners, but exponentially against the market. 200 units of work per month in a single business is far more effective for market return than 100 + 100 units across two businesses.
You seem to like odds, probability, and statistics...so I'll chime in here.

The latest research shows that business partnerships have a 70% failure rate.

Compare that to the overall business failure rate (which includes partnerships), of 50% in 5 years and 70% in 10 years...and you have the exact same probability of success.

Wasn't Amazon started by one person? Ebay? IBM? E*Trade? GoDaddy? Dell? EDS? Wrigley?

THIS is exactly why you are hearing so much about mindset.

There literally are no "rules" to entrepreneurship other than the law and your own personal code of conduct.

Here's my mindset about statistics:

7 out of 10 businesses fail?

I DON'T CARE.

I'll repeat that.

I. DO. NOT. CARE.

Why?

Because everything in my life is MY fault.

If my business fails (and I just had one that failed and dropped my net worth 75%+), it isn't because 7 out of 10 businesses failed...it's because *I* did something that made it fail.

I either screwed up and made bad decisions, or I didn't put in the effort required, or I picked a business that didn't have the possibility of succeeding to begin with.

All of that is mindset. All of it.

Here's another way my mindset works:

What if my current business fails?

Again,

I DON'T CARE.

Why?

Because I can always start another one.

I care deeply about my ultimate goal of maintaining my autonomy and freedom, but I could care less if any one specific pursuit fails to get me there.

Every time I improve my mindset I improve my life/business.

I can't say the same about specific steps I take to get there though.
 

Vigilante

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At one point, I was -$1,200,000 with no income. I fixed it. You're starting out +1,090,000 better than I was.

"In life, you either need inspiration or desperation." - Tony Robbins
 
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I was doing some reflection today about where I am and where I’m headed. These two places are very, very different.

I never talk about this with close friends, let alone almost complete strangers. Between student loans and credit card debt I’ve got 110k racked up. Yes, six figures of almost entirely unjustified debt.

Scary, right? I know some people with more, but not many, unless they have a mortgage or a business loan.

But here’s the thing; it doesn’t bother me any more. I used to have crippling anxiety, losing sleep and having restricted confidence with women. I used to be on a date and feel like I was wasting the girl’s time because I knew she would ultimately run from my financial troubles. I was allowing the debt to poison every aspect of my life. It made decisions for me. It became one of the largest parts of my identity.

MJ’s books got my proverbial ship (because lord knows I don’t have the real one yet) sailing in the right direction. But that wasn’t enough. For the impact of his powerful words to take hold I had to actively pursue inner change. This involved looking at my own inner beliefs and understanding why I’m living my life like a victim. What I ultimately discovered was that I was living as though I was a victim to the world. I was not. The world only allows people to become victims if they choose to do so - I was a victim to my own decisions. This is a critical distinction. I decided that college was a great choice with the information I had, even though it wasn’t. I decided the things I bought on credit were “necessary”, even though they weren’t. In aggregate, I made a collection of decisions that showed I alone decided to be a sidewalker.

So what’s different now?

I’m deciding to be in the fastlane. The world is not going to tell me whether or not I can do this. I’m deciding that I will do this. Now that this life decision is made (and make no mistake, this is a LIFE drcision), it makes a lot of other decisions very easy; where I spend my money, where I spend my time, and who I do and do not listen to. I embarked on this shift about two years ago, and I’m just now seeing a business idea begin to come to fruition. On the outside I’m still the same debt-ridden desk jocky with a predictably mediocre existence. But in private, when I lock myself in my room and do the real work, I am a millionaire butterfly in its cocoon. I am grinding 20x harder than I do at my job to learn and bring a revolutionary product to life. No person, family or otherwise, will disrupt this. I’ve detached friends and family members who exerted even an ounce of negative energy towards me, and I don’t need them back.

To thosevwho feel like victims, stop telling yourself a shitty story and wake up. You are only a victim to your own ignorance and lack of will. If you live in a free country, there are no excuses. It is simply about what you believe, and what you’re willing to do.

“It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”

- William Ernest Henley
 
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Vigilante

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No, those are not the same things. There is only one way to get six pack abs: lower body fat percentage by caloric deficit and exercise your muscles. It's an actual simple, very high probability process -- it's very hard not to get abs if your bf% is 8% and you've been gymning for 6 months or more.

Saying making money is simple is having your cake and eating it too. It's history written by the winners. It's "why can't you just do it like me? huh?".

There are millions of different ways to proceed, and millions of ways that will fail, and there is not one way that will fix anyone's situation regardless of what it is. But there is definitely room for helpful procedure between "just have a good mindset" and "follow my easy 10 step plan and you'll get rich".

The reason I bring this up is that you don't get to see the statistics on those seriously struggling who drop off and end up in the gutter as a result of advice like "just fix your mindset and good will come to you". You never see the shadows of the logins that never happen again because of that. You can have the best mindset in the world, but if you fry yourself and still don't get enough money to eat, it's over.

For every Sylvester Stallone, there's 9 others who tried just as hard and stayed homeless. People forget that. And that number isn't going to be brought down by the successful saying "it was just mindset". But tangibles could.

You've had your (free) membership here for several months, with access to thousands of pages of stories, business plans, and helpful procedures.

Keep telling yourself the lucky ones pass through the eye of the needle. Skip right past the dozens of skeletons in my closet I have documented, and just look at the wins. Keep telling yourself that if you fail, it's over. Let that be the reason the safety of the apron strings you cling to is the only practical answer, and scoff at the people who throw you a lifeline.

At the end of the day, we're not here for you. We're here for the kids I met at the Fast Lane Tampa meetup, who are grinding, finding their way, and at varying degrees of success. We're here for the person who comes here looking for an oasis in their personal desert. We're here for the people who read the book and want to see if the names within are real or fictional. We're here to help people looking for help. We're here to help each other.

We're not here to debate you on whether or not you can climb, if you're content to sit at the foot of the mountain and tell other people why they shouldn't climb. Don't climb then. You represent the majority.
 

biophase

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I don't get why advice on these matters is so often fluffy and abstract. Even that Dan Lok guy says "your first million is just mindset". And Tony Robbins said he got the money to buy a castle simply by buying it, because "then he had to make the money". What?

It is not just about mindset. It is about actual tangible steps. "You have to want it" and other platitudes are not enough to succeed by. And neither is hard work.

Seriously? You don’t get it because you don’t get it. Tangible steps are easy but if you don’t have the mindset you won’t take the steps.

Why can’t people lose weight or get six pack abs then? There are hundreds of step by step guides to do this. It’s simple.

You ever wonder that if everyone tells you it’s mindset that maybe it’s true and maybe you just don’t have the mindset so you don’t want to believe it.
 

biophase

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I may make a separate post about this, but I was just doing my taxes and went to look back at 10 years ago. I decide to post this to show that it's a slow grind at first and can then blow up. It' all about sticking to it.

You can tell me that it's not about mindset all you want, but would you have stuck with your business the first 2 years?

These are my AGI's from 2006 to 2010. The dates on the forms are a year later because you do 2006 taxes in 2007.

To give you perspective, I started my first online business in 2007. So look at my first 4 years in business, $18k, $6k, $50k, then $187k.

In 2010, I took a consulting gig that paid me about $100k so the AGI is not true to just ecommerce, so subtract $100k from that number.

2007.png
 

MidwestLandlord

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That is to say that, every statistical result shouted from the rooftops, such as the 90% business failure rate and others, has a DEGREE OF UNCERTAINTY to it.

Exactly.

Here's a thing that isn't often talked about with the business failure statistic.

Why those businesses were closed.

I closed a business in May. Not because it failed, but because it made me the money I wished to make, so I got out. Sold the assets off and closed the business (an LLC)

I owned it for 4 years.

That would make it part of the 50% in 5 years "failure" rate, even though it was successful.
 

Vigilante

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I'll never cease to stir the pot if I think good can come out of it. It's always a test of the mettle of a community by whether criticism is met by rebuttal and valuable content (such as biophase's post above about speed), or purposeful misinterpretation of intent and mockery. Usually 90% of the time it's the latter; so glad to see this place is holding integrity well (except the crypto areas, but that's a whole different kettle of fish).


"... just like last time".
This is the kind of fluff platitude that gets made into a gif and posted on reddit for 100k upvotes. It's worth nothing.

You don't simply decide this time is going to be different, you invest large amounts of effort to test if it's going to be different. Otherwise if you fail, you'll have to say "but I decided it would be different..." and you lose self-credibility. If you recognize the power law of return, and are prepared for that, you avoid falsely self-ascribing failure in cases where your actions were not determinably at fault -- something that would just cause demotivation.

You speak in vague terms. Teach by example, not hyperbole. Help us to understand what you've experienced from what you draw the wisdom of how to succeed. Give us a specific actionable road map from your history. If you can, let's hear it. If you can't, you're full of s***. If you've been to the top of the mountain you can tell other people how to get there. If you haven't, everything you're talking about about how people succeed or fail is based on nothing but your own unexperienced intuition which on the surface looks to be about 99% incorrect with a couple of nuggets of truth that you've learn from others and added to your cynical entrepreneurial worldview. Enlighten us with actual tangible examples. That's what we're here for. If you don't have any, then it might be more prudent to shut up and listen.

If you could also share with us examples of businesses that failed despite all of the actions taken that were correct. Success and failure is self-determined, not caused by external forces. Even in the example where I lost my company by a hostile takeover it was because of actions I took that were errant and actions I didn't take that I could have... There was no boogie man out there in the universe dooming me to failure despite my best efforts. Life doesn't owe you s***. The Law of Attraction will never beat success or failure determined by building a business that follows the principles of CENTS.

I think you've read too many business books and not built any businesses. I've concluded that you don't know the subject matter from first-hand experience about which you speak.

However, in your defense you would make an excellent professor of Entrepreneurship. Perhaps Academia might be your true calling. You could equip other people to be smarter than people that have actually done it.

Or, simply choose to ignore the challenge and continue on with your soliloquy.
 
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Longinus

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No, those are not the same things. There is only one way to get six pack abs: lower body fat percentage by caloric deficit and exercise your muscles. It's an actual simple, very high probability process -- it's very hard not to get abs if your bf% is 8% and you've been gymning for 6 months or more.

Saying making money is simple is having your cake and eating it too. It's history written by the winners. It's "why can't you just do it like me? huh?".

There are millions of different ways to proceed, and millions of ways that will fail, and there is not one way that will fix anyone's situation regardless of what it is. But there is definitely room for helpful procedure between "just have a good mindset" and "follow my easy 10 step plan and you'll get rich".

The reason I bring this up is that you don't get to see the statistics on those seriously struggling who drop off and end up in the gutter as a result of advice like "just fix your mindset and good will come to you". You never see the shadows of the logins that never happen again because of that. You can have the best mindset in the world, but if you fry yourself and still don't get enough money to eat, it's over.

For every Sylvester Stallone, there's 9 others who tried just as hard and stayed homeless. People forget that. And that number isn't going to be brought down by the successful saying "it was just mindset". But tangibles could.

What your mindset basically says is that there's only one "lucky" Stallone on 10 people. While the only difference between Sly and the 9 others, is perhaps that he had the persistence to try just one more time.

On 100 people who read TMF , perhaps only 10 took action. On those 10 people, perhaps only 1 didn't give up after the first failure.

Imagine how many kept going after the second failure. And third. And fourth...

Why is that? Mindset, no?

Seems like you are giving yourself an excuse to fail in life.
 

Vigilante

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You seem to like odds, probability, and statistics...so I'll chime in here.

The latest research shows that business partnerships have a 70% failure rate.

Compare that to the overall business failure rate (which includes partnerships), of 50% in 5 years and 70% in 10 years...and you have the exact same probability of success.

Wasn't Amazon started by one person? Ebay? IBM? E*Trade? GoDaddy? Dell? EDS? Wrigley?

THIS is exactly why you are hearing so much about mindset.

There literally are no "rules" to entrepreneurship other than the law and your own personal code of conduct.

Here's my mindset about statistics:

7 out of 10 businesses fail?

I DON'T CARE.

I'll repeat that.

I. DO. NOT. CARE.

Why?

Because everything in my life is MY fault.

If my business fails (and I just had one that failed and dropped my net worth 75%+), it isn't because 7 out of 10 businesses failed...it's because *I* did something that made it fail.

I either screwed up and made bad decisions, or I didn't put in the effort required, or I picked a business that didn't have the possibility of succeeding to begin with.

All of that is mindset. All of it.

Here's another way my mindset works:

What if my current business fails?

Again,

I DON'T CARE.

Why?

Because I can always start another one.

I care deeply about my ultimate goal of maintaining my autonomy and freedom, but I could care less if any one specific pursuit fails to get me there.

Every time I improve my mindset I improve my life/business.

I can't say the same about specific steps I take to get there though.

Step 1. Print this out
Step 2. Go to the drugstore and buy a cheap glass frame
Step 3. Put this in the frame, and set it on your desk. On the wall is too easy. Has to be on your desk.
Step 4. Read and re-read this. When you need encouragement, read it again. When shit is hard, read it again. When dumb shits post statistics that bring you down, read it again. When people tell you what can't be done, read it again. Then, read it again.
Ste5 5. Re-do step 4.

@MJ DeMarco featured post.
 
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Fox

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Little late to this thread.

I never cared about "starting business stats". If you look at anything else in life you most likely failed your a$$ off before you had any success too:
- riding a bike
- cooking a meal
- talking to girls
- driving a car
- creating good relationships

"70% of people burn their first meal" < who cares. Maybe it works first time, maybe it doesn't, but if you want to learn to cook you just keep going till you got it.

Same with business. Some people have it click first time and some don't. It doesn't matter > start again and keep going. No debates, statistics, or forum responses are going to change that.

The only reason the starting business stats get used is people like to justify why they gave up or why they didn't even start. You would never use those type of stats for one of the 1000 crucial life skills you already have mastered. Its only when the stakes are higher that people want something to fall back on.

I really don't get your replies @GoGetter24. There are 100s of super detailed execution threads on here. There are also some excellent mindset and motivational threads. You will need both.

While you are debating the fine details someone else is taking action and getting results.
 

MJ DeMarco

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Mindset and motivation are two different things. You are describing motivation.

Could you elaborate on how different both are from each other?

I look at mindset as the seed.

Motivation is fertilizer.

Motivation is fleeting. And fertilizer by itself is meaningless.

Mindset is transcendent.

As long as that seed is there, it gnaws. It grows. And it breaks through.

Motivation can only serve as periodic growth that might make that seed grow faster.
 

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IGP

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No, those are not the same things. There is only one way to get six pack abs: lower body fat percentage by caloric deficit and exercise your muscles. It's an actual simple, very high probability process -- it's very hard not to get abs if your bf% is 8% and you've been gymning for 6 months or more.

Saying making money is simple is having your cake and eating it too. It's history written by the winners. It's "why can't you just do it like me? huh?".

There are millions of different ways to proceed, and millions of ways that will fail, and there is not one way that will fix anyone's situation regardless of what it is. But there is definitely room for helpful procedure between "just have a good mindset" and "follow my easy 10 step plan and you'll get rich".

The reason I bring this up is that you don't get to see the statistics on those seriously struggling who drop off and end up in the gutter as a result of advice like "just fix your mindset and good will come to you". You never see the shadows of the logins that never happen again because of that. You can have the best mindset in the world, but if you fry yourself and still don't get enough money to eat, it's over.

For every Sylvester Stallone, there's 9 others who tried just as hard and stayed homeless. People forget that. And that number isn't going to be brought down by the successful saying "it was just mindset". But tangibles could.

There are also a million ways to lose weight to get your BF% to 8% - (but you say it's not hard, presumably because you've done it before?)

There are a million exercises to do in the gym for 6 months., but you've probably done those before too.

Lets flip the script:

Tell a person that has never exercised and who has been fat their entire life that getting six pack abs is easy. Just do this. <insert your "easy" plan here>

Their response is going to be much like yours.

You want a simple plan?

Pick an idea.
Bust your a$$ for 16 hours per day.
Execute. Fail. Learn. Improve.
Do it again tomorrow.

Do that everyday for 6 months (just like your gym example)

If you aren't successful or on your way to success, I would be shocked!

In this day and age, there is absolutely zero reason someone can't become a success other than their mindset. The amount of information available is mind boggling.

Quit making excuses.
 

biophase

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No, those are not the same things. There is only one way to get six pack abs: lower body fat percentage by caloric deficit and exercise your muscles. It's an actual simple, very high probability process -- it's very hard not to get abs if your bf% is 8% and you've been gymning for 6 months or more.

Saying making money is simple is having your cake and eating it too. It's history written by the winners. It's "why can't you just do it like me? huh?".

There are millions of different ways to proceed, and millions of ways that will fail, and there is not one way that will fix anyone's situation regardless of what it is. But there is definitely room for helpful procedure between "just have a good mindset" and "follow my easy 10 step plan and you'll get rich".

The reason I bring this up is that you don't get to see the statistics on those seriously struggling who drop off and end up in the gutter as a result of advice like "just fix your mindset and good will come to you". You never see the shadows of the logins that never happen again because of that. You can have the best mindset in the world, but if you fry yourself and still don't get enough money to eat, it's over.

For every Sylvester Stallone, there's 9 others who tried just as hard and stayed homeless. People forget that. And that number isn't going to be brought down by the successful saying "it was just mindset". But tangibles could.

Exactly, it's not very hard to get abs if you've been following the step by step for 6 months. But can people follow the step by step for 6 months? Why can't they stay on the path for 6 months? It's because just following the step by step is hard. It's not that the steps themselves are hard, it's how you do them and actually doing them every day without cheating or getting side tracked.

Two people can go to the gym and do 3 sets of 10 reps benching. But I bet that one person's reps were executed better. One person's reps were stricter, rested less, more intense, etc... One person gained more than the other in those 30 reps of benching.

Running a business is the same thing, are you consistently putting in the hard work every day. Are you cheating? Taking days off?

You know what, those get rich quick courses do actually work. They are the most step by step that I've seen. But the kicker is that they require hard work. You buy a REI investment course and they tell you to drive neighborhoods and birddog and knock on 100 doors a day. The Amazon course tells you to look at jungle scout to find a product. You jump in and get on Amazon and go up against 1000 other people who found the exact same product as you. Why do 10 of those 1000 people win and the other 990 fail? They've all taken the same steps and imported the same product. It's because the 10 winners did more, executed better.

This is why it comes down to mindset. If you aren't in the right frame of mind, your execution will suck. You will do the minimum, follow each step, but not do it to its full intensity.
 

ZCP

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Here you go:
1. See the hustle threads to generate a little bit of cash to minimally live and then invest
2. Buy or create a small cashflowing business to LEARN and pay the bills
3. Start your CENTS business with the funds (and knowledge)

Tag me in your progress thread and I'll be happy to come over and help.
 
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MidwestLandlord

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You do care how long it takes, and at what cost, to get there though, right? You don't care if you get rich in 2 years or 12?

You're shifting topics here. I said I don't care about statistics because I don't care what others have done as a group. (individuals I care about...groups of people generalized into a statistic? Not so much)

Not sure what that has to do with your new questions here.

But, I'll answer.

Of course I care how long it takes to make my goals in life.

But my goal isn't to "get rich" (been there, done that. I was "rich" by most people's definition by age 25)

My goal is autonomy and freedom, money is just a means to that end.

My goal is to build a business that allows me to keep the autonomy and freedom I already have, and also increase my wealth to pay for continuing freedom and autonomy in my old age. (I'm 36, but I've seen enough to realize that old age/doctors/medical bills will very quickly erode my autonomy unless I can pay to remain in control)

My next goal will be to maintain my current goal, while building a legacy (I have an idea of what that will look like, but I don't care to share it)

So the business steps I take are more concerned with divorcing my time from the process than anything else.

As for other costs, I greatly enjoy the process and struggle of business (quite addicted to it), so no, I don't really care.
 

TonyStark

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Read The Miracle Morning, it helped me.

The guy was in way more debt than you and turned his life around.

His struggles make mine look nonexistent.
 
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biophase

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All I'm saying is that there needs to be a middle ground between the linear curve of the job (slowlane) and the observation-bias, power-law ignored, "you've just got to unplug, and want it enough" world of self-congratulatory business bravado.

Ok, so to continue with the working out analogy.

You can go from eating poorly, to 100% clean to get six pack abs in 3 months. But this burns me out. I can't go months without a cookie, or a Coke. So I would give up.

But what if I cheat just one day, or every 6 meals. Well it's more palatable and I'm more likely to stay on my diet.

Personally for me, six pack abs is hard because I fall back into eating poorly AND my mindset isn't 100% there. I know this. Maybe I will never get 7% BF abs, but one day I will get to 12% BF abs. My analogy to making $3k a month vs $20k a month. I'm working out and eating just good enough to get to 12%, not to 7%.

Same thing with business, you can't go 80 hours a week full bore, you'd burn out. You need breaks and vacations. So if you start a business, it's not 100% full bore for 2 months and burn out. 50% for 12 months would be much better.

There is a middle ground and it is how you interpret your speed. But to stay for the long haul, it is a mindset issue, even at coasting speed.

[EDIT]
So here's is the one most important difference in working hard to get abs and working hard to succeed in business...

In getting abs, you compete against yourself, so you can get there at your leisure.
In business you are competing against yourself and others.

Imagine if at your gym, that there was a limited amount of loss of body fat. Imagine that you would gain body fat if the guy next to you lost body fat by working harder. You could bust your a$$ and do everything right and gain 3% because the 3 dudes next to you each lost 1%. How would that change your intensity in your workout? Would you work out more? Would you quit showing up? How much would mindset play into getting abs now?
 
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IGP

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You do care how long it takes, and at what cost, to get there though, right? You don't care if you get rich in 2 years or 12?


I didn't say that can't be done, I was suggesting the odds are lower.

Ebay: Omidyar brought on Skoll very shortly after starting (less than 12 months later), and they both became billionaires when it sold, so I'm calling that a partnership.

IBM: The 'founder' was a financier who lead the amalgamation of a group of other companies together. I wouldn't call that founding, that's more M&A stuff, but still indicative of the mentioned rule: buying an existing company (or companies), bypasses the business failure rate.

E*Trade: No, founded by 2 partners.

Wrigley: took too long to be considered a valuable example.

GoDaddy, Amazon, Dell, EDS: Yes.

Keep in mind that "70% of business partnerships fail" (taking that statistic on faith) is not the same as "70% of businesses fail". A business can succeed, make money, and then the partners drift apart in vision, leading to selling the company, or buying each other out, etc. I don't call that a failure if they made decent money from it. There's a great book on this: "How I Sold My Business: A Personal Diary", where the guy ended up hating his partners' guts to the extent where he couldn't be in the same room as them, and no one would buy the other out, so he managed to offload it to the actual employees of the firm in a form of internal buy-out. But as he pointed out: he was getting $1000/day throughout the whole thing, despite the dysfunction and him not being in the office.

I recognize that the ideal scenario for getting as rich as possible, will full control, is to own 100% equity in something that you manage to get to take off. I'm just saying the chance of getting it to take off is higher if you have good partners. You can move twice as fast or more than alone, you're dividing the labour, etc, all which gives you better odds of striking the blade of the power law curve.

Of course we're all going to keep trying until we make a play that succeeds. But there's no romance in struggling. It's no value to me to have 20 stories of struggle under my belt. Only the result matters. If I can get rich within 3 years instead of 6 years by paying attention to the rules, I'd rather do that.

As a sidenote, I try to go it alone myself too (for a variety of reasons), but I recognize it would be better to have a good partner or two to accelerate things.

If you spent half as much time working on your business that you do disputing posts on this forum, you would be a resounding success!

That much I know for sure.
 

Get Right

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direction is critical.

I disagree. You aren't to the point of needing direction yet. The only wrong direction is simply to not pick one.

There is room for way more rigor in this than mindset fluff. Mindset fluff gets people to say "Yeaauhhh!! I'm gonnna do it!!!!"

Mindset and motivation are two different things. You are describing motivation.
 
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Vigilante

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I may make a separate post about this, but I was just doing my taxes and went to look back at 10 years ago. I decide to post this to show that it's a slow grind at first and can then blow up. It' all about sticking to it.

You can tell me that it's not about mindset all you want, but would you have stuck with your business the first 2 years?

These are my AGI's from 2006 to 2010. The dates on the forms are a year later because you do 2006 taxes in 2007.

To give you perspective, I started my first online business in 2007. So look at my first 4 years in business, $18k, $6k, $50k, then $187k.

In 2010, I took a consulting gig that paid me about $100k so the AGI is not true to just ecommerce, so subtract $100k from that number.

View attachment 19710

You got lucky.
 
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AfterWind

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Amazing post, thank you for believing in yourself and showing the inner thought process behind your actions. I apply a similar mentality and one small complementary tip anyone here can use right now is:

Replace every maybe, probably, should, have to in sentences where you're describing your actions with will or remove them altogether:

Maybe I should start cold calling -> I will start cold calling
I should continue fighting -> I will continue fighting
I probably am weak minded -> I am weak minded
I have to pass this exam -> I will pass this exam

Seriously, it makes a huge difference in self credibility and self confidence.
 

ZF Lee

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You seem to like odds, probability, and statistics...so I'll chime in here.

The latest research shows that business partnerships have a 70% failure rate.

Compare that to the overall business failure rate (which includes partnerships), of 50% in 5 years and 70% in 10 years...and you have the exact same probability of success.

Wasn't Amazon started by one person? Ebay? IBM? E*Trade? GoDaddy? Dell? EDS? Wrigley?

THIS is exactly why you are hearing so much about mindset.

There literally are no "rules" to entrepreneurship other than the law and your own personal code of conduct.

Here's my mindset about statistics:

7 out of 10 businesses fail?

I DON'T CARE.

I'll repeat that.

I. DO. NOT. CARE.

Why?

Because everything in my life is MY fault.

If my business fails (and I just had one that failed and dropped my net worth 75%+), it isn't because 7 out of 10 businesses failed...it's because *I* did something that made it fail.

I either screwed up and made bad decisions, or I didn't put in the effort required, or I picked a business that didn't have the possibility of succeeding to begin with.

All of that is mindset. All of it.

Here's another way my mindset works:

What if my current business fails?

Again,

I DON'T CARE.

Why?

Because I can always start another one.

I care deeply about my ultimate goal of maintaining my autonomy and freedom, but I could care less if any one specific pursuit fails to get me there.

Every time I improve my mindset I improve my life/business.

I can't say the same about specific steps I take to get there though.
Speaking of statistics, my econometrics lecturer used to something REPEATEDLY many times during lectures.

He said, 'Just because you can get a conclusion from a sample out a a statistical study of an entire POPULATION, it doesn't mean that the result will always represent the population.'

That is to say that, every statistical result shouted from the rooftops, such as the 90% business failure rate and others, has a DEGREE OF UNCERTAINTY to it.

How much uncertainty? It depends on the grounds of the study...which is always different.

For instance, examining the business success rate today would have me a very different sampling of business people from that of the 1960s, because of differences in technology, mindset, economic policies and education.

Leap onto any blog screaming, '90% of businesses fail' or '10% of businesses only last for 5 years'. Not all that you see and read about is 100% correct. Who knows if the bloggers just nickpicked some numbers out of thin air? Faked survey results? Deployed flawed statistical tools?

And bear in mind that statistics are driven by MASS DATA, which involves studying the mindset of the majority. Last time I checked, usually the majority didn't exactly make the finest decisions.

My lecturer told us to ask these questions instead:

1. What story can the statistics tell us? What's going on behind there? (e.g. were the statistics biased against a certain mindset falsity or assumption?)
2. What can we do about it?

With all these uncertainties floating about, I would like to make my decisions based on my own grounds and merits, rather than from fear and influence of mass thinking. Statistics are not silver bullets to divine truth, if you can call it.
 
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rollerskates

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To Not-much-of-a-go-getter: I found great content in that podcast. The most important thing I got was:

"Decide that this time it's going to be different".

And then do things differently. There are two parts to success--the idea and the execution. No one can tell you how to execute, that's where your own personal secret sauce will be. Watch the two videos MJ recently posted about a productrocracy.

My current idea has been through several variations, some of which have been done by people here. But guess what? Their execution doesn't work for me, so I found what does. So now I am slowly executing MY WAY. No one else's way works for me, and it won't for you either.
 

Raoul Duke

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What your mindset basically says is that there's only one "lucky" Stallone on 10 people. While the only difference between Sly and the 9 others, is perhaps that he had the persistence to try just one more time.

On 100 people who read TMF , perhaps only 10 took action. On those 10 people, perhaps only 1 didn't give up after the first failure.

Imagine how many kept going after the second failure. And third. And fourth...

Why is that? Mindset, no?

Seems like you are giving yourself an excuse to fail in life.


Nah bruh... Clearly, Rocky did it in one day... Look at his training vs Drago. One DAY!



Full man beard... in ONE DAY!!!
 
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Get Right

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Wait....what?

Could you elaborate on how different both are from each other?

Mindset - The way you "see" the world, business etc.
Motivation - The reason(s) you do (or do not do) things.
 

Velocke

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I always find it's important to remember that simple and easy are not necessarily the same thing. A formula for weight loss (calories in < calories out) is very simple, but damned difficult in practice because of all the factors that weigh on its execution. I recently lost weight with a diet that was very simple in concept, but still a bitch to stick to at times, haha.
This is actually related to one of the things I really liked about TMF /Unscripted : that they acknowledge that get rich QUICK and get rich EASY are not the same. People always think quick = easy and vice versa, but they do not always go together. Get rich quick can happen, but it will still be a lot of work.
 
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Vigilante

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Agreed! I see a lot regurgitation and pontificating of ideas taken from books, most of which many of us have read. However, there doesn't seem to be real world knowledge other than some cynicism that has resulted from maybe a few failed attempts at business?

Instead of always focusing on the negatives, I would love to hear about his success.

Lets re-frame this story!
He's either
 

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