(CTB: Call To Be)
(instead of call to action - it's plan B)
"Your next best action is at the corner of fear and frustration" ~ Ben Arment
What annoys you?
Tune into your frustrations. The complaints are likely shared by others.
Can you do something about them? If not you, who? What keeps you up at night is keeping millions of others up a night too. Solve your collective problem, and you may have a viable business.
You fear insignificance more than failure. You will become significant or die trying. "Your burden in your mandate." You MUST do something about it, It's why you have the itch. It's what you were born to do. Everything has led up to this moment.
Fear of failure is small compared to the fear of insignificance. You daily CTAs will overthrow the fear.
The best way to dampen the fear is to act.
Frustration gives birth to significance when you are willing to attack it head on.
An extraordinary life demands a dose of discomfort.
Risk doesn't feel good, it's not supposed to. Ignore your feelings and proceed. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Action trumps feeling. Once a commitment has been made - follow through to completion.
Just start. It's the agony of unfinished that will drive you to completion. The more public, the better. Check in with your acccountabilibuddies. The agony of holding back will slowly eat away at you. At least with unfinished, you can do something about it. The more you act, the more you become acclimated to action. What was once discomfort becomes less so.
Example:
Getting up a 5am used to feel like a burden. Now it's automatic. Doing my monthly quickbooks reconcile used to be a burden. The longer I delayed doing it, the more painful it became. It revealed unfinished work, so I choose to ignore it. But it is significant, and I know it. Why do I let the less significant take priority? No more! If not now, when?
When saying no is appropriate.
Say NO to that which delays or distracts you from working on your prime objective.
The beauty of the 10 day sprint is you give yourself permission to commit to one objective for 10 days. Anything NOT related to the prime objective has to wait. You're not saying no. You're saying not now.
I prefer 10 day sprints over 30 day challenges.
You must be able to say NO to people and events that steal your time so you can say YES to the significant tasks ahead.
The thing about NO? You can replace it with NOT NOW. The thing with YES? It creates obligation. And you have way more obligations that you can fulfill. Those unfilfilled obligations turn into guilt, and guilt becomes an obstacle to getting more done. Guilt can be paralyzing. The best 'Not Now' answer is to convey to the requester that you have other obligations you are required to meet right now.
When you align what you do with who you are, you will fulfill your potential.
It's when what you do is not about the money. But the money matters. If your idea is not financially sustainable, you haven't found the right model yet. Don't give up. Get creative.
This week I met with a full time ukulele instructor who shared with me how he justifies a trip to teach at a ukulele festival (who typically pay little unless you are the headliner). He'll travel by train if necessary, but usually they take their airstream. In fact, where they go (they are full time RVers) is dictated by where he can work.
He'll teach workshops at nearby stores and clubs. He'll contact a ukulele distribtuor and offer to make visits to stores. He'll take video of the conference and offer to create a 'sizzle reel' they can use for next year's conference (and earn more $ as a result). What's clear is he's always looking for opportunities. And then he acts on it. He said the moment the opportunity is provided, he gets to work on it. He keeps his 'inbox' clear so he can capitalize when the next opportunity comes up.
The spreadsheet is king.
I recall the spreadsheet that Jim Mofhitz shared with me:
| Trigger | Result |
|---|---|
| Event | SF Craft Fair |
| Total Sales | $3,000 |
| Cost of Goods Sold | $450 |
| Auto Mileage (x .52/mi) | $182 |
| Lodging | $120 |
| Show Fees | $300 |
| Other Expenses | $300 |
| Total Expenses | $1352 |
| Net Profit | 1,648 |
The entrepreneurs I interviewed... While true, they would do what they do despite being paid to do it, the fact is they must be paid to do it because it's how they are able to keep doing it. To do what I love, I must earn enough to keep doing it. Otherwise, you will have to do something else!
"Every experience either steers you away from wrong dream or towards the real one."
What if I profiled 50 entrepreneurs who built multimillion dollar business in publishing, or related to writing? That's the one thing that has always been constant that I enjoy, hasn't it?
Even Richard Branson had roots in writing.
"I wanted to be an editor or a journalist. I wasn't really interested in becoming an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become one in order to keep the magazine going."
Setbacks make you better. Financial hardships help you develop survival skills.
The more you are dismissed or misunderstood by your industry, the more likely you are a visionary of it! All visionaries faced this in the beginning. Your job is to convince them otherwise.
Fines and penalties teach you the rules of the game that must be followed.
Each failure is one step closer to a breakthrough.
"We knew Google was going to get better every single day we worked on it." ~ Sergey Brin (Google)
Like PubWriter & AuthorDock!
"We were never in a big hurry to get you to us it today, tomorrow would be better."
Other's may not embrace your idea of even understand it. Skepticism and doubt are why they won't steal it. Consider it a gift because you can continue to work on it - continue to fail toward success - without the scrutiny of others.
When others feel your frustration, they will be blessed by the realization of your dream. This is the only motivation you need. If it frustrates you - it frustrates others too! It's your key to becoming significant. When your solution addresses the problems of others, your solution will sell itself.
A characteristic of a dream is it appears impossible until it's done. This is why I must do the undone.
Worked at McDonalds. Start 'The Dream' education camp for kids. Recommended reading: Lord of The Rings, Dune, Gulliver's Travels, and Treasure Island.
Worked for a web startup. Worked for a tech-based hedge fund. Has a passion for books, technology, and startups. Amazon became the culmination of all of them!
(this is a key part of program development!)
When you share the experiences real people - familiar figures - you are validating your theory.
You can't make waves without a ripple.
As we grow older, dreams don't disappear, we trade them for standards of living. Friends don't disappear, they just move on.
You can recover from almost anything. But you can't recover from having never tried at all.
What programs have you downloaded? What programs are downloading now? You need to be careful! Most of the crap on your TV is not good software.
Now you can download at an faster rate with Youtube and Open Universities. You can take lectures from MIT professors and learn from the best authors in the world.
What are you downloading?