I was at the LFMpires seminar in Bristol (UK) over the weekend and got some serious food for thought. Seminars are almost always great places to go – if only for the netwoking opportunities. The people you meet are always the high spot, but this time the speakers were top-notch as well. There were loads of them (including your’s truly) but for me, an American chap called Sterling Valentine really stood out. He had some great things to share and I recommend you look him up.
Thinking back to some of the personal stories that the successful speakers shared from the stage, there is one theme that keeps coming up. The people are different and the words describing their situations are different, but when you boil it all down, the people who are now enjoying success almost all went through a similar journey:
1. They were struggling in their lives. Some were flat broke and desperate, some were stressed to the max and at their wits’ end, some were on the verge of complete meltdown. Even allowing for a certain amount of poetic license in the stories told, the recurring theme is that their lives were way less than great and they were trapped.
2. They all tried everything. Or thought they did. They worked several jobs (if they had jobs) and flitted from one scheme to another.
3. Even when they discovered Internet marketing and saw the potential, they found it impossible to focus. Time and again we heard stories of people trying this, and failing, trying that, and failing, and then trying anything else that caught their attention. And failing.
4. Despite their phenomenal lack of success making money online, each and every one of them (and I’m including myself in the group too) absolutely knew – and I mean *knew* at a molecular level – that Internet marketing was real, making money online was possible and success was just a matter of putting the jigsaw pieces in their right places.
5. Success came *only* when, for whatever reason (everyone has their own reason) these people stopped chasing every rainbow and started focusing on creating a business. It came when they realized, at a deep level, that you fly higher and faster on a rocket that is blasting towards a target than on a balloon that is drifting in the breeze.
Everyone had their own solutions, strategies and skills, and each speaker was naturally ‘selling’ his or her own methods. But underneath it all, they were all saying the same thing: stop drifting, stop working hard at achieving nothing, stop being distracted. And learn to focus. You have no idea how much you can achieve if you only make a plan and follow it to the end.
