Are you more motivated by charity than by greed?

I just finished reading a really interesting book. It’s called Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior The authors are Ori and Rom Brafman, and I highly recommend it. These guys make some surprising points about the way our irrational sides undercut our rational decision making. One part of the book that really stayed with me was about how altruism and avarice compete for our attention. Almost all of us are sometimes giving and sometimes greedy, and it’s really tough to be both at the same time.

They tell a great story about Switzerland, I think it was. The government wanted to store nuclear waste near a certain town, and they wanted to find out the best way to present it to the townspeople. So they commissioned a study that asked half the people a question designed to appeal to their altruistic side, and half the people a question designed to appeal to their avaricious side.

Radiation – It’s Not Just for Breakfast Anymore

The first question was something like this: Your country needs a place to store nuclear waste, and we want you to help. Would you be willing to support your country by agreeing to let us store the waste near your town?

The second questions was something like this: Your country needs a place to store nuclear waste, and we want you to help. Would you be willing to agree to let us store the waste near your town in return for a payment of $2,500?

You might think a lot more people would want to get paid for the “privilege” of having nuclear waste stored nearby. But the truth is, the percentage of people who agreed when they were asked to volunteer in order to help their country was a lot higher than the percentage of people who agreed when they were offered money.

People are Basically Good …. Unless They’re Greedy

And the authors said that this kind of thing happens a lot. They talked about some studies that showed that when people make altruistic decisions, one part of their brains activate, and when they make decisions based on personal gain, a different part of their brains activate. They also explained that it’s almost impossible for both the altruism center and the avarice center to activate at the same time. And what’s really surprising is that altruism may be a better motivator than greed!

Would You Buy a Used Car to Save the Planet?

If this is true, it could have a profound effect on marketing strategies. Maybe if you’re a marketing expert you already know this, but based on what the Brafmans said, it’s going to be critical to make sure your marketing and sales materials appeal only to one side of your customers’ minds – either the giving side or the greedy side.  And if I’m right about this, your advertising dollar might be a lot better spent appealing to the giving side. I’m planning to do a lot more research on this idea, and I’ll try to write a column about it when I find out what data is available.

But here’s a point that’s a lot more important if you’re into personal development. You may be a lot “better” person that you think you are. Do you know if you’re motivated more by a good cause than by a good paycheck? Would an appeal to your inner St. Vincent de Paul be more likely to succeed than an offer to your inner Gordon Gecko?

When you Absolutely, Positively Have to Get Something Done

Here’s one way you might be able to find out – take some time to imagine a high-stakes situation similar to the nuclear waste example I pointed out earlier. Would you, really, truly, be more likely to agree to accept a risky or difficult situation if you thought you were helping out your country, your church, your family, or your company? When you put yourself in the shoes of the Swiss townspeople in the story who were offered money, did you do a mental calculation like I did … “Jeez, they want me to put myself, my family, and my neighbors at risk for a lousy $2,500. They’re gonna have to do a lot better than that!”

If you can figure out what approach works better for you, you’ve got a very powerful leverage tool for following through on personal development challenges. If there’s something you want to do or you’ve been meaning to do but just can’t get yourself started, why not take some time to figure out what would motivate you better to get started – personal gain or some benefit to your community. Take some time to write out a list of the reasons to do it and put the altruistic reasons in one column and the avaricious reasons in another column. When you can clearly see which column motivates you better, re-read that column several times. For each entry, visualize how it’s going to feel to attain the reward when you succeed. Make the visualization part of your daily routine, and I bet in a few weeks your desire is going to be very strong! I bet almost nothing will stand in the way of you taking the steps you need to reach your goal.

Remember – don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING! Get started today, pair up your goals with rewards that really get you passionate about achieving. And please let me know how it turns out for you. I think it’s going to be fantastic!

I got reminded of an important business concept this morning at a meeting with one of my young business mentors. His name is James Snider and he has great insight into all things business. If you want someone to review your business from beginning to end who can focus on the financials better than almost anyone I’ve met, get hold of James at On The Top Management.

Anyway, James and I were reviewing the website for one of my businesses, and we started talking about obstacles for potential new clients. He pointed out that you need to have a very clear idea of what action you want your web visitors to take, and that anything that slows them down or prevents them from taking that action should be gotten rid of. I couldn’t agree more, and if you want a really fun read on this topic, pick up Seth Godin’s book The Big Red Fez, which I’ve mentioned before. It’s all about making sure the monkey (your web visitor) knows exactly how to find the banana (the button or other action tool you want your visitor to push). But for now, let’s focus on getting rid of obstacles.

Let’s use the website for a martial arts school as an example. As a dojo (martial arts school) owner, I know I always want to show my visitors how cool our school is – our cool facility, our extraordinary instructors, our history, and the amazing techniques some of our people can do. But James suggested that most people who want to start martial arts probably have a lot more basic concerns.Some of the issues he suggested were:

How do I get to the dojo?

Is it hard to find?

I’m nervous about going in by myself.

What class should I go to watch?

Will it be scary?

If he’s right about these concerns, then all the pictures and video of cool techniques might actually work against us. Brand new people who visit the site would be frightened by dramatic throws instead of reassured by how easy and safe the dojo looks. And our research shows that he is right for most potential new students.

In the larger world of business, you can see this process get played out again and again. Auto makers who show their cars in racing scenes and who emphasize horsepower are targeting a certain segment of the car-buying market, but they are also missing out when it comes to appealing to car buyers with more pedestrian concerns. On the other hand, Saturn went a long way toward capturing the buyers who just wanted a reasonably priced vehicle without having to go through the haggling process. There’s also a lot to be said for car makers who offer an online ordering process – potential purchasers can assemble the car of their dreams, trying out different feature packages and paintjobs, and they don’t have to actually place an order until they’re quite sure of what they want.

Just about every business could benefit from this “get out of the way” analysis. James manages a very successful import repair facility in Ann Arbor, and they do a better job of making non-car people comfortable than just about any auto shop I’ve ever visited. At the same time, customers have to drive into what is unquestionably a repair shop, with all the attendant noises, smells, and rough looking guys with greasy hands. I know all the guys there, and they are very nice people, but a timid client might still be intimidated by the atmosphere. It’s just possible that if James could figure out how to make the place look and feel like a department store, he might win the business of the least car-savvy clients.

Anyway, a great thing to do for any business is to have an objective person look at your website and your client intake process and tell you about anything that seems confusing or frightening, or anything that takes customers away from the clear purpose of enrolling them in your sales process. You can then make a much more educated decision about where to focus your attention. I guarantee it!

I recently read Tell to Win by Peter Gruber, and I recommend it highly. It’s entertaining and it’s a great resource for learning how to tell your story effectively. But one of the points Gruber makes that is not only entertaining but really valuable is about making sure you use your time effectively.

The Monkey Story

In the 1970s, when Gruber was a young studio head at Columbia Pictures, he had a conversation with Jack Warner, the founder of Warner Bros. Warner had asked Gruber how things were going for him at the studio. The conversation is a fantastic lesson, so I’ll quote it word for word here:

Gruber: “It’s like a tidal wave. People just keep coming into my office with one problem after the other. It never ends.”

Warner said, “Let me tell you a story. Don’t be confused. You’re only renting that office. You don’t own it. It’s a zoo. You’re the zookeeper, and every single person that comes in the office comes with a monkey. That monkey is their problem. They’re trying to leave it with you. Your job is to discover where the monkey is. They’ll hide it, or dress it up, but remember you’re the zookeeper. You’ve got to keep the place clean. So make sure when you walk them to the door, they’ve got their monkey by the hand. Don’t let them leave without it. Don’t let them come back until it’s trained and they have solutions to their problem. Otherwise at the end of the day, you’ll have an office full of screaming, jumping animals and monkey shit all over the floor.”

What a great way to explain how to manage from the top! Remember, you’re the manager, not the actor, pipe-fitter, screenwriter, typist, whatever. So the point of the story, which I’m sure you get, is that to effectively manage, you have to be very careful what tasks you agree to do. Instead, you want to put people on the right track to solve their own problems, or put them in touch with other people who can help them.

Business is Even Faster Today!

Even though it’s a great point and a great story, I think it actually doesn’t go far enough. Business is much faster than it was even five years ago, so  we have to find ways to get things accomplished in a fraction of the time it used to take. You might work more hours, hire more employees, or contract out the tasks that take you away from leading your business. However, one big key, maybe the biggest, to getting your business as fast as it needs to be, is efficiency. You have to learn to get three things done in the time it used to take to do one thing. Here’s a helpful way to do just that, which was actually suggested to me by Ian, who also writes columns for thewellnessaddict.com and is a very smart fellow:

When someone comes into your office trying to unload their monkey on your desk, you should do more than just make sure they leave with it (I mean the monkey, not your desk)! Instead, find a way to send them away with one of your monkeys, too. Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean by this.

Learn to Say “Yes, But …”

The first example is kind of silly, but it’s simple and it works. My wife, Pam, and I move a lot. Poor woman, she supports me in all my business ideas, and helps me move from place to place when I start new businesses. I don’t know what I’d do without her. Anyway, almost every time we move we have a garage sale. Somehow every year or two we accumulate enough stuff to hold a three-day garage sale – I swear I have no idea how it all fits in our house.

So Pam has become an expert at unloading stuff quickly. When people come to our garage sales – and we advertise so we always have a lot of people – she engages them and talks to them about whatever items they are interested in. If they pick up a $20 item and ask, “Can you let me have this for $15?” she immediately says yes, but also says this, “I can give it to you for that price, but you have to find something else to take. How about this sugar bowl for $5?” They almost always leave with the item they want as well as one or two items that we probably wouldn’t have been able to sell except that Pam made it a condition of getting the item they wanted. They come for one item but they leave with two or three feeling like they got a great deal. We make a few more dollars and get rid of stuff that we don’t want to move.

Have Your To-Do List Ready

Here’s a more serious example for business. Review your to do list every day. Keep a mental note (or better still, write it down) of likely people to help you with each task on your list. Make a habit of imagining who might be able to work with whom (who said daydreaming is a waste of time?). That way, when one of those people comes into your office trying to unload their monkey on your desk, conjure up your list while they’re talking about their problem.

Once you’ve got a couple of tasks in mind that might fit them, and maybe a couple people they could work with on those tasks, you’ll be surprised at how often you can work out a way for them not only to leave with their own problem, but with one of yours, and how often solving one can help solve the other.

Try Giving Away Monkeys Today

I’ve written before about a guy who does contract work for me who came to ask for more money. His problem, as he saw it, was “not enough money.” He was basically asking for more hours and a raise. As it happened, I was thinking about ways to hand off more of my daily work to someone so I could concentrate more on marketing and strategy.

I did give him a small symbolic raise, but what I really did was point out the opportunities to do more within the projects we already had going together (sending him away with his monkey). I also gave him two of the tasks I was doing every Wednesday, freeing up about three hours in the middle of the day that were previously tied up (sending him away with one of my monkeys). I’m pretty pleased with the results – and I think he is, too – but I’m even more pleased that I was not only able to remember the lesson that Jack Warner taught Peter Gruber, but to improve upon it slightly.

That’s a great feeling in business – to accomplish something while remembering a lesson learned, and maybe learning something new from it. Being able to pass it on like this is also a great feeling. So, if there’s one point I hope you’ll take away from this post, it’s this one: Keep Your Dang Monkey, and Take One of Mine, Too!

A guy who does contract labor for one of my businesses came to me this morning to ask for more money. I was surprised at how carefully he had thought out his plan. I’ll call him “Keith” to protect his identity.

First, he listed all the money problems he was having. “My cars needs work, I have no savings, I have a bunch of credit card debt.” Then he suggested how he could take over some tasks that I do. “I could cover your work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings,” he said, “and that would leave you more time to do marketing or whatever.”

Now, if you own a business, you’re probably thinking that I should be doing back flips, right? Here’s a guy offering to take away some of my daily grind to give me more time to develop my business. As a matter of fact, he’s pretty good at the work, and almost every one of my clients who works with him likes him a lot. And, he works for a reasonable hourly amount.

So where’s the problem?

Here’s the problem: I’ve been meeting with this guy once a week for the past year and a half to help him learn about business. I’ve coached him on marketing, encouraged him to go out and find new clients, set up systems for him to generate new business, and overall just done everything I can think of to put him in a position to help grow our business. Which could potentially net him a ton of money. Yet he’s still thinking like an employee.

So, what would I say to him if he was sitting right here? I’d say, Keith, you should have come to me to offer to cut your own wages! If you want to get rich, work for free! As long as you look for and receive an honest hour’s pay for an honest hour’s work, you’re going to be an employee. Only when you can get your mind around the idea that real wealth is created rather than earned will you begin to realize your potential as a member of our organization. Or any great organization.

If that sounds like a crazy idea, let me give you a concrete example (I’m going to use made up numbers to further protect Keith’s identity). In this particular business, we’ve found that, given our current level of effort and expenditure on advertising, with normal repeat clients and new clients through word of mouth, we can expect to average about $80,000 a month in gross income. We’ve been doing it long enough to know that that’s pretty much how it works out, and until we come up with a breakthrough way to market our service, we can depend on that average over the long haul.

By the time we pay our fixed overhead, health insurance, employees, corporate taxes, investors, and me, there’s about $10,000 left to pay Keith and our other independent contractors, and to reinvest in the business. I know it’s not a ton of money, but I like the business and it spins off a lot of other work for me. Anyway, the pool of money available to pay Keith is finite, and in some ways the more we pay Keith the less we have available to be creative in trying to grow the business.

I’ve got ten apples, right, and you want four. That leaves only six apples for me, and if you’re still hungry in six months, I know you’re going to come back to me for another apple. But let’s flip the paradigm on its head. What if you could increase the number of apples I had, with the promise that you’d also get more?

“Why would I want to do that,” you might say. “I could just go out and start my own business.”

Sure, but think about two things. One, why haven’t you done it? And two, if you start a business yourself, you have to be prepared for all the work involved: incorporation, setting up the office, hiring employees or independent contractors, dealing with vendors, and, the most critical and challenging part of every business, selling. What if I told you that instead of doing all that work, you could concentrate on only one aspect of the business, get really, really good at it, and potentially make tons of money?

Well, that’s exactly what I’m telling you! I have a business with an absolutely rock solid service that’s head and shoulders above everything else in the area. The facility is in place, the reputation is impeccable, and the follow-up service for the clients you’d bring in is fantastic. In fact, I’m going to give you lots of opportunity to serve those clients and find other ways to generate income from them. All you have to do to help is find a way to bring in new clients on your own initiative.

If you make the number of apples I have get bigger, I’ll give you some of those apples. I’m happy to give you more apples because more clients means more word of mouth, more momentum, more energy in the room, more opportunities for growth, more ways to serve both the existing clients and the new clients better. Everybody wins!

I interact with a lot of folks in their early twenties, and when they’re getting into the job market, a lot of them talk about jobs they’ve considered. You’d be surprised how often one of them says, “that job had lousy pay. They wanted to pay me on commission.”

I tell them this: “if you want to get rich, go back to those guys and tell them you don’t want the base pay at all. Tell ‘em you’ll work on pure commission for six months. Get another part time job to pay your rent if you have to. Doing pure commission sales could be the most important learning experience in your financial life.”

I think you get it. The reason I say this is that if they learn to create wealth for other people, rather than trying to earn money, they’ll be able to create wealth for themselves. I’ll repeat that in a different way. A critical step toward getting rich is to realize that you must create wealth rather than earn money. Earning money means you’re limited to the hours you can work and the pay you can convince somebody to give you. Creating wealth means you’re limited only by your imagination and ability to learn.

If you want to get rich, work for free! Now don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING!

People all over the world have picked up on Cole’s saying. It’s the title of a lot of blogs and personal development talks. Zig Ziglar used the saying in his motivational speeches, and you can find it in his books. One I think you ought to read, if you’re into personal development, is Embrace the Struggle: Living Life on Life’s Terms. The point of the saying is that, when life gets you down, you shouldn’t stay down. You’ve probably heard, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” In the martial arts world we say, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”

Anyway, with all due respect to these very accomplished guys, I don’t think the saying goes far enough. If you’ve spent as much time as I have studying the science of self-improvement, you probably realize that learning to recover from adversity is only the first step. If you want to become truly outstanding, you’ve got find a way to build personal evolution into your DNA.

So I’d change the saying to: “You don’t drown by falling in water, you drown by not getting out and learning to swim!”

Ups and downs are not just part of life, they are life. Once you’ve figured out a mindset or strategy for moving through adversity, like picking yourself up after you get by hard times, then you can start working on real accomplishment. And you don’t get it by doing the same things over and over. Like falling in the water and pulling yourself out! If you do, you’ll find yourself in the same situations over and over, and I don’t think that’s the formula for real personal achievement.

You see, every challenge has built into it the germ or seed of its own solution. “Hey,” you say, “last time I fell in the water I got out, and here I am, doing great!” But there’s an aspect of dealing with challenges that’s even more important, more profound, and probably far more life changing than just figuring out how to solve life’s immediate problems. If we think about it, each challenge can teach us the lessons we need for real, meaningful, lasting personal change.

The truth is, most of us ignore these lessons. It’s like we deliberately tune out the most profound lessons that life teaches us, virtually all the time. We suffer through some crisis, get our lives more or less back to normal, sit back and say, “whew, I’m glad that’s over,” and forget to change the fundamental behaviors or attitudes that got us into the crisis in the first place.

Now, that might be because taking the action called for by lesson is difficult, or involves some sacrifice, hard work, or change in our thinking, but it’s almost never impossible. I know this because there are always people out there who have learned the lesson we were supposed to learn. Let me give you an example.

After you fall into the water and pull yourself out a few times, even if you’re darn proud of figuring out how not to drown, you’re probably thinking, “darn it, isn’t there some other way to handle this?” And that little voice in your head might say, “hey, dummy! Stay out of the water.” And if you do that, you’re not going to fall in anymore.

But what if the water is where you really need to be? Maybe all the most exciting things are happening in the water. That’s where you learn the most, get the biggest reward, meet the coolest people. So you have a lot of motivation to get back in the water, you’re just tired of hauling yourself out. And if you look around next time you fall in, just before you pull yourself out, you pay attention to what all the other people are doing in there. They seem to be having a good time, you know, getting a lot done, making friends, learning a ton by staying in there for so long. So, you ask yourself, “what are they doing that I’m not doing?” And darn it, that voice in your head answers you again. “Hey slowpoke, they’re swimming!”

So, the point is, don’t just keep pulling yourself out, learn to swim! If you find something you absolutely, positively need to do, but you keep doing belly flops when you try it, don’t you think it’s time to do more than just pull yourself out? Look around and figure out what the really successful people are doing. Learn to do what they’re doing. And the surprising thing is, most of them are happy to give you some tips. And when you get good at swimming, you can go in the water anytime you want, and get all kinds of work done there.

Visualize your goal, plan your mission, and don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING!

The saying is “everything happens for a reason.”

People say it when something bad happens to them. Keith Miller was the guy being interviewed on NPR. He’d been a professional football player, and he’s now actually a very successful opera singer! That’s an extreme change, right? He had played for five years in the European and the Arena Football leagues, both of which no longer exist. When the leagues went out of business, he found himself without a job. He said he was a fan of opera, and he went on to study it and is now one of most celebrated bass-baritones on stage. He’s singing Madame Butterfly with the Washington National Opera.

What You Say Affects What You Think!

When Keith Miller said “everything happens for a reason,” he meant basically the same thing we mean when we say “when one door closes, another opens.” If we’re wired for success, we should re-write both of these phrases to get them out of the passive voice. We should say them this way:

“Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, I choose the reason.”

and:

“When one door closes, I open another.”

You Have Control When You Take Control

If we’re really going to excel in life, we need to stop thinking in terms of when something is going to happen to us, and start thinking in terms of making things happen. Which mindset you choose can make a gigantic difference to what you get in life. It made a difference of epic proportions in Keith Miller’s life, and that’s because he chose to make things happen. Here’s what he said, and if you get chance to read the whole interview, I recommend it, because he’s a very articulate guy and his story is a fascinating one. The show is in the NPR archives for March 2, 2011. Anyway, here’s what he said:

“It’s the one thing I’ve learned, is everything always happens for a reason You know, the biggest losses that we’ve suffered, I mean, in personal life, professional football, you know, when you lose something, you have to go back and diagnose. You’re more apt to go back and diagnose the things that you did wrong, what you can improve upon. And when things go well, you don’t really at the end of the night you know, you just say, oh well, you know, thanks, that was great. You don’t take the time to really assess.

“So you really need to have speed bumps in your life to kind of say, hey, what – you know, make some adjustments, fine tune things or just, you know, change the transmission completely.”

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I don’t know if he’s studied success systems, but that’s a great way to explain the benefit of adversity in our lives. When bad things happen, we should reflect on what happened, consider whether we could have done something better or could do something better in the future, and then make adjustments to our actions. The adjustments may just be fine tuning, or we may need to completely change the transmission! It’s as though he’s been reading my journals. Look at steps three through seven from my last talk “Don’t Just Do Something, DO SOMETHING!”

3. Do something!

4. Pay attention to your results

5. Multiply your successes

6. Modify or discard your failures

7. Do something else!

You’re Not the Problem, Unless You ARE the Problem!

The people who fail, who don’t grow, are often people who, when they experience a failure, either keep doing the same things that caused the failure or simply stop trying. That leads to paralysis. Soon they feel like they can’t do anything, and that can lead to a pretty miserable life.

The people who succeed recognize that, as Zig Ziglar says, “failure is an event, not a person.” And how they think about that event makes all the difference in the world. They recognize that they can learn from failures.

When you try to do something great – that’s step three: Do something! – and you don’t succeed, you can  “go back and diagnose the things you did wrong” – that’s step four: Pay attention to your results. Steps five and six are what Keith called making “some adjustments, fine tune things or just …. change the transmission completely.”

Change Something, and Pay Attention!

What a great lesson! No wonder people who do really well say that it’s not about winning and losing. It’s about doing! If you DO SOMETHING with your goal clearly in mind, then the failures will be lessons clearly written out for you to modify your actions in the future. If we could go through life enthusiastically doing things without worrying about whether we instantly succeed or fail, think how much we could learn! What a great mindset to teach our children. “When one door closes, I open another.”

You know what, I’m going to go share this idea with my daughter right now. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason, you choose the reason. And if the reason is to teach you what you need to do to succeed, you can be as wildly successful as any human being can ever hope to be.

A Little About My Friend Ian

Now, before I share my ideas of how you can achieve success, I want to tell you a little about Ian. He’s a true friend of mine, and we’ve known each other for over 30 years. I get a little emotional talking about it, because we’ve been through some extraordinary experiences together. At one point, we formed a band together and wrote some really amazing songs. I remember getting some real interest from recording agencies. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look how our futures developed, Ian and I and the other members of the band had a lot of growing up to do at that time, and the band basically self-destructed.

Anyway, the reason I’m going on about Ian is that he’s one of greatest facilitators I know. What I mean is that he has a gift for bringing out the most creative, powerful parts of your personality. This gift comes from a life lived through a lot of adversity. He’s got a profound energy that has to be experienced to be appreciated, and if you ever get a chance to talk with him, I encourage you to do it!

Seven Key Principles of Achievement

So, back to our conversation about the key principles of achievement. I was very inspired by Ian’s leading questions, so I rattled off seven principles. Here’s what they were:

1. Clearly identify your goal

2. Learn the path others have taken to reach similar goals

3. Do something!

4. Pay attention to your results

5. Multiply your successes

6. Modify or discard your failures

7. Do something else!

If you follow success systems at all, you’re going to hear a lot of echoes in my talks of the big players in success coaching, like Napoleon Hill, Jim Rohn, Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Deepak Chopra, and others like them. That’s because over the past ten years, I’ve consumed massive amounts of their writings and teachings. I’ve compared what all the success leaders are saying to the wisdom of the ancient teachers of Asia, and found that they have a LOT in common. If you can afford it, I encourage you to go to seminars taught by these great motivators.

If you can’t afford it, go anyway!

My first choice for you, just because he’s the rock star of personal achievement right now, would be to attend a Tony Robbins seminar or read one his books, like Awaken the Giant Within!

Here’s the Point

So, after that long digression, let me get back to the one thing I really want to share with you today. I’m sure you’ve heard to the old expression, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” If you study leadership at all, you’ve probably heard of the book by Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff called Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!: Ten Principles for Leading Meetings That Matter. My suggestion to you is a little different. If you want to realize a goal, don’t just do something, DO SOMETHING! What I mean by that is that when you have a powerful idea, the most effective way to bring it into existence in the real world is to take action, take big action, and take it now!

Small Results Are Hard to Measure!

Small results are hard to measure. If you do something right, but it’s very, very small, you may need a microscope to figure out if it helped you get closer to your goal. But if you do something big, you’re going to know if it worked or not. And if it didn’t, you’ll be able to see what didn’t work about it.

Now, I’m not saying you should just willy nilly do something huge and crazy just to be doing something! You have to clearly identify your goal and learn what the path is that will take you there. I’ll share a lot more about these two steps in the future. But the point I want you to take away from today is that if you’ve clearly identified your goal and figured out the major steps needed to get there, you can work out some action to take to get you started. That’s the “something big” I encourage you to take on.

Ideas Have a Shelf Life

And, finally, do it now! Ideas have a shelf life. If you doubt me, go back and look at a newspaper or book from 30 years ago. It looks pretty quaint, doesn’t it? You don’t want your ideas to spoil because they’ve festered too long! Take the first opportunity to act, before doubts creep in, before technology leaves your idea behind, or before you get too caught up in your everyday life to work hard on the one thing that is really important to you.

So … if you want to realize your dreams … don’t just do something, get out there and DO SOMETHING!