- Oct 9, 2013
- 3,209
- 13,126
Running a business and making money can seem incredibly complex.
If you have a look on youtube you'll find 100's of rules for success. Everyone seems to have a different set of rules. Like the "<FAMOUS PERSON>'s top 10 rules for success". Ie,
There's so many and you could sit all day watching them and come away with a thousand different things you need to change.
But what happens?
You wake up the next day and just slip back into your old patterns..
We run entirely from minute to minute on our "default program" in our subconscious. The only way to overcome this is with simplicity. The simpler the better. If you just have 1 or 2 things to keep in your conscious mind.
The reason that most of you aren't making $1mil/year is because you have the wrong program running.
So here's what you need to do. Forget everything else and just follow these core rules of success. Trust them and you'll have anything in life you want.
That's it. It's simple. Every morning I open this up to remind my brain this is the programming we are running. I'll discuss it in more detail below so you understand a bit more and I'll an example.
1. First, you decide what you want. Pick something you like. Not something you necessarily love, just something you can see yourself doing for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week for the next 2-3 years. You can make money writing 5k words a day for your own site, but if you don't enjoy that, your life will be hell. Don't create a life you hate. Money isn't worth it and you can make money doing almost anything.
The thing you want, you're going to do for at least 1 year. Once you decide, that's it. Stop reading EVERYTHING that isn't related to that. 99.9999% of what's happening in the world is completely irrelevant. The latest movies, what's going on in politics. The lot of it. Unless the governments are going to collapse, you can just ignore current events. Your focus, your thinking must revolve every day around what you have decided you want. You can apply this to business, health, relationships and anything else. Success is not money. Success is achieving the kind of life YOU enjoy.
But for business, whatever you decide, you stick with it through failure 1, failure 2, failure 3, failure 10. The more you fail the closer you are to success. Every time you switch to something else you start at square 1.
Our example character will be Jim. Jim has decided he wants to be a conversion rate optimization expert.
2. Create a plan. This is the thinking time. We'll create our yearly/quarterly/monthly. Use mindmaps. I use Xmind Zen. https://www.xmind.net/pricing/
Your yearly plan is your overall guiding light. Here's Jim's.
This is just a simple overview. Look at this every morning to focus the mind on your overall vision. This is your plan. This is where your energy will go every day. Anything not related to this is not moving your life where you have decided it should go.
Next your quarterly plan. This gets a bit more specific, but is still not 'task based'. The yearly and quarterly are your compasses.
You now have your roadmap for the quarter. This is all you need to do. Nothing else. If you do anything else you are VEERING OFF your roadmap and will not reach your goals.
Now we create our first month's plan. Revision 1 of it.
I don't do weekly plans. I don't like them. I prefer to create a monthly plan, set today/tomorrow's tasks from it, and review it every sunday, adding or editing. It's more flexible than a rigid weekly plan.
This isn't a complete monthly, but it shows you how you do it. You're creating a visual representation of actual tasks. I use the orange arrows to sub categorize my tasks.
Then what I do is, every day I pick a batch, add them into todoist, and mark them as complete in the monthly. I add tasks for today/tomorrow, because that's where my thinking is now.
Every sunday you can review your monthly. Tweak it, add some things, but aim to have it all completed by the end of the month.
So after having done this, each day you find yourself with just a batch of 5-10 tasks to do. This can be in todoist, a blank a5 notebook or any simple todo program. Now, all you have to do is complete those tasks, as fast as you can. Be lazy and do the bare minimum. When choosing a theme, don't spend an entire day, like 99% of people do reviewing every theme out there and procrastinating. Just pick something that looks good and tick the damn box and move on. 80/20 rule. if you have a REAL problem later on, some limitation in that theme, then you go out and look for more, but this time with a specific requirement.
In everything you do, ask yourself, am I solving a problem I have now, or a future problem? 99% of the time you are solving some future problem that won't even be a problem. The task now is choose a theme. That takes 10 minutes. Adding the opt in form? Again, don't spend a day reading guides about opt in forms, and the perfect placement, the perfect headline. Just stick any old thing on the sidebar and tick that box. Later on, if your conversions are low, then when you're doing your sunday review, you schedule in A) Study time to learn more about list building with an allocated time like 2 hours, and B) you schedule in time to implement a better opt in. You see how this works? That's how you make a million a year. That's how you make a billion dollar company.
People get lost when doing tasks. We end up reading endless crap because we think we're doing a better job. Imagine your boss has asked you to pick a theme and install it. Then he comes back a week later to find out you've spent the whole week reading about themes, studying opt in forms, headlines and other crap and you haven't even chosen a theme. Do you think he'll be happy? No. You're just guessing at future problems and wasting time solving them. 90% of the things you think are a problem will not be a problem, and the things that ARE going to be a problem you have no idea are coming, so just do the bare minimum task, tick the box and move on. Do that for a year and you'll have so much action-momentum that it'll be impossible for you not to be making a ton of money and have learned a LOT of things.
If you have a look on youtube you'll find 100's of rules for success. Everyone seems to have a different set of rules. Like the "<FAMOUS PERSON>'s top 10 rules for success". Ie,
There's so many and you could sit all day watching them and come away with a thousand different things you need to change.
But what happens?
You wake up the next day and just slip back into your old patterns..
We run entirely from minute to minute on our "default program" in our subconscious. The only way to overcome this is with simplicity. The simpler the better. If you just have 1 or 2 things to keep in your conscious mind.
The reason that most of you aren't making $1mil/year is because you have the wrong program running.
So here's what you need to do. Forget everything else and just follow these core rules of success. Trust them and you'll have anything in life you want.
That's it. It's simple. Every morning I open this up to remind my brain this is the programming we are running. I'll discuss it in more detail below so you understand a bit more and I'll an example.
1. First, you decide what you want. Pick something you like. Not something you necessarily love, just something you can see yourself doing for 8 hours a day, 6 days a week for the next 2-3 years. You can make money writing 5k words a day for your own site, but if you don't enjoy that, your life will be hell. Don't create a life you hate. Money isn't worth it and you can make money doing almost anything.
The thing you want, you're going to do for at least 1 year. Once you decide, that's it. Stop reading EVERYTHING that isn't related to that. 99.9999% of what's happening in the world is completely irrelevant. The latest movies, what's going on in politics. The lot of it. Unless the governments are going to collapse, you can just ignore current events. Your focus, your thinking must revolve every day around what you have decided you want. You can apply this to business, health, relationships and anything else. Success is not money. Success is achieving the kind of life YOU enjoy.
But for business, whatever you decide, you stick with it through failure 1, failure 2, failure 3, failure 10. The more you fail the closer you are to success. Every time you switch to something else you start at square 1.
Our example character will be Jim. Jim has decided he wants to be a conversion rate optimization expert.
2. Create a plan. This is the thinking time. We'll create our yearly/quarterly/monthly. Use mindmaps. I use Xmind Zen. https://www.xmind.net/pricing/
Your yearly plan is your overall guiding light. Here's Jim's.
This is just a simple overview. Look at this every morning to focus the mind on your overall vision. This is your plan. This is where your energy will go every day. Anything not related to this is not moving your life where you have decided it should go.
Next your quarterly plan. This gets a bit more specific, but is still not 'task based'. The yearly and quarterly are your compasses.
You now have your roadmap for the quarter. This is all you need to do. Nothing else. If you do anything else you are VEERING OFF your roadmap and will not reach your goals.
Now we create our first month's plan. Revision 1 of it.
I don't do weekly plans. I don't like them. I prefer to create a monthly plan, set today/tomorrow's tasks from it, and review it every sunday, adding or editing. It's more flexible than a rigid weekly plan.
This isn't a complete monthly, but it shows you how you do it. You're creating a visual representation of actual tasks. I use the orange arrows to sub categorize my tasks.
Then what I do is, every day I pick a batch, add them into todoist, and mark them as complete in the monthly. I add tasks for today/tomorrow, because that's where my thinking is now.
Every sunday you can review your monthly. Tweak it, add some things, but aim to have it all completed by the end of the month.
So after having done this, each day you find yourself with just a batch of 5-10 tasks to do. This can be in todoist, a blank a5 notebook or any simple todo program. Now, all you have to do is complete those tasks, as fast as you can. Be lazy and do the bare minimum. When choosing a theme, don't spend an entire day, like 99% of people do reviewing every theme out there and procrastinating. Just pick something that looks good and tick the damn box and move on. 80/20 rule. if you have a REAL problem later on, some limitation in that theme, then you go out and look for more, but this time with a specific requirement.
In everything you do, ask yourself, am I solving a problem I have now, or a future problem? 99% of the time you are solving some future problem that won't even be a problem. The task now is choose a theme. That takes 10 minutes. Adding the opt in form? Again, don't spend a day reading guides about opt in forms, and the perfect placement, the perfect headline. Just stick any old thing on the sidebar and tick that box. Later on, if your conversions are low, then when you're doing your sunday review, you schedule in A) Study time to learn more about list building with an allocated time like 2 hours, and B) you schedule in time to implement a better opt in. You see how this works? That's how you make a million a year. That's how you make a billion dollar company.
People get lost when doing tasks. We end up reading endless crap because we think we're doing a better job. Imagine your boss has asked you to pick a theme and install it. Then he comes back a week later to find out you've spent the whole week reading about themes, studying opt in forms, headlines and other crap and you haven't even chosen a theme. Do you think he'll be happy? No. You're just guessing at future problems and wasting time solving them. 90% of the things you think are a problem will not be a problem, and the things that ARE going to be a problem you have no idea are coming, so just do the bare minimum task, tick the box and move on. Do that for a year and you'll have so much action-momentum that it'll be impossible for you not to be making a ton of money and have learned a LOT of things.
