You Are As Good As The People Around You
During the opening campaign for Membership Site Mastermind I actively observed the conversation occurring at other blogs about what I was doing.
One of the less-talked about benefits of conducting a major launch is the education you receive about your market. As Jeff Walker points out in his Product Launch Formula (PLF) program, each launch is an entirely different beast and once you begin the campaign you never truly know what will happen.
Eben Pagan, while presenting at one of Jeff’s PLF live workshops, stated something similar, explaining how each launch he has done has been different, teaching him new things as the campaign goes to unexpected places.
One of the great skills a marketer can develop is his or her ability to think on their feet and dynamically respond to what they see going on during their marketing campaign.
The very best marketers have an innate understanding of how they need to respond to what the market is telling them. For example, producing new content that is designed specifically to tackle an objection that they have observed coming from feedback during their campaign. As Jeff notes, he can “feel” how a launch is going, even before a product goes on sale.
Rich Schefren wrote an entire follow-up report to his first report (I believe it was the Missing Chapter follow-up to the Internet Business Manifesto) to specifically address a major sticking point he saw in his market. What was particularly amazing about this situation, was Rich was able to write the entire report DURING the launch campaign.
In my case, much of the content I published following up after the Masterplan report I released at the start of my campaign, contained elements designed to respond to specific rejections and talking points I saw in my market.
There were however, some things I couldn’t address during the campaign simply due to lack of resources (mostly time). There’s one thing that stuck in my mind since then that I wanted to write about here on my blog. This is a particularly important issue because I think it’s a mental hang-up you are likely feeling right now, which is significantly holding you back from success.
If You Want Success Today, Let Yesterday Go And Stop Seeking Tomorrow
Bear with me here, this is going to sound a little strange, especially for a business blog, but I promise you there is a very powerful lesson to be found within these words - powerful for business success too.
Last night (as I write this article) I found myself sitting down on the floor in a half circle of people facing some musical instruments that were waiting patiently for their musician masters to come and start playing. I was told that I was attending a “Kirtan Session” with David Stringer and there would be chanting involved.
My immediate response when I found out where I was going was - “Will I have to chant?”
I’ve chanted before, a couple of times at least, at the end of yoga sessions at some of the more eastern-philosophy yoga schools I’ve attended. They’ve always been very short experiences, made more comfortable due to the preceding yoga workout and its mellow effects. During chant time I’d lightly sing along, enough to be included with the group, but not loud enough for anyone to notice.
You don’t need a good singing voice for chanting mind you, and it’s certainly not about performance quality, rather wholehearted participation is the main criteria, but let’s just say I try and avoid using my voice for anything other than talking. I was cast as the voice-over guy in my grade school musical and there was a reason I wasn’t singing.
So, I find myself sitting on the floor of a yoga studio on a Wednesday night in anticipation of my first Kirtan session. The musicians sit down, David Stringer the lead singer…err…chanter starts talking about chanting, a projector fires up with some decidedly yogic words lighting up the wall above the musicians, and the chant begins.
The leader begins by chanting the words, which are very simple, usually two to four words repeated over again in basic sequences. Then the audience (including the other musicians) chants the words and then back to the leader, then to the rest of us again, and back to the leader, and so on.
The whole processes is driven by the music and the leader, with the pace increasing, different inflections and melodies help make it interesting, but essentially you are chanting the same words over and over again.
And yes, I had to chant.
The Real Secret To A 2-Hour Work Day
I recently attended a network event as a panelist on the subject of social media. Before the panel discussion part of the evening began, a group of about one hundred attendees who work in PR and/or own a business, were mixing and mingling in the pre-show drinks and nibbles party.
I was standing in a circle talking to a group of people, all involved in running their own businesses. As we talked I noticed a difference between how these people worked to build their businesses (or at least how they talked about their work) and how I work on my business. They seem forever busy, and while they were brave enough to start their own business, the amount of labor hours they put in is significant.
The problems people have with their relationship to work became clearer when I mentioned that I’m doing a productivity course from Eben Pagan (Wake Up Productive), whom none of them had heard of.
I told the people in the circle how I often have a nap in the afternoon if my body feels like it, which got a laugh from some, presumably because they couldn’t imagine sleeping in the middle of a work day. I felt the need to defend myself and explain the nap is actually beneficial for my productivity (Eben suggests this in the course - though I didn’t need him to give me permission to take a nap, that’s for sure!).
My naps are short, usually around 20-40 minutes long and are not solid sleep, more like a dozing in and out of consciousness. I feel amazing once I get up, very clear and coherent - it’s like a reset button when you are feeling tired in the afternoon. Eben, and people he quoted, concurred about the effectiveness of napping for improved productivity.
This concept, the idea of “not working” when it’s designated work time based on what society tells you or how you have conditioned yourself, is something that lots of entrepreneurs and certainly employees have trouble coming to terms with. If you’re working for someone else then obviously you can’t just go to sleep on the job and if you are working for yourself the sense of obligation to keep producing is very strong - you feel guilty if you don’t work a 12 hour day.
Personally I got over the typical working day time structure a long time ago. Truth be told, I never really had to adopt it because I went from school, to university to running my own business at my own pace, so I never had the stringent nine-to-five mentality applied to my life, even if most people around me live that way Monday to Friday.
Do You Work Too Hard?
How To Master The Inner Game Of Business And Life
I remember a year or so ago I was trawling a popular Internet marketing forum. This particular forum has some successful marketers, but mostly the members are opportunity seeking newbies, including lots of young guys who are looking to make money online quick and care little for hard work.
I did an “ego” search in this particular forum for my name (market feedback I swear!), and came across a thread from some people discussing my Blog Profits Blueprint free report. Someone had asked how to make money blogging and my report was referenced by another member.
Some of the feedback was positive, but there was also a few replies that were along the lines of…
“It’s full of too much fluff”
“Just show me how to make money”
etc…
My report talked too much about things you control with your mind, like being consistent and persistent, finding passion and then narrowing down to a focus, and not enough about specific techniques that just make money flow like mana from heaven.
Put in other terms, these particular people wanted to know the “how” without really knowing the “why”. Unfortunately, you can make a little money by implementing certain techniques, but if you don’t know why you are doing something and how it fits into the big picture, and most importantly, how you as the owner of your business impact your results, then any success you have will be short lived.
I wasn’t really upset about these comments, rather I felt bad for people who wanted a quick fix and weren’t seeing what they were doing online as building a long term sustainable asset. They preferred to flutter from technique to technique hoping to strike it rich one day, just like miners digging for gold.
Impatient people rarely have time for “mindset” lessons, thus they will stop reading an article like this after the first few paragraphs. Discussing things like the inner game seems useless to them. In their opinion all you need to do is figure out what works and do it, there’s no need to worry about much more than that. That might work if we were all robots, but we’re not, so you do need to pay attention to your fallible human characteristics, like your thoughts and your feelings.
The Inner Game of Business
What the people in the forums were neglecting is the importance of your “inner game”. The concept of the inner game is widely used in fields like personal development, in the seduction community and is talked about in business circles as well, yet I find people often have trouble grasping exactly what the inner game is, since it’s such an intangible aspect of life.
Some people, particularly men of course, don’t like to talk about things like feelings and thoughts, when they consider what really matters are actions and outcomes. That’s true, but behind every action and the resulting outcome is a thought and a feeling. Doesn’t it make sense to track back all the way to the origin of something to make sure we have all aspects of the process congruent? Of course it does if we want success, and that’s exactly what the inner game is about.
Are You Tired Of Failure?
How To Find The Courage To Change By Raising Your Awareness
Those of you on my newsletter received an email last week where I talked about a subject related to the movie The Secret.
The responses I received to that email where quite polarized, which should not be surprising since subject matter that can be interpreted as spiritual or religious tends to elicit hard-line opinions. Yet I have to admit I was surprised by some of the emails I received in reply to the newsletter, which was a little naive on my part.
I received messages from my readers from both ends of the spectrum. Everything from I love what you are saying and totally agree, to that movie is a bunch of hogwash — just thinking about what you want won’t get it, all the way to the movie is against my religion and you shouldn’t be promoting it.
I’m happy whenever people engage with my content, and I never take one person’s feedback too strongly unless I’m receiving many responses along the same line. It was certainly interesting to read the different places people were coming from and thank you to everyone who wrote to me - it was an enlightening experience to read your point of view.
I don’t adhere specifically to a branch of religion, nor am I an atheist. If a label must be applied, I’m closest to agnostic, believing in a higher power but not looking to lock that power into a rigid framework like doctrine can do. I like to take on board concepts and ideas from all religions and belief systems, but I never became so restricted by them that I can’t at least listen to other people’s ideas without labeling them blasphemous.
You might call me a perpetual fence sitter, which in itself has problems. The wonderful thing about taking on board and truly feeling a specific religious calling is that you no longer suffer from being “lost”. You now have a framework to follow, a way to live and a community of people who share your beliefs. That is a wonderful thing.
Of course I have a moral compass, as we all do, which gives me some sense of rules and structure that govern my life. I’m going to draw the line on certain actions and label them wrong or right. Some things fall into a grey area, which once again is where having a strong religious belief has “benefits” - you have less greys and more black and whites - although I don’t think that’s always a good thing. Unwavering absolutes can be very dangerous - religious fundamentalism has certainly taught us that.
