Archive for July 26th, 2007

Secrets #3 & 4 of the 9 Inner Secrets of Personal Success

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

I figured let’s get more of these secrets out sooner – so I’m going to be posting 2/day

Secret #3:  Do one proactive thing a day

You don’t need to do 100 things a day.  Just get that one proactive thing a day.  So each little brick builds a big wall for you.  Trust me it’s easy to be overwhelmed with hundreds of tasks.  You’re like, “Oh, I need to do ezine ads, create my autoresponders, do joint ventures, set up Pay-per-click campaigns, my affiliate program, write sales copy and I need to do all this other stuff.”

 Ahhhhhhhhhhh!

But just relax and do one task a day.

Your action will create more and more and more action for you. You simply need to make a commitment to do one proactive thing a day no matter what. Even if you’re dead tired and worked a 14-hour day job – come home and mail one letter or send out one joint venture proposal. I’m telling you – just these little tiny proactive things will have an immense impact.

Most everyone has heard of the ’80/20 rule’ or the Pareto Principle. It says that 20% of your actions produce 80% of your results, and the other way around.  80% of your work only creates 20% of your results.

So go back and look where your successes came from, and I know that they’re from a tiny little group of actions.  So if you just get that one proactive thing a day (from the 20% group) that is going to propel you further, that’s going to bring you to where you want to be.

Make it a point to focus on those “20% activities”. In Stephen Covey’s famous work “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” he calls these activities “important but not urgent”. One of my original Apprentices, Peter Woodhead, from the UK is a perfect example of simply doing one proactive thing a day. A lot of Apprentices bolted out of the gate during our one year program but Peter was an Internet newbie and he also had a full time job so he was a bit slower getting started. However, he took my advice and simply managed to do one proactive thing every single day. No matter how big or how small. It could be writing one autoresponder message or it might have been writing 50 headlines. No matter the day – Peter was moving ahead. And not surprisingly his project was completed before many of the other Apprentices were finished.

Secret #4:  Unless You Deliver Exceptional Value – You Will Not Get Rich 

This is something critical that I look at in my planner every single day, when I wake up.  This is one of my cores values. 

It says “I get rich by enriching others 10 times to 100 times what they pay me in return”.

So any product, any service, or absolutely anything I offer, must deliver 10 times to 100 times in value. 

When you deliver that much value, when you over-deliver, the marketplace compensates you.  There’s no other way around it.  This is an unyielding natural law.  This goes along with a famous quote motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar frequently uses and that is “You can get anything you want if you help enough people get what they want.”

There’s no other way that it could possibly occur.  If you deliver shoddy crap, you’re not going to get rich for very long and the marketplace is going to find out about you, and you’ll be out of business. The marketplace is always self-correcting.
 
So the only real strategy to enduring and lasting wealth is to over-deliver as much as you can, and provide as much value.

Think about it. If a customer purchases a product or service from you and they paid $100 but it makes them $1000 – do you think they’ll buy something else from you? Of course. Plus, when you are selling dollars for dimes – it makes it a whole lot easier to sell your product. Too many people only want to do ‘just enough’ or just get-by. That’s the wrong attitude.

Okay look out for #5 and #6 coming up next…