Breaking it down

I have just come back off three weeks leave to spend some time with my father who is ill. It was an amazing and at times emotional trip. But I am back to reality. My situation is the same now as it has been all year. I have no income coming in whatsoever. My wife’s income has dried up so we are getting into the situation of dire straits.

So I need to break things down and look where I am at and where I want to go. I still have my five year plan so I have an idea of a bigger picture. But let me break down my first mini plan. I know exactly what amount I want. I also know exactly how much I want to be earning each month, and what total amount I want to exit the plan at. I have then broken it down even further. There are things that need fixing in the house and there are luxuries which I wish to buy for both my wife and I. I have put a value on these items and the first income I earn will be set aside to get these things. So now the work that I am putting in is traded off against these things, rather than against money. If I want the plumber to come fix the irritating banging pipes or have our bathroom finally completer, then I need to get to work and get successful fast.

I am fired up, all that is stopping me is me.

Getting a Fast Plan

I was skimming Rich Dad’s Retire Young, Retire Rich book by Robert Kiyosaki over the weekend. Robert was talking about planning for financial wealth. There is no way ever (besides getting an inheritance or winning the lottery) that one can become rich without having a plan. Even not having a plan is a plan. I don’t want to leave my fortune up to fate so if I want to turn my big dreams into reality then I need to have a financial plan. I can change this plan and it doesn’t have to be perfect to start off with but I need to start working the plan as soon as possible and stick to it.

Robert talks about whether the plan is fast or slow. A slow plan entails saving, working for someone else, investing in stocks for the long term and working hard to give 50% away to the government. A fast plan is all about making money and leverage. So I think the little plan I have made is pretty fast.

I have started a small five page (so far) plan for the next five and a half years (exiting when I turn forty in 2016). It comes with four mini plans.
Plan One is all about making a living wage as soon as possible (within 8 months) (living wage plan).
Plan Two is all about the next level of wealth where I am earning a million dollars a year (automatic comfort plan).
Plan Three is all about the next level of wealth where I am earning a million dollars a month (reasonably wealthy).
Plan Four is optional , I can retire or go to the next level by earning ten million dollars a month (unreasonably wealthy plan).

For each plan I have set out why I need to succeed with the plan, the key milestones, a simple strategy, challenges I will need to overcome, resources needed, why I will succeed and what I will do with the money once I have realized the plan.
I have fleshed out Plan One, am working on Plan Two but have no idea yet how I will plan or even achieve Plans Three and Four. But most importantly, I need to achieve Plan One.

No doubt when I look back as my future self to this present self (and what I am writing and dreaming about) I will be thinking ‘what was I thinking’. But I don’t have the experience or knowledge that my future self has so I am quite willing to write the wrong thing, do the wrong thing and take the wrong path knowing that even failure will aid in me in my journey towards

The quality of our lives are determined by the quality of the questions we ask ourselves.

I think Anthony Robbins said that. If we ask ourselves great questions, then we will have great lives.

What should I eat today? This is probably not a great quality of life question.
How do I get out of doing that presentation for my boss? Another not so great quality of life question.

What do I really want out of life? Great quality of life question. And how do I go about achieving what I want? And how do I do it quicker? And what can I do right now that will move me the fastest and furthest towards achieving what I want? If I get better and better at asking and then learning to answer these questions then I will have a better quality of life.

I know what I want. And it is not just about money. I have a number of figures in mind and these keep changing. A thousand miles or fifteen hundred miles is not going to make much difference to a snail unless he can find a way to tag on the back of interstate trucks. Likewise, from someone earning zero, $1 million or $5 million a month doesn’t seem like a huge issue unless I can start earning $50 thousand or $500 thousand a month. But I have a very clear idea of what that money can buy. What kind of lifestyle I will be able to lead with my wife. And I am clear how I want to help my friends and family. So what questions should I be asking myself.

How do I totally and irreversibly transform my life from one of lack to one of unreasonable wealth inside of twelve months? That is a pretty good question to start answering! And if I give every thought and every effort to answering this question, then I am not worrying about what people think of me, or my ego or being right. I am purely interested in answering this question.

As Robert Collier said ‘Make every thought, every fact, that comes into your mind pay you a profit. Make it work and produce for you. Think of things not as they are but as they may be. Don’t merely dream but create!’

Love what you do, do what you love

Yesterday I read an eBook about making money with blogs. It suggested that people who start blogs just to make money mostly fail. ‘You cannot start a successful blog just to make money, you must be passionate about your subject matter.’ I agree it would make it easier. But the main reason for failure due to no passion is that one soon gives up. If therefore I could be disciplined not to give up and keep doing the research and writing blog posts, then surely I can be successful without a passion for the subject matter?

I look at what I am passionate about: Rugby, helping people be successful, getting fit, reading, movies, cooking. Now some of these areas of subject matter are marketable but exist in pretty competitive market places. I don’t know enough about Internet Marketing to know how to make money out of the other areas of subject matter.

But most people work in an area they weren’t passionate about when they started. I myself have taken jobs because of the money, because of the type of company or its reputation, other benefits and even location. I wasn’t passionate about the what that company did. But I became passionate about my role and became successful. The same applies to my Internet Marketing. I need to remain passionate about Internet Marketing and making money. This will allow me the motivation and discipline to be successful, rather than being stopped from starting a highly lucrative website on say ‘buying cars online’ just because I am not passionate about ‘cars’. Jeff Bezos from Amazon made a huge list of things to sell online (cars, houses, furniture etc) and decided to give books a try. He has turned out somewhat successful without perhaps being initially passionate about books.

I plan to have as many web assets as I can get started but hand the majority over to third parties who are passionate about the areas of subject matter. I am not sure yet whether it is time or money that will determine when I hand them over. If I earned 50-70% on a website with no work whatsoever, then I would call that a success as long as the care taker was able to keep the revenue going. I need to give some thought to how I set up the legal and technical aspects of each web asset so I can maintain control.

Remembering Who I am

I need to remember who I am as well as realizing who I am not.

I am not my past. I am not my family or friends. I am not my education. I am not my bank account. I am not my failures. I am not my father. I am not my wife. I am not my circumstances. I am not my business partner or my boss. I am not the news. I am not the way things used to be. I am not my old habits. I am not my childhood or my upbringing.

Who am I then? I am now. I am a man of greatness. I am the best individual internet marketeer in the world. I am the ability to create massive unreasonable wealth. I am action. I am enthusiasm and motivation. I am energy. I am the ability to create massive unreasonable wealth in a short space of time. I am the best individual internet marketeer in the world.

I start living the above, I start living my dreams. I start thinking, believing, acting that will cause the reality. Remembering who I am each day will change my reality. Remembering who I am until it is no longer a conscious thought but a way of being.

I don’t know the way yet. I don’t know the how. But if I am driving to a strange city at night, I don’t need to know the entire route off by heart. I just drive in the general direction and my headlights will illuminate the bit of the route that I need. As long as I see immediately in front of me and follow in that direction, the rest of the journey will take care of itself when I get there.

A bias towards action

Arguably the best motivational speaker on the market today is Anthony Robbins (although he prefers not to use the term ‘motivational speaker’). He started out with the desire to become a motivational speaker after doing an NLP course. On the course he kept wondering when the instructors and students would actually go out into the wider world and practice NLP on real people. Everyone told him to be patient and not get ahead of himself. But he decided he wanted to be the best and so he booked himself on every radio station he could and challenged people to come in person with issues which he would then solve with NLP. This lead to some disasters as he was still a novice but after the first year, he had hundreds of hours of experience talking in public and helping people with their issues whereas the other students probably only had the theory they had learned in that year.

I need to take the same approach when coming to Internet Marketing. I need to have a bias towards action. As Winston Churchill said, “I never worry about action, but only about inaction.” I need to get experience quickly. No doubt I will make mistakes with my first couple of websites. Maybe I will get lucky and one will become successful. But if I start and manage ten or twenty websites in the next 12 months, then I will have more experience than many people who have been doing Internet Marketing for two years or more.

Crawl before I can walk? Nonsense!
Walk before I can run? Who says!
Run before I can fly? What utter rubbish!

How do I disrupt the Internet Marketing business (and how do I disrupt the Internet)? How do I hit the ground running. I don’t care if I fail, as long as I go out with a bang. As long as I can fail spectacularly. What is the worse that can happen? I lose my house? So what, I can start again. And I have nothing really else of value to lose (apart from relationships which include those that will not be rocked by my mere misfortune). And if I have nothing to lose, then by definition I have everything to gain. Massive daily action will allow me to become the world’s best individual internet marketeer and allow me to make my minimum living wage of $60,000 a month and even exceed my goal of $5 million a month. Massive daily action towards my vision.

My financial thermometer

I have just been to Starbucks and behind me were three guys talking about investing money. One guy was saying that if he didn’t get $200k out of this one deal it wouldn’t change his life that much. If he did get $200k then he would probably just spend it on a sports Bentley. It must be great to have that sort of cash to invest. But at the end of the day, these guys are just human, like me. The one major difference (apart from having loads more money) is that their financial thermometers are set a lot higher than mine. Oh sure, I may talk about borrowing £20,000 the way some people talk about borrowing $2,000. But these guys talk about borrowing $2 million. Their financial thermometer is set about 100 times higher than mine. I must learn to set mine a lot higher.

Let’s say I want to earn $20,000. If this is a lot of money to me, then I may associate lots of hard work to getting this money and it may take me a long time to do so. If my thermometer is set to earning $500,000 then no doubt earning $20,000 will seem easy and I will be able to think of a strategy to earn this amount easily and quickly. My thoughts will lead me to have better conversations with myself and with other people who also have a high financial thermometer which will ultimately mean I will have lots of money. Off the bat, I am not going to set my thermometer at something like $5 million a month without working myself up to that point with a bit of practice. So, I have set the thermometer to $60,000 a month. I will live and breathe and believe in my head that I can’t possibly get by in life unless I am earning $60,000 a month. Anything less than this will mean I am just scraping by and not living the kind of lifestyle I need to.

So, what would someone earning $60,000 a month need to learn? Tax avoidance and investing. Not only must I be good at internet marketing, but I need to learn how to invest my money with the least tax liability possible. Live and breathe $60,000 a month. I am usually motivated by stress and crisis. If I fail at something (and am noticed to have failed by others) or I have my back against the wall, then I come out fighting and always seem to find a way to succeed. I am also motivated when I can see my path to more money (actually seeing money coming in and working out how to increase it, rather than just blue sky thinking). But when I am comfortable I seem to just stagnate. So, if I am uncomfortable at anything less than $60,000 a month then I should be motivated to come out fighting. When I get to $60,000 a month I will be motivated to set my thermometer higher so I never languish in the land of the comfortable. So I have to show myself the money and come out fighting; and do it quickly!

Focus

The amount of focus multiplied by time will determine how far and how quickly I can go towards achieving my dreams. As it stands, I think I am probably about eighty years away from achieving my vision. But no doubt I will be dead by then. I want to achieve my vision much sooner than that. Could I do it in ten years or even five years? Definitely, but it is going to take some guts. Guts for me to give up immediate and definite comfort for the possibility of future reward. It takes time to build the vision strong enough to be able to over come my present comfortableness. It takes some work to break out of decades of habits inclined towards instant gratification.

So, let me put some rewards on the table that are not too far in the future. The first $5,000 I make in profit will go towards me. New clothes, dinners out, a short holiday, whatever grabs my fancy. This promise of reward helps drive my behaviour. Ooh, what could I spend $5,000 on? What will it feel like when I go out and spend it? What will it feel like to have that amount of money in my bank account to do with as I please?

I have to focus each day on the question ‘How do I become the world’s best individual internet marketeer?’ If I ask myself this question each day then I can start working on how to answer it. If I just spend 30 minutes each day trying to answer this question this would be a step forward for me. I then need to build up the time each day I focus on answering this question. Only then will I consider myself on the road to my vision.

How do I become the world’s best individual internet marketeer?

A word on Integrity

Integrity is probably one of the hardest principles for me to uphold. I am talking about the integrity of my word. I am not talking about the little white lies I tell – Yes I am working hard, yes I liked the way you did that, sorry I didn’t return your call I have been too busy. It is far easier to tell these little white lies than to be brutally honest (or indeed just tell it how it is). I don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings and I don’t want to come off looking like the bad guy. But rather than go into the merits of being brutally honest and not telling little white lies, let me talk instead of my word. Let me swap the phrase ‘my word’ for ‘my promise’. This I need to uphold. When I say I am going to do something I need to make sure I deliver on that promise. If I cannot keep the promise then I shouldn’t make it in the first place. If I commit to something then I need to keep to that commitment. I am not talking here about a movie caricature where the cowboy or mafioso won’t go against his word to the cost of all others. I am just talking about being more true, reliable and not give away my promise too lightly, especially to myself – it is the promises to myself that I keep breaking that are the most damaging to my soul.

‘I will start next week’. ‘I will get up early tomorrow and finish this’. ‘I will make sure I get it done at all costs’. ‘I will commit to this until it is finished’. ‘I will complete this by the end of the year’. ‘I will ensure that I earn this much within six months’. These are the kind of promises I make when I am on a caffeine high, an alcohol high or just a motivational high. But do I really believe these promises? Not really. How can I when I never keep them? How can I ever plan for anything if I don’t keep these promises? I can have the best plans and strategies in the world and they mean naught if I don’t actually mean what I say. If I want my dreams to become reality then I had better start keeping my own promises.

Perhaps my dreams are too big for me to be able to keep my integrity. Perhaps it is like a muscle that I need to exercise and build up. So I will start small. I won’t promise myself $5 million a month just yet (although the belief and certainty is definitely there). I will just start by committing to everything I promise to myself on this blog…… a very public promise (although I let myself off the hook slightly in the knowledge that no-one is reading this blog).

So what small promise can I make right now? I commit to having made $100 on my first website by the end of September (exactly 12 weeks away). $100 is the first step to making $5 million and I commit to doing it. $100 seems to be letting myself off a little lightly as if I want to make $5 million perhaps I should be aiming for $5,000 by the end of September. But let me start small and definitely make it and see if I can over achieve, rather than starting large and missing the goal of making $5 million.

Taking responsibility

It is important to take responsibility for where I am in life. I am exactly where I am because of the actions, beliefs, thoughts and habits that I have had over a long period of time. If I had the actions, thoughts, habits and beliefs of a multi millionaire over the last five years, then I would be a multi millionaire today. It is no one else’s fault. It is not because of circumstances or the weather or thinking ‘if only things had been different’. I am to blame. I should have done things differently.

Here is one little example: Over the course of the last five years, how many hours of TV did I watch? An average of three hours a day? That equates to 21 hours a week. That equates to 1,092 hours a year. That equates to 5,460 hours over the five years. Let’s say I take 8 hours sleep a day (which leaves 16 hours TV watching time), that means I have spent 341 days in the last five years watching TV. That is like locking me up in a room to just watch TV for a whole year. Imagine if I had read business books during that time, or spent that time focusing on my business. I would be a billionaire now!

The great thing about taking responsibility is that it gives me the power to improve and change my situation. If it is my fault that I am where I am, then I can also change where I am. It is going to be difficult and feel like hard work in the beginning. Perhaps I won’t see much progress to start off with. But these things have a way of snow balling out of control (in a positive way) once a critical mass or tipping point has been reached. Focus, dedication and daily steps forward are going to see me through.

A quick word about next steps. I have this vision of earning $5 million a month. But I have to earn my first dollar. So this is how it starts. If I had $75,000 this would allow me to pay off all my debts (and have a little left over for a good night out). So this is the figure I have to focus on before the end of this year. The question I ask myself is how do I earn this amount as soon as possible (while keeping my eyes on the bigger vision)?