INTEREST & AMBITION TOO

INTEREST: Most people like doing whatever it is that they do for a living. Some love it. Can you imagine a carpenter not liking wood or nails or an accountant not liking precision with numbers? No. “The most important thing in life is interest.” John Houston, the famous Hollywood movie director said that. So if you own a business, and plan to work at it for years and years, two things stand out. First, you’d better find it interesting. Second, you’d better like it huh. Yeah.

And…similar to INTEREST…we have AMBITION.

AMBITION: How bad do you want that thing you find interesting? Whether it is building the business of your dreams, making a million bucks, becoming famous, finding eternal beauty or just having a few moments of serene peace and quiet, ambition is a part of that. Ambition drives us all…it's what the first psychology teacher in the United States, William James, called the worship of the Bitch Goddess Success.

Here’s the whole quote taken from a letter William James wrote to HG Wells, September 11, 1906. “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success, together with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success, is our national disease.”

Now Freud would have us believe that all drive stems from the libido. Sorry Sigmund, success is biologically determined by one’s own ability to stay focused on a task and persistence is a function of an active limbic system. Focus and persistence are influenced by desire and training and practice and discipline and determination and so on.

So INTEREST and AMBITION…what can we say about these two concepts? 

AMBITION fuels our desire for success and INTEREST steers us in a direction in which our success can be achieved. We can say this because it’s true. One the down side, some people are cursed with ambition, it ruins their lives, for they have no interest in anything else, like relationships and love and family. But for most of us, ambition works just fine.

If you’ve ever been in a job interview you may have heard a question like the following. Can you give a brief outline of the tasks which have your specific interest and ambitions? If you are unprepared to answer a question like this it can be devastating, and your chance for a job offer...gone in a hurry.

Then there is this wonderful little question. What would you do IF you knew you could not fail? And if you can answer that, then there is this follow-up question. What should be next? In other words, once armed with the answer to the first question how will you change your life?

Okay, you say, so what now?

Well now we can ask what would make a person with a certain ambition and interest enjoy that particular interest even more. Well, a person with a certain interest might enjoy that particular interest even more if he or she got better at doing it, don’t you think? Sure, that’s logical. They would derive more intrinsic pleasure if they could pursue their interest more successfully or simply…do it better. When they would perform the activities fundamental to their interest flawlessly, that would give them temporary or even lasting moments of joy, right? Yup. They might also enjoy their interest more if they were rewarded for doing it more dramatically, as with a round of applause or more financial remuneration, you know, more money. That would probably make them happier, don’t you think? So let’s talk about how an ambitious person with a particular interest might pursue it more vigorously and successfully, and if it’s business related, make more money doing that thing they love.

Here are a couple of things that come to mind.

Create And Keep A Morning Phrase: “Today I will get all my important stuff done…before noon in fact.” Whatever you say to yourself in the morning, if you sincerely mean it and if you stay focused on it, it will most likely come true during the day. Why not taking advantage of this? Create a simple morning phrase and say it to yourself first thing in the morning and a couple of more times during the morning. Is that simple?

Change Your Work Space: Clean up your desk. Re-arrange the furniture. Add some color to that space. Make the place where you work really enjoyable. So enjoyable that work there won’t be perceived as work anymore. It will be something you love to do.

Let’s do one more.

Wake Up Early: This is not a habit, this is a lifestyle. Don’t just wake up early without a purpose. Be early. Be there before others, while it’s still and quiet. Decide what matters most to you that day. Write it down. Look for new opportunities and embrace them. Waking up early means keeping your eyes open to every available opportunity…and pursuing all your interests with all your might. 

THE 5 MINUTE RULE

We like positive habits. We don’t like negative habits. Positive habits are good. Negative habits are bad. Everyone understands this. We also know that we don’t like wasting time when we’re trying to be productive. I’m not talking about procrastinating, that’s a subject for another article and I have a great deal to say about that. I’m talking about distractions, going pulled off on a tangent or being interrupted. Distractions that take our attention off something we consider important abound. In fact life is one great big hailstorm of distractions…and they can ruin an otherwise productive day or string of days. Ugh! 

The 5 Minute Rule is a Get-R-DONE Habit designed to keep you on the path to success every day. Here’s how it works. 

A few times a day, you stop what you’re doing, pause, take five minutes, and ask yourself this question. What Am I Doing? If the answer is—just what I want to be or should be or planned to be doing—then keep on doing that. But if your answer is—something urgent but not important, or I’m chasing something that has distracted me and working on it is keeping me from being productive, from pursuing what will make my day today a success—then stop doing that thing and refocus your attention and concentration on the important things you have to do or should do with the rest of your day. 

This simple little habit can be one of the best focusing and re-prioritizing routines you've ever embraced.

Now, here’s what some people do make this work splendidly. We all have computers and many of us have smart phones. It is eminently possible to make these devices remind us, with a friendly beep, when it’s time for an appointment or some such thing. So, I recommend you set your computer or smart phone to beep you twice a day, at 10:30 AM and 2:30 PM. The beep is your cue to stop what you’re doing and ask yourself the What Am I Doing Question. 

The rest is easy, refocus and get more done that day.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is about thinking and focusing on the most important things.

In business the important things are the top money making activities, crafting them so they work most of the time and then, of course, implementing those money making activities in highly effective ways and frequently enough to make your goals for income and wealth building happen. 

It’s about lining up all the things you need to consistently take bold direct action and get things done.

Master-Mind is all about that.

THE FUTURE BASED SELF QUESTION

“If we were having a discussion three years from today, and you were looking back over those three years, what has to happen in your life, personally and professionally, for you to feel happy with the progress of your business?” 

This question gets asked a lot in Master-Mind Alliance meetings. It’s the vision thing. It describes what you want for your future life. The FUTURE BASED SELF QUESTION is about INTENTIONS, Grand INTENTIONS. And those drive 90% of what we work toward securing in life and through our business activities. 

The FUTURE BASED SELF QUESTION asks us to imagine who we'll they be just three years hence. It asks that we create in our mind a "Future Self", not only in our professional life, who we’ll be as a successful business person, but also who we’ll be personally, what our personal life will be like. 

Now imagine you have answered the FUTURE BASED SELF QUESTION, you have created an image of that future time, what I would do next is ask that you to use that image to make decisions in the present, today. Over the next three years, I'd ask that you continually use that image of who are going to be three years from now to make decisions and to make changes today that will fit that future you. It'll be important. That image of a FUTURE YOU will be the basis upon which you communicate with others and decide how you take action.

Once INTENTIONS are clear and driving decisions and plans, we can more on to the next thing…BEHAVIOR. With clear INTENTIONS we can start focusing on the behavior it will take for us to get to the FUTURE SELF place. This will drive additional decisions and formulations and re-formulations of STRUCTURE and continual adjustments to GRAND STRATEGY and the creation of GAME PLANS and all the rest of the stuff that is Master-Mind Alliance. 

All from a simple question about three years hence. It’s a big deal this little question.

STRESS BE GONE

Stress has been called the silent killer, because unbridled run-away stress can have a disastrous effect on our health: heart attack, stroke, diabetes, insanity, certain cancers and other life-shortening human maladies and pesky unpleasant chronic conditions or bad habits often have stress as a significant contributing factor. Yup, stress can kill us, probably won’t kill us, at least not today. But normal everyday stress, or more accurately our reaction to it, will surely cause us grief at times, can make us feel a little crazy once in a while and can make it so we waste a lot of our energy as well as give us plenty about which to worry needlessly. And besides hurting us physically and emotionally, unbridled stress can also ruin our otherwise perfectly good business. We cannot let that happen.

Truthfully, we cannot get rid of all the stress in our life, so we ought not to waste our time trying. Besides we need some stress to motivate us, otherwise we’d never get out of bed in the morning. Clearly we don’t want a level of stress that makes us sick or anxious or worried all the time or the kind that makes us feel like we need to work 12 hour days because that destroys our business.

It would be smart of us to spend some quality time understanding all we can about how the stress in our lives affects us. We’d be doing ourselves a brilliant favor if we’d master effective healthy ways to react to stress. Maybe it’s time for us to build some new life habits particularly concerning what we eat and how much exercise we get. And surely we want to learn to channel our reaction to the pressure, anxiety and tension we encounter into healthy outlets so we’re rarely if ever living in overwhelm mode and freaking out needlessly. And working 12 hours days, who wants that? Yup, dealing more effectively with ordinary stress, that’d be good!

WE CAN DO ANYTHING

One of the oldest rivalries in college football is between University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California and the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. It just so happens that I grew up in South Bend and my family had season tickets the Notre Dame games. I was a big fan. We went to all the home games and I knew about the USC rivalry. So when we went to the USC games, I played close attention to everything that happened. And at one of these games, my life changed.

Somewhere, during the first half, the USC running back made a nice first down and time out was called. During that time out, the play-by-play announcer just casually happened to mention that the USC running back was an Academic All-American… who also had the distinction of graduating from his high school at age 15. Then he started USC the fall of that year. I was 9 years old at the time so I found that very interesting. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The announcer went on to say that this young man had already finished all of his academic graduation requirements and had entered into medical school at USC. So, while he was on the football team he was also going to medical school—at the same time! I was flabbergasted, dumfounded, literally stunned! Here’s why.

My father, grandfather, grandmother and one of my uncles were all physicians. For years I had heard stories about how hard, extremely stressful and all-consuming it was to get into and then graduate from medical school. So the idea of playing on a football team while going to medical school at the same time seemed impossible to me. How could anyone do that? I could hardly manage elementary school and I didn’t play any sport.

Well, suffice to say I was fascinated about this. And although I had no name for it, didn’t know what to call it, at that moment my interest in the concept we now call Peak Performance and the Psychology of Achievement began. And I wanted to know more about this stuff.

I left the stadium that day feeling challenged. I wanted to look at my life and see if I could do any more than just muddle along like I’d always done. Could I possibly be really good at something? This is what I asked myself for the first time.

THE LESSON HERE IS YES, WE CAN DO GREAT THINGS. We have to understand, as I did thanks to that football game experience long ago, that if other people can do great things—can excel to great heights, achieve mastery over something, do wonderful things in sports or business or any facet of life—if others can do it, we might be able to do it too. At a minimum, we can always to better. This is what I learned at that football game on a cold winter day in South Bend when I was just a kid. And I’ve never forgotten it.

WINNING MONEY MAKING GRAND STRATEGY

I once wrote a book entitled “How Come You’re Not Rich Yet?” That’s a favorite question I like to ask business owners. Here’s why. We know how people can get rich in business. It’s not a secret. You just have to do enough of what’s known to work. Now it won’t be easy, but we do know what do to. And if you want to grow real big, you can become a millionaire or a billionaire if you want that.

Speaking of getting rich, Forbes Magazine recently published their annual list of billionaires in the world today. There are 1153 of them. I think the list needs some further refinement because some of these billionaires did nothing to make their money. They are on the list only because they inherited their wealth from a previous generation. I don’t care about them. I’m interested in the billionaires who are not members of the Wal-Mart family or the Saudi Arabian sheikdom and who did not literally stumble into a long lost pirate treasure. The self-made entrepreneurial billionaires in the world are the people I want to talk about. And every single one of those boys and girls is an owner of an extremely profitable business, that they founded, that serves many (or large) customers. It is from their personal creativity coupled with the sweat of their very hard work that these individuals became billionaires.

Here’s the significant point. Every one of these self-made entrepreneurial billionaires has a GRAND STRATEGY that works splendidly. They’ve figured out how to do business excellently. They have what in the Master-Mind Alliance we call a DONE BUSINESS. That’s like having an MBA in your own business. And according to the money, the DONE BUSINESSES these self-made Forbes billionaires own has made them a ton of money.

Big time success in business for you, just like for the entrepreneurial billionaires in the world, requires splendid GRAND STRATEGY. GRAND STRATEGY includes many things. The centerpiece, the engine that drives GRAND STRATEGY is your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR. That’s the fire in the belly… and it must be splendid and stay splendid. 

SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR is all the things you say and all the things do that bring in the money. That has got to work. And you got to be able to do enough of it. Then, when you have access to a large enough pool of potential buyers… because your marketing works… you ought to be able to make as much money as you could ever want, right? YES.

If you have splendid GRAND STRATEGY and if you routinely wield splendid SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR and if you routinely have access to a large enough pool of potential buyers of what you sell… there’s no reason in the world why you cannot get rich… if that is what you so desire, because that’s all it ever takes, that’s all it has ever taken and all it will ever take to get rich.  

SPLENDID GRAND STRATEGY, SPLENDID SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR and a SPLENDID CONNECTION TO A POOL OF POTENTIAL BUYERS… what else could you ever want for your business?

Now then, if you’re not RICH YET, or close to it… the only reason for that is that your GRAND STRATEGY is not yet SPLENDID. Something is askew. Your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR needs some improvement. Or, maybe it works just fine, but for some reason, you’re unable to do enough of it.

Please understand this. With nine YES or NO questions, we can examine the causes for that being less that rich yet predicament and perhaps find a place to begin improvements. Go through this with me and let’s see.

1. Do you have a ROAD MAP, some document that sets forth crystal clear INTENTIONS about money goals, growth projections, time you want to spend working and such? YES/NO. If you answer NO to this we cannot go any further. We’ve found our place to start making improvements.

2. Do you sell goods, products and services that people genuinely need or want? YES/NO

3. Can people afford to buy those things from you? YES/NO.

4. When they buy from you do you make a decent profit? YES/NO.

5. Can you thoroughly describe your ideal best customer? YES/NO. If NO, you can’t go any further. You must know this cold.

6. Are you making enough potential buyers find out about you? Is your customer or client attraction process working smoothly? YES/NO. If the answer is NO, could it be that your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR needs some adjustment or perhaps a major overhaul? YES/NO.

When you consider the effectiveness of your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR and find that something is missing we need to get into that, don’t we? Yeah. Because if we can figure that out… and can remedy that situation, if we can make your SALES GENERATION BEHAVIOR, including your marketing and advertising, work better, then you just need to do more of that, right? Yup!

7. Do you know how to make your marketing work better? The answer to this question is often NO. Sometimes it’s a YES BUT, meaning you’re not doing enough of what you should be doing. When we get a YES BUT, we need to probe deeper into that.

8. Are you being constrained or held back? YES/NO. If you are being unnaturally inhibited we need to know by what or whom.

9. Finally, we come to this question. Do you think there are other people in the world who sell what you do… yet who make more money than you do? YES. How do they do that? Are they doing things you are not doing? DON’T KNOW. Would you like to find out? YES.

Okay, by running through these nine questions, we can find a starting point, a place from which to grow your business by making improvements in INTENTIONS, STRUCTURES and BEHAVIORS.

The thing that makes it possible to become a billionaire is splendid GRAND STRATEGY. GRAND STRATEGY is about INTENTIONS (goals, ambition and motivation) plus STRUCTURES (mechanisms, systems and arrangements that make it possible for a business to function and achievement to happen) and finally BEHAVIOR (all forms of appropriate business action and activity where the rubber meets the road).

A huge part of the DONE Business Solution is figuring out what needs to happen for you to make more money. Once we have a starting point, start making improvements to your SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR, improving the things you say and do to bring in the money, then your entire GRAND STRATEGY can function more SPLENDIDLY. As a business person, it’s your main job to arrange your life so you can do lots and lots of whatever your splendid SALES GENERATING BEHAVIOR happens to be.

Now one more thing about those self-made Forbes billionaires, in the beginning everyone one of them worked real hard to make themselves wealthy. But after a while, they didn’t work so hard anymore. They don’t even work smart. They worked BETTER… and BETTER is better. It just is. In fact, that’s the trick in life. You win by being BETTER. BETTER wins the day. So go out and Be BETTER By Choice. That’s what I leave you with here. You can do that. You know you that you can do BETTER because others have. And if others can do it, so can you.