So how to program your success mechanism? First you have to start with times in your past where you have had success. Let’s face it, your first act in life you started as a winner. You were the fastest sperm to reach the egg. In some cases it might have been a tie but you were there first or you wouldn’t be here today. For some people finding times they have succeeded can become very painful because they have always viewed themselves as a failure. So to reverse this thought process we have to get deep and truly honest about how success really works and how failure works.
Let’s first look at how failure works. Failure is an event, not a person. But we learn far more from failure than we do from success. For many success is when we stop learning. Look at how many professional football teams rise to the top to never achieve those heights again. That is because they pressed on through many challenges, failures and won the ultimate success but then their hunger for more failures and challenges subsides. So failure is the catalyst to all success. So we want to look at some early failures in life to show you that you have everything you need to achieve any heights possible.
At a very young age you learned to crawl. I laid on your belly and moved your knees and arms in many different motions until one moment you hit the knees and hands just right and you moved forward. You couldn’t believe it but you moved. Actually, you weren’t even surprised because you had been moving thousands upon thousands of ways that did not work until that fateful moment when you tired one more thing and boom, you were crawling. But you did not stop there, you had your heart set on learning to walk but first you had to learn to stand. This usually happens quite quickly after a baby learns to crawl. You maneuvered yourself up to a table or the edge of the bed and then you pulled yourself up. You were standing. Once again, you never thought it odd because you had learned thousands of ways that did not work. But as you learned to stand you found out that falling can hurt, sometimes a lot. This negative feedback created something in you that did not exist previously. Fear. You began to have fear of falling, aka, fear of failure.
So instead of you just letting go and taking steps you did not want to let go of the table. You would hold on while mom or dad might prod you to let go and come to them. They promised they would catch you but your fear kept growing. Then after a period of time you finally let go and took a few steps. In some cases mom, dad or a sibling was there to catch you or sometimes they weren’t but you had finally let go and took those first steps. From there as the expression goes the rest is history, you learned to walk, then run, jump, climb you name it you learned to do whatever you set your mind to. This of course is true of nearly all humans. Nearly all of us go through a similar pattern. Certainly there are some who’s journey was much tougher but for the bulk of us this is how we learned, through failing enough times that we finally knew what not to do enough that through the process of elimination we figured out what did. What is very important to note in all of the above illustrations was the fact that we knew what we wanted. When we wanted to learn to crawl we began the process of failing until we learned to crawl.
Success in life and in business is not much different. In order to achieve a desired result we first have to figure out what the result is that we want. This may be the most eye opening statement in this book thus far. Why are you in business? Or if you are not in business yet, why do you want to be in business? I ask people this question all the time and the answer is very rarely ever clear. I get answers like, to make money, to not have to work for someone else, to provide for my family but nearly every time I ask the question I rarely get an answer that describes what the business looks like when it’s done. So I ask you, how do you want your business to look when it’s done? Your answer should tell me everything you are seeking from owning your own business.
I know what I want out of my business. I want a business that provides tremendous value to my customers and allows me freedom of location, freedom of time and freedom of money. I want to own the business and not have it own me. I know I do not want a job so I do not want to work for my business, I want it to work for me. Your answer may be different but I know one thing you do not want, you do not want a business where you do all the work because that is just a job and you are working for an psychotic. You want a business that provides you profitability, you will take that profitability to pay yourself, eliminate debt, build reserves and once the reserves are built you will use those reserves to purchase cash flowing assets so you can have income without work. This is what financial freedom looks like. Once this is done, you can help people however you see fit.
I do not believe we are put on this earth to be a slave. A slave to money, debt and time. You have a purpose and all you need to do is define it and then make it happen. I refer to this as Prosperity I design. I’m the designer, I’m the creator of my ideal life and so are you.
So I ask you again, why own a business? Is it for money, freedom, sense of accomplishment, control your destiny, as an investment vehicle or all of the above? Defining this is the first step to freedom but this must be defined before you go on.
Define this right now.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney