Experience Is A Great Teacher...

...But Let It Be Someone Else's!

80% of small business fail within the first year, and 95% fail within 5 years. Horrifying statistics.

How do you increase your chances of success?

Well apart from doing all the things suggested on this blog...

Get some High Level Mentoring, and create a Mastermind Group.

Find an expert who has been there and done that, someone who's done it all before, and been successful at it. 

Don't reinvent the wheel.

What will it cost you, in time and money, if you have to make all the mistakes yourself, before you learn how to do it profitably?

You might have to pay handsomely for your mentor, but it will be surely worth it.

That brings us to the Mastermind group. 

Surround yourself with people who are experts in all the areas you are weak in.
Take property investment for example, something I am passionate about.

In my first attempt at property investment, I had the idea that I could do it all myself. I'd read the books, been to the seminars, it seemed easy. Well I bought at least one dud property that cost me years of heartache, and probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. I also left a lot of money on the table by not structuring loans properly, not getting depreciation reports, etc. etc.

Luckily I had the opportunity to start all over again. I know a few people who either went bankrupt, or died way too early, from (I hallucinate) the stress caused by bad investments.

Second time around I got a mentor, someone who had done it all before, and was continuing to do it. And I surrounded myself with experts, a mastermind group. I got someone to find the locations, someone to manage the building contractors, a lawyer to handle the legals, a mortgage broker to handle the loans, people to manage the properties, and an accountant to make sure I'm reducing my tax and have the proper financial structures in place. These weren't the cheapest people I could find, they were the best. What do I do, you might be asking? I check my bank accounts once a month, and answer the occasional email from the real estate agent.

I've never been inside my properties, and I don't intend to, that's what I pay the real estate agent to do. If I have any questions or challenges, I pick up the phone and call one of my mastermind group. They deal with investment properties every day. They have the answers. They've done it all before.

Similarly in my business, I surround myself with experts. If I have questions on how to put a package together, or promote a seminar, etc. I call or email a few people, discuss what I want to do, and listen to their advice. I don't try to re-invent the wheel. Yes I'm smart and I could probably figure it out myself eventually. But the really smart way is to find out what has already worked and do that. Once I know how to do that, maybe I can make it better.

Be smart. Get a Mentor. Get a Mastermind Group.

To your success,
Trevor Long

To Train, Or Not To Train Too?

In the previous post we asked if attending trainings and seminars is worth it.

If that's you, did you first determine WHAT DO YOU WANT?

And then after that, did you determine specifically the exact training with the right person who would give you “the thing” you needed to move forward?

No one knows everything. That is why it is so important to always be learning from others who can teach us that which we want to do.

LEARNING IS GROWING

You can be the most talented person in the world, but if you stop learning, your days on top are numbered.

What type of training should you spend your time and money on?

ALL learning is good, but when it comes to creating rapid results, you must determine if you require SKILLS training, or HABIT & MINDSET training

Here’s how to figure out what training to do next.

Spend some quiet time, meditating, mind mapping, journaling, or whatever works best for you, and seriously ask yourself:

How do you want to BE in the world?
What do you want to create and DO in the world?
What do you want to HAVE as a result?
Why?

Then, you’ll notice a GAP from where you are now, to where you want to be.

Now ask yourself, what is going to rapidly close this gap?

What do you need to learn to take you to where you want to be?

Doing the training we actually need is what gets us over our fears.

Last year I overcame a serious fear of my own, by attending a Sales Training. It was a ridiculous and limiting fear. Yet attending the training I realized that sales is just a process using techniques that I already knew, in a specific order. What was there to be afraid of?!

Whether it's Skills or Mindset and Habit training you choose to learn next, make sure you make it a part of your success PLAN. What do you want? And what do you need to step into what you ultimately desire?

If your goal is to become a millionaire, will QuickBooks training get you there? (Hint - no)

Don't just sign up for another training because you got caught up in the moment, and the presenter gave you a sob story, or had you waving your credit card in the air and running to the back of the room for a free prize. Make sure it is specific to your goal and that it will help you close the gap.

You must become intentional about the education you choose to take, and from whom. This will save you time and money, and get you there faster.

To your success,
Trevor Long

Train Your Brain For Success

Just as its easier to learn a new sport when your body is in shape, the same is true for our brains.

Whether it's learning a new skill, or starting a new business venture, it will be much easier when your brain is fit and healthy.

If your brain is in poor condition, you will have a hard time training it for success.

However, if you keep your brain running at an optimal performance rate then teaching it to start thinking like a success becomes a much easier task.

Let's look at a few areas we can focus on to improve our brain health. 

Improve your physical health
The condition of your body affects the condition of your brain. Keeping your brain active is a great way to guard against mind slip but studies have shown that without regular exercise, extra stimulation doesn't have an effect on our brain health.
You are both mind and body. Both need to be used and kept in shape. 

Improve your diet
The foods we eat have a huge impact on how we feel, perform, and even how well our brains perform. I highly recommend that you study the work of Dr Daniel Amen, who has studied over 80,000 living brains, for a more in depth of all things to do with brain health, especially brain diet.

Improve your sleep
Sleep helps restore the brain by flushing out toxins that build up during waking hours.
 We all know sleep is important, but do we know why? Sleep is crucial for storing memories, as well as having a restorative function. Lack of sleep on the other hand can impair reasoning, interfere with your ability to problem solve, and diminish your ability to pay attention to detail.
As a frequent international flyer, I can attest that a lack of sleep has very similar effects to being drunk.
Studies even show that lack of sleep can cause your brain to shrink. Not good for training a successful brain.

How can you get a better sleep?
Well, it can be as easy as picking up an eye mask and some ear plugs.Light and noise can negatively affect your quality of sleep.
Cut out caffeine after 1pm.
Turn off your email, Facebook, phone, etc at least an hour before bedtime.
Write down all your tasks and ideas for tomorrow, that way they are not bouncing around your brain all night.
List your gratitudes as you drift off to sleep. You cannot be stressed or anxious if you are in a state of gratitude.

Take care of yourself to have the best chance of reaching your success goals. 

Obviously physical and brain health is a huge topic, and a very important topic, this blog post can barely scratch the surface. I highly recommend you make physical and brain health a top goal, and
do your own research, get a coach who specialises in this area, see a chiropractor, a dietitian or naturopath, etc.

To your success,
Trevor Long

Do You Understand Your Market?

No matter how good you are at what you do, without paying clients, you won't be doing it very long!

Love it or hate it, there comes a time when you have to do sales and marketing, which are two very different subjects.

Let's talk about market research, and how if done correctly, can be the ace up your sleeve.

You can use market research to find out where trends are going, and stay ahead of the game.

For example, perhaps you are personal trainer that wants to work with teens, but you find all your clients are middle aged males. Would you still concentrate your marketing efforts towards teens?

One of the first things to do is a Competitive Analysis of successful businesses in a similar field as your own. If you are currently a one man band, still look at what the big companies are doing.

This will allow you get a good look at what it is they are doing to reach those levels of success. There is much to learn from this process.

Also look on Youtube.com, search for your topic, and sort by most viewed, this will show you what is popular and trending. I'm no fitness coach, but you would have to be living under a rock not to see that 'cross-fit' (whatever that is!) is becoming hugely popular. If you are still trying to promote calisthenics, you might just find yourself losing market share.

What’s working for others that could work for you? 
What has not worked in your industry that you can avoid? 

Make sure you are not so focused on your business that you forget to come up for air and survey whats going on around them, or even survey your own clients.

Once you have done your research, use the power of visualisation to create your own simulations of how making different decisions will affect your business.

It's not only athletes that use visualisation as part of their training regime, musicians do it to get ready for performances, and you can do it to for your business. Your coach can assist you with this.

The idea is to visualise your outcome and walk through the steps it will take to get to where you want to be. 

Visualise your business operating at the levels it needs to be to hit your desired level of success.

What do you need to be doing differently or more proficiently?

Spend some time seeing yourself doing it. Then your body will have an easy task of playing catch up, instead of having to figure everything out on its own.

If you haven't already done so, work out your customer avatar - your ideal average client.

Using the example of the fitness coach above, perhaps his could be male, 35-45yo, married, executive or business owner earning over $80Kpa, keen to live a healthy active lifestyle.

Actions To Take:

• Define your Avatar
• Block off at least an hour a week to do market research
• Do a competitive analysis of success businesses in the same field as your own.
• Analyse the data.
• Wrtie down ideas as they come to you.
• Visualise how you would use those ideas.
• TEST - try a new idea,
• FAIL FASTER - try a new idea every week and notice what works.

Yes, I said fail. Not everything you do will work, but don't keep flogging a dead horse, keep trying new things until you find the ideas that work.

To your success,
Trevor Long

Develop and Expand Your Inner Circle

You must have heard the the rule of "Your net worth is the average of the five people you spend the most time with."

By following this principle, you can raise your level of success simply by surrounding yourself with successful people and/or millionaires.

Sounds easy enough right? But how do you go about finding millionaires, or whoever it is that you you want in your life, want to emulate, to grow to be like?  

Take a moment now to check in with yourself to review your inner circle.

Do they have the income and or wealth that you desire?

Do they have the relationships that you crave?

Do they have the health and body shape that you want?

Do they have the skills you wish to acquire?

Do they have the lifestyle you aspire to?

We are continually evolving and need to continually review of who and what we bring into our lives. This doesn’t mean you have to drop all your old friends, however, it is sometimes necessary to remove negative influences that bring you down.

Don't be a S.N.I.O.P!

First, you need a target to aim for.

Make a list of 20 wealthy and/or successful people you want as a part of your inner circle. Maybe people you have not thought of yet...

Once you have your list, determine 2-3 people who inspire you and focus on making a connection with them, right away.

You must become intentional about creating new, beneficial relationships.

Reading about someone's success, and how they achieved it is extremely beneficial, but being able to pick up the phone and make a call, or send an email, or go for coffee, is way better.

One way to do this is to think of the most successful person in your community. Now think of how you can make a connection with them...

What clubs are they apart of? What events do they attend? What charities do they sponsor? These are all great opportunities to make a connection and break the ice.

When reaching out always remember to provide value. No one likes to feel like they are being used, or to be pestered by someone who wants something for nothing.

Spend some time focused on making new connections that will help you reach your success goals. This will be time well spent, and could lead to new lifelong friendships, and even partnerships.

This is not about finding a mentor or coach. We’ll cover in a future blog.

Go and meet and connected with even more people… YES! More! We can never have too large of a network, especially in this “small world.” You just never know what will come of one connection that you make at one event. (Consider this a "kick in the pants" to get crack'in on your network expansion for 2015!).

How is this relevant to your future success? Well, a successful brain is trained to constantly expand and evolve. It’s never too shy to reach out and make new connections with people of influence.

Like they say… “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

I once attended a free seminar that was selling speaker training. I had no intention of buying the training, however the guy I was sitting next to turned into a business partner. It was certainly worth going out of my way to meet new people.

So right now in this moment, sit up taller, shine your confidence forth to the world, act from where you want to be, and the next time you go to an event, approach those people who you may have turned away from introducing yourself to in the past because you didn’t feel confident enough.

Step into your power. Step into the knowing that you are already successful.

To your success,

Trevor Long

OWN Your Topic

Once you have read 20 books on a topic you OWN that topic.

It's true. But how many people do it? Not many.

But guess what? Successful people do. Millionaires do. And so will you.

It's so easy to get started, with services from Amazon & Kindle, The Book Depository, etc. You can also pickup magazines on your topic, though the content is often not as in depth.

It’s even easier to take in great audio book through services like Audible. There are also video programs, or you can watch The History channel or The Biography channel for biographies.

But how often do you actually take the time to consume GOOD content?

Make sure that you’re taking the time to read about the things you actually want in your life.

Order a new book, or subscribe to a magazine that directly pertains to where you want to go and how you want to show up in the world. 

Instead of watching a movie, or the tennis, or a soap, or another series, watch a biography this weekend of an amazing person whose success you want to emulate.

Australians on average watch about 3 hours TV a day!

It’s time to get serious about your self-study. Knowledge is power.

Go online and find a book list on your topic.

Read what the giants who have gone before you wrote to create that which you most want to have & experience in life. It's that easy. Success leaves clues. They wrote them in books.

If you have read everything on the book list, fantastic! Read them again. Cover to cover.

If you haven't read them. Get moving, get reading.

Read for 15 mins before bed. This will fill your subconscious with good stuff that it can go to work on while you sleep.

If there are questions to answer, or exercises to do, (very common in self development books), go to a cafe, and spend some time just for yourself to answer the questions, and go through the exercises. Don't worry about getting it right, just get words on the paper, do it quickly, you can always refine it later, it's more important to get it flowing.

Start applying what you read.

Share and teach what you have read, it will make it so much more clear for you, and embed it even deeper.

Then watch your success take off.

To your success,

Trevor Long

Learn anything in 10 or 20 hours

Learn anything in 10 or 20 hours

I want to show you how to teach yourself any skill extremely quickly.

We get better at we repeatedly do. For example, if you want to learn to write, the best way is to start writing (just as I did with this blog!).

'They' say, if you want to be an expert in anything, there's a rule that you need 10,000 hours doing that thing. 10,000 hours equates to years of your life to master a skill. Not very cool is it?

That's rather daunting too. And it's not really necessary unless you want to be at the level of Andy Murray or Roger Federer. Well, what if I told you there was a 1,000 hour rule, a 100 hour rule, and even a 10 hour rule? (And a 20 hour rule according to Josh Kaufman).

If you practice something for 1,000 hours straight, you will most likely be in the top percentage in the world. You won’t be a Novak Djokovic, but you will be extremely better than the average person at whatever you do.

Most people don’t have the patience to stick at something for this long. In fact, the majority of people don’t have the patience to stick with anything for too long. Most people don't finish reading a book, or completing a course, there is an awful lot of 'shelf help' out there. So here’s where you get a leg up… by doing what the majority is not willing to do, so that you can have what others can't.

If you practice something for 100 hours straight, you will most likely be “good” at whatever you are doing. Our brains quickly adapt.

If you practice something for 10 hours straight. You will most likely be “OK” at whatever you are doing.

Our brains make the first gains in the first 10 to 100 hours of practicing a new skill. After that progress is much slower.

So put in the first 10 or 20 hours into a new skill (less than a day!) to impress yourself, your friends and colleagues, with whatever new skill you want to develop.

Put ten hours into that new skill you want to learn. You will be surprised how fast you can get past that initial “newbie” phase.

What is the one main skill that you want to learn and master in order to advance yourself and increase your value?

Put in 1 hour right now. Everything is hard in the beginning. Get past the beginning.

This will take you...

To your success,
Trevor Long

If It Is To Be, It's Up To Me!

If It Is To Be, It's Up To Me!

Who is responsible for your success?

• Your Mum?
• Your Dad?
• Your Teachers?
• Your School/College/University?
• Your boss?
• Your Wife/Husband?
• The Government???
• or perhaps, just maybe, it's YOU?

YOU! It's definitely up to you. You are 100% responsible for your thoughts, your words, your behaviours, your actions and ultimately your success.

That can be a bitter pill to swallow.

I once heard Chris Howard say that "You create everything in your life, either by your actions, or your inactions".

That was a tough one for me. Did I create a bad marriage? Up until then I thought it was entirely her fault, but I had to admit I was at least partly responsible. Did I create a dead end job? Yes, I could have studied harder, followed a different path, started a business, been more diligent and engaged in the job. Did I create my out of shape body, Hell yes, but was all the fancy food and wine worth it in the end, hell no. Did I create my financial situation? Yep, see the bad marriage, it's a great way to lose half your wealth in one foul swoop, Etc. etc. Even if I didn't believe I was 100% responsible for everything, I was starting to see that I was at least partly responsible, and the more I thought about it, the more responsible I became.

So I chose to believe that I create everything in my life, that if it was to be, it was up to me and that I am 100% responsible for my thoughts, words and actions.

Try it on for size. Walk around with it for a few days or weeks, see how it feels.

It may be a little uncomfortable at first, but you will get used to feeling empowered and responsible. 

You can be at Cause instead of Effect.

You stop having a victim mentality and take personal responsibility for your life.

You'll feel so much better about yourself.

To your success,

Trevor Long