Why You’re Not Achieving Your Business Goals (and what to change so you do)

I believe that there is huge danger of something called complacency. There is a danger of complacency where you are getting the experience where you are never reevaluating. What happens is a month, a year or three months goes by and you are never looking back and reevaluating for success or failure. You never look back for success or failure and you become very complacent. Then, a year from now you go, “I never really achieved my goals. Why not?”. It was not because you were not working hard and it was not because you do not have mentoring. It could just be that you never evaluated so you could make changes. It would be like hitting 1200 golf balls, 40 a day for 30 days. If you never evaluated your swing, all you would be doing is perfecting bad habits. You would have 20 yards for 1200 balls.

There is this process of constantly asking, “Is this working?” I remember starting the process of writing articles in this business. The process would just like this: I wrote an article, I put it online, and I probably checked it every five minutes to see if somebody had viewed it. Have you ever done that? You go back and check it every five minutes to see if someone had viewed your article and every time you check it there is one more view there, but you did not know that that it was you because you kept on viewing it? Have you had anything happen like that? I imagine that is what happened to me my first day. I clicked my article 35 times and I thought 35 people had viewed my article.

So, tomorrow, I say “Great, I’m going to write another article. The next day I’m going to write another one.”And then, after 20 of them, I can look back at the stats and say, “Which one got the most views?” Well, the one that wrote on the first day! (That was a joke.) Seriously, you look and you go back and see which one got the most views and you go,”Why, what is different? Was the subject line longer, was it shorter, was it a shorter article, was it a lesser article, what is it, was a random chance?” You can say, “I don’t care if it’s random chance or not, I’m going to try and duplicate this article for the next 20.” Then you do that and another one becomes a winner, but now that you have two winners, you can compare them side-by-side and say, “What’s the difference between these two winners and the other 38 losers?”

After a while, you are able to make it work where more than half of your articles are winners. The same with videos, it’s also the same thing with creating new products. It’s the same thing with designing a clothing line. Perhaps you are in the business of designing clothing and you do 20 pieces of clothing, then you take them to the local market and 19 of them don’t sell, but one of them, you get enough orders to keep you going for a whole year. Now, one thing that you can do is dump the other 19 or you could do what successful entrepreneurs do and ask yourself, “Why is this one selling and the other ones are not? What is different?” Why? Because you have to fill that experience bucket.

There is a danger letting time slip by. Time slips by. Eight hours in a day, gone. You look back at the day and ask, “What did I do. I don’t know, I am not sure.” The easiest way to evaluate your eight hours and to know what you did is to have a timer that goes off every 15 minutes that asks you what you are doing and you just write it down. At the end of the day you will be able to see what you are doing.

Does that ever happen, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, you don’t know what you did this month? You know you worked hard, you have a hard work ethic, you were in the office, you were on the computer, you logged the time, but you don’t know what you did. The only way that you’re going to find out is that every 15 minutes or every hour, you write down what you did. Do that for a whole month and you will be amazed at what happens. I’m not going to even tell you what happens, that is outside the scope of this training. Just do it. You have to watch time like a hawk.

You see, I think time management is a misnomer. We do not manage time, time happens. You get one minute, every minute for 60 minutes for every hour just like I do. You do not manage it either because management implies that you can change it. You cannot change time because one minute to you is the same minute is one minute to me, we both get 60 seconds and every hour we get 60 minutes, and in every eight hour day, we get eight segments of 60 minutes.

Why do some people get more done in that time than other people? It is not because some people are faster than others, it is not because some people think faster than others, it is not because anybody is managing time because you are not managing time, you cannot manage time. Time ticks on the matter what. What you can manage is your own actions during the time, you can say, “During the 60 minutes of time I’m only going to work on this.” If you are tempted, get software that will block your computer that will not allow you to go to any of the website that distracts you.

Force your computer to not allow you to go anywhere that tempts you. Anywhere that wastes your time. You have to watch time like a hawk. You have to make decisions wrong or right. Remember we were talking about this idea, and perhaps we spent a long time on this, but I’d rather over-emotionalize this then under-emotionalize this. Why? Because, no matter what the facts are, regardless of what the logic is, the thing that on an hourly basis motivates us, usually has emotion attached to it. If there is no emotion attached to it, we don’t go after it.

If we don’t stoke the fire of emotion, then nothing happens. And so, here we have this fire of experience, you realize that you need experience and you realize that failure is not matter. You no longer have a fear of failure. Say that to yourself, “I no longer have a fear of failure, I do not care if I fail”. You probably have never been able to say that you yourself, have you? I do not care if I fail. I don’t! Because, if I fail, it would only let me know what I did wrong so the next time I don’t fail so bad. I do not have any fear of failure because tomorrow I can do a better job. Because, tomorrow I can do a better job and I can put the failure behind me.