What Makes Us Truly Happy?

What Makes Us Truly Happy?

Its not things. Things break.

It's not a holiday house. I've never heard people complain so much about having to pack up and go to their second house. (This is a serious first world problem!)

It's GROWTH and CONTRIBUTION.

It's learning new things, attaining new levels, and serving others.

That's true happiness.

What about love? Love is service, it is not infatuation, it is not horny-ness. It is the feeling you get from serving your partner, or your children, or your friends.

To your success, and happiness,
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

Off the Court

The Australian Open Tennis Championships are dominating the media and conversations this Australia Day.

Just like any major sporting event, we see the best of the best of the best of the best congregate to do battle.

With the exception of one player, all of the players in to the top 8 Men's singles are in the top 10 ranked players in the world.

The cream floats to the top.



We look at what they do on the court and are impressed with their skills and determination.

But what about what they are doing off the court? How did they get to enter such competitions in the first place?

Well, the majority of them started very young, they played, they persisted and continued playing.

They traveled away from home over 30 weeks a year, and spent another 15 or so in off season training. They shared rooms with other players, they ate junk because that was all they could afford, yet they had a dream, goals, and they persisted.

And even when they've 'made it', they are still training about 4 hours a day, even when they have a grueling match. They've got strength training, endurance training, and that's on top of tennis training.

There are no overnight successes. There is no success without hard work and commitment.

What are you doing 'off the court'?

To your success,
Trevor Long

Welcome in the new...

Australia Day is not only the anniversary of the First Fleet into Australia, it is also a day when Australia welcomes new immigrants into the country with citizenship ceremonies across the country.

By this day, most New Year Resolutions have fallen by the wayside. If not, well done!

If you keep doing the same thing, you'll get the same results.

What do you need to welcome into your life in order to achieve your goals?

If I said "Self Discipline", what area would you need to apply that to?

Your diet?
Exercise?
Finances?
Relationships?
Your house?
Your business or career?
Your studies?
Your spiritual life?

Which one resonated with you the most?

Pick something in that area, and apply some self discipline to that for the next 30 days, just one, just 30 days, and notice how things change for you.

And Celebrate! Aussie Aussie Aussie!

To your success,
Trevor Long