You’re right it ain’t easy!

Start Small.

Give yourself a time limit.

Measure

Set up the Environment to Win

Conclusion

photo credit: quinn.anya

I remember a time when I was talking to a small business owner in Asia and asking him some questions about his business. He told me that he bought a certain product from his supplier at about 80 cents and then he sold it for $1.60. I congratulated him and said it was very good that he was making a 100% mark up on what he was selling. Very quickly he turned and told me that, no he only had a 50% mark up. When I pointed out the he was actually doubling his money and had a 100% mark up, he kept pointing out that I was wrong and the mark up was only 50%. No matter what i tried to do to convince him otherwise, he disagreed. I began to make the mistake of thinking this guy is stupid and I could feel that I was getting annoyed at his lack of math skills.

As the conversation went on, one of his sons came along and listened and laughed at our conversation. His son had a very good education overseas and quickly agreed with me that it was a 100% mark up. Not matter what we did to convince his father, the father though we were both stupid. Eventually I had to laugh at the situation and let it go. As i did that, something occurred to me. He was the one making the money. He was the one taking action and even if he didn’t describe in the correct academic way, he was the one getting the results he wanted. From that day on I realized that being smart had a lot less to do with being successful than I had ever thought.

So if intelligence isn’t the answer, what is?

At school we are taught to value intelligence as if it is gold . I suspect that most of us were taught to value it too much. Time and time again when I meet people who have achieved much success in life (both financial and non financial), their success hasn’t come from a great deal of intelligence, its come from the consistent actions they have taken, not from any large source of intelligence.

Look at most self made millionaires and a common theme that you see in many of them is that left school at a young age. Its true that most of them kept learning in the real world after they left school, but I think you would be hard pressed to find one of them that claims they were one of the smartest people in their industry. Many of them would claim though, that they were the ones who took action when other people stood still out of fear or out knowing better. You often hear them say things such as “I was too dumb to know that it wouldn’t work, so I made it work.”

Action Beats Smart

Time and time again when I meet people who are getting results that they want in life, they aren’t the people who are the smartest in the room. They are the people who implement the fastest. It surprises me so often that its not the people who talk the big talk and ask in depth and complicated questions, its the quiet person who comes up after the seminar and says “these are the 10 things I am doing and these are the results I am getting, what can I do next?”. These are the people that I love to talk to, because I know if I show them one small thing that they can do to improve their business or life, they will implement it. They won’t argue whether it will work for them or not. They won’t argue that their situation or location is different, and that that means that what works for others won’t work for them. They Nike it!! They just do it and more often than not they get the results they wanted. I think we all do this when we are achieving in our life.

Even the smallest bit of action will beat immense knowledge with no follow through.

What action have you taken today?

My challenge to you now is what action have you taken today that will take you closer to your goals. What action is getting the most traction in your life. Don’t let the quest for more knowledge or the self perceived belief that you aren’t intelligent enough stop you from taking small actions that will lead to big results. People (often including myself) are looking for the magic strategy or information that we think we need. Nine times out of ten the strategies we need are out there and easy to find, they don’t require a great deal of knowledge but they do require action.

I continually aim to remind myself of this. Re-starting posting to my blog is an example of action that I have needed to take for a long time, yet not followed through on, because I thought I needed to learn more about writing and blogging (and wordpress and plugins) and getting smarter. I was wrong!!! I needed to be posting and getting it wrong and learning from doing, rather than from reading or listening to others. So here it is my first post. I am sure that they will get better the more that I write but at least now I have taken the action, posted this and even have 3 more posts coming along the pipeline.

photo credit: Eddie~S

I was recently in Zurich Switzerland and had the good fortune to be taken to The Blindekuh (Blind Cow) Restaurant.

The Blindekuh is a restaurant where everything inside the dinning room is totally pitch black. There is no light in there what so ever. Basically by walking into the dinning room you loose your sense of sight. You become blind. Totally.

At first myself and others at my table had the illusion that we could still see our own hands moving in front of our faces, even though we couldn’t see anything else. I put this to the test by getting a friend’s hand in front of my face (an inch away), only to find that I couldn’t see it at all. It had been a trick that my mind was playing on me by making me think I could see my hands.

The experience for me was amazing. After the few initial minutes of feeling wary and concern about where my hands were and if I was going to knock over my glass etc wore off, I began to relax in to the realization that I no longer had my sight to rely on.

Listening to people’s voices took on a whole new level of awareness. The tables are shared and seat 6-8 people, so our small group of three joined a table by another group of 3 Americans. During the whole lunch I never got to see these people at all, I only had the sense of sound and topics of our conversation from which to evaluate them.

The thing that struck me most about the whole experience was the ability to try living in someone else’s shoes. Being in that pitch-black room, gave me (even if just for a few hours) the experience of being blind in the world.

Simple things take on a whole new dimension with out sight. Things taste different, sounds become more precise and simple functions such as using a knife and fork or pouring a drink become a mechanical challenge of wit and logic.

Our senses are our external filters of the outside world from which we create a model of that world in our brains. By loosing a sense and especially the sense that you rely on the most, suddenly that ‘model of the world’ changes drastically.

Not only do we no longer see, but we are also forced to think in a whole new way, which opens up possibilities that we hadn’t thought of before. Pouring water into a glass with out sight, is not as hard it may seem when you know to put your finger in the glass to measure when the glass is full. This is just a small practical example of the ways your brain finds to get around the lack of sight.

I left the restaurant with a profound respect for people who are blind, but not out of sympathy for them, but rather out of the fact that they have ability that most of us lack. The ability to function in a different way, yet still achieve the majority of results that we can and perhaps some we can’t

While I have heard some people freak out in the dark and have the sense of claustrophobia, for me the whole experience was a freeing one and certainly one that I would recommend everyone try if they are given the chance.

By trying on other peoples ‘model of the world’ whether that be their beliefs, values or their lack of certain physical filters such as sight, it often shines a spotlight on areas of our own ‘model of the world’ which are far too often covered in darkness.

The Obsession of Passion – What you gives you OCD, will often give you your success.

People often ask me at my seminars, about how they find can find their true passion and often my answer is something along the lines ‘you will know it when you find it, so keep trying new things till you find it’.

While this may often seem a short and succinct reply to a truly in depth question, the simple fact is that most people don’t try many new activities once they become an adult.

Adam Savage is known to many of you as one of the presenters from the Myth-Busters show on the discovery channel. I am a fan of the show and the fundamental ways they test assumptions to see what actually is myth and what is plausible.

Much of what I have done in modeling of people is based on the similar approach of looking for what really gives a person the results they got and is it possible to be reproduced by others in a different setting.

What most people don’t know about Adam Savage was that he was a model and prop builder before he became TV celebrity. He worked in the special effects industry, working on many films including some of the Star Wars films. His passion is building things and seeing how well he can create or reproduce something.

The following video is a fantastic example of someone’s passion and the lengths they will go to follow that passion. If you are looking to find one of the reason’s Adam Savage has been successful, then this video really shows you the simple fact of how much he loves what he does, that he goes far, far, far beyond what a normal person would do in pursuit of that passion. Make sure you watch the through till the last sentence.

I have found everybody that I have modeled using NLP and Neuro-Action, had a deep passion about the skill that they did. While other people look for their ‘motivation’, I have found that their ‘passion’ is really driving force in their life and most often what drives them to reach them level of success in their particular skill or occupation.

This can be seen in a Steve Jobs who has a deep passion for creating new innovation around technology, to a Bill Gates whose passion lay in software, through to artists, musicians and most people who have been successful at what they did.

So how to find your passion? Ask yourself the following questions:

What would you do for free?

Most of the successful people that I have modeled weren’t motivated by money, even though they had made a lot of money. They loved what they did and often commented that they would be happy to do it for free.

What do you strive to be the best at?

A true passion often drives a good sense of competition. When we are really passionate about something then we tend to want to get as absolutely as good as we can possibly be.

What activities, seem to make time stop still when you are doing them?

When we are really deep in our passion, we often have the sensation that time stands still. When you take a break from it, you are often shocked at actually how much time has gone by. When I was really into writing music and producing albums, I had one time when it suddenly occurred to me that I had been working on a track for 22 hours straight with out even realizing it.

What do you enjoying talking about with friends, search the Internet for or actively seek info about?

Often we the subjects we like to communicate with people about are what fuels our deepest passions. Most people naturally like to share what they are passionate about with other people. What do you enjoying getting into deep discussion about?

These ideas are only scratching the surface, but they do give you some starting points for finding your true passion and what that could be in your life.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that simply following your passion alone is what will make you rich and famous. There are many other elements that go into harnessing your passion into profit that need to be followed, but at least knowing your passion is a start, that many people have yet to discover.

The ultimate mind trick is to accurately read someone’s mind and know what they are thinking, with out any fancy card forces or magic tricks. This is often achieved by frauds and scam artists using a technique called ‘Cold Reading’. When I first learnt NLP I modeled ‘Cold Reading’ from two sources and found it to be extremely effective at making people think that you could read their mind and tell their future.

At one party I went to I took out a normal deck of cards and used them as prop while I used cold reading to read all my girlfriend’s friends. Later in the night many people came up to me and professed that I had been the best fortune-teller they had ever met (this was in an Asian culture where people going to a fortune teller, was quite common).

For me I did it as fun exercise to check the ability that I had modeled and I deliberately set up an empowering future for all of the people I worked with, yet unfortunately many people use it, to claim to speak to the dead, talk of magic abilities and generally to get large sums of money out of people.

While we can read many of the things in peoples minds (such as they way they are thinking and style of their thinking), we are still unable to read their exact and precise thoughts. UNTIL NOW that is.

As science gets better and better at learning how our brains work we are starting to see some truly amazing milestones in the technology of brain scanning.

This story from CBS 60 Minutes shows exactly how far technology has come to being able to make this simple little feat available to computers and perhaps in the future everyone, including the government.

Watch CBS Videos Online

What is really interesting in this story is the whole concept of reading people’s intentions. Will the future be something like the movie ‘Minority Report’? Will people be scanned before getting on a plane to see if they have the intention to blow up that plane?

As the rate of our technology advances, I wonder if we are advancing at the same rate as a society to handle the many ethical issues related to this kind of technology.

The future is always interesting.

Let the conversation begin. (Photo: eye2eye)

Welcome to my blog.

Hi everybody and welcome to my blog.

I’ve put it off for a few years now, but I’ve finally taken the action and I’m going to start my own blog and here it is.

What is the blog going to be about?  Actually I’m going to have more than one blog. One of the reasons why I put it off for so long was that I was trying to decide which topics to write a blog about and basically I decided have a few blogs. As some of you know one of the things that I’m working on a lot at the moment are the Strategies of Business Genius books: that go along with the course that I’m sure some of you have already done and that’s going to have its own blog at strategiesofbusinessgenius.com/blog

I am also going to have a blog about one my favourite topics which is all about Persuasion and even though I don’t teach this as much nowadays, now that I’ve got other people who have started to teach it, I still am extremely passionate about Persuasion and so I’m going to be having one blog dedicated just to Persuasion things and that’s going to be at www.persuasionsales.com/blog and that’s going to be really all about different elements of Persuasion, both in sales situations and also in non sale situations. In fact I’ve already done an interesting post for that, about the upcoming presidential debates and what’s going on with the Persuasion skills of John McCain and Barack Obama.

That leaves this blog and this blog is sort of going to be my main blog that I am going to have general ideas and general things about a variety of different topics and some of the things I am going to be talking about here will include NLP, they’ll include lot of things about Neuro-Action. Neuro-Action is starting to become a lot more popular around the world now and so I am going to be talking some things about that. I’m also going to be talking about technology and how technology is changing so quickly and how you can put yourself in a position to benefit from that technology as either an executive, someone who is working for a big company or also as an entrepreneur, someone who is starting up and running your own company.

Here I am going to put in a lot of the things, I find around the net, and a lot of tips that, I’ve got a team of researchers looking for new useful information constantly for me and some of the things they find are really, frankly amazing. So what I’ll be doing is putting some of that information here and maybe even making some videos about some of the cool things I find and putting them up as well.

Now, how am I doing this blog? If you’re listening to the audio part of this, this is me actually recording it. If you are reading this blog, there’s a good chance that basically the written part is a transcription of the audio file. So, while I’ll probably log in sometimes and write my on posts, the majority of the time what I’m going to be doing is recording audio’s and putting them up so that you can listen to the audio and some of my staff will then take that audio and then transcribe it and put that as actually the blog post, so really you’ve got a number of different choices of how to get access to the information, you can either listen to the audio and we are actually sort of looking at how to set it all up so it’s going to come through iTunes as well or you can actually focus on just reading it like a normal blog.

So, anyway if you have any questions, please feel free to post it in the comments and I’ll certainly be checking in it on every now and then.  I am currently planning to try and put up at least one new post every week about some of the things, sometimes that a little bit hard with me travelling and being in different places but I’ll certainly attempt to do that and I’ve already made a list of some of the things I want talk about on the blogs, so check back quite often and you’ll see a lot of new things here. So until then I’ll sign off and talk to you soon.