Focus: What you WANT

Hey, guys, welcome back this week. I am excited to talk about this. I’ve been mulling over some future podcast episodes and this is one of those ones that I kind of had the brewing. I also want to give you kind of a sneak peek. We’re going to change up a little bit. I’ve had the goal this year of coming out with at least weekly podcasts, and I’m going to be doing that every Wednesday. You can plan on a podcast episode coming from me. I’m planting my flag, every Wednesday afternoon. Let’s call it 2:00 p.m. mountain time, since that’s where I live. We will be launching each episode of MLM Renegade then. If I’ve got a special episode in between, okay, cool. Maybe I’ll drop something, but for the most part, we’re going to launch weekly on Wednesdays, so this will be the last non-Wednesday MLM Renegade episode. I’m really excited for that to be moving forward.

Today, speaking of planting my flag, I want to talk a little bit about where to go or where you want to go. I was reading through a reading a book recently, because I do that right. I was reading Millionaire Success Habits by Dean Graziosi. Fantastic book actually. He gave it away at Funnel Hacking Live, which is how I got my copy of it, a friend of friend of mine brought back for me. But dean is a stud, and I haven’t finished it yet, but the book is fantastic.

One of the thoughts that I had here came from that book. I want to talk about it in reference, maybe a little bit to goal setting, and how we achieve things as we work forward through our businesses, through our lives, through everyday life. In this book, it talks about an experience with a scout leader. I’m an Eagle Scout, so I can definitely relate with that. This scout leader was going on a rafting trip, I think they were going in Colorado, maybe on the Colorado River.

What happened is they got there and there’d been a lot of rain, a lot of snow melt off, and so these rapids were running high like category four rapids, which is they go one to five: Five is you got to be semi-insane to get on. Four is pretty close to there, too. This scout master and the river guide basically said was like, look, when I point something, I want you to go towards it. Whatever that was, which meant that he wasn’t going to point out the dangers, the perils that the rocks or the rapids that were coming up. What happens when we point at them and we look at them? We fixate on them. The same thing happens to us in our lives and in our business. When we say that we are going to the top of a mountain, when I climbed Mount Rainier, whatever the pinnacle that you’re trying to reach is, that’s what you’re looking towards, not necessarily at your feet where there could be trouble.

When I climbed Mount Rainier, we walked over lots of crevasses, which is these big openings in the glacier. In fact, on a couple of them, the park service put a ladder across with a 2 x 6 latched to the ladder, and we had to walk across it to get it. They usually had a rope there where you could hold on, but it was a little loose. It was kind of squirrelly because, as you would walk across this thing, one, you didn’t want to look down, but you always look down. It’s like standing at the top of a cliff. Oh, don’t look down. It always happened. You look down because people are intrigued by what they shouldn’t be. Well, I looked down, and the way that it happened is it went from snow on top as you would expect. We’re on a glacier and wins from this white to color to a light blue to a nice royal blue to a nice navy blue to an even darker midnight blue to a black. I never saw the bottom of these things. There were hundreds of feet deep. These things are scary. You don’t want to fall in them because they don’t find your body.

With this river guide, he didn’t want them staring into the rocks because they were worried about them. If they fixated on them, that was going to be a problem. Instead he said, follow my gaze follower where I’m pointing and go there because he was going to lead them to safety; that’s what we all want, as we’re leading other people, as we’re leading our own families, as we’re leading ourselves, we want to be led to safety. We want to be led to a space where we can be safe and where we can thrive. These boys, obviously, had a great experience, just like I did climbing a mountain. It brought it brought to my mind to another example. I like to ride my bicycle. I like to cycle on my road bike. I grew up in the sticks in Western Washington. It wasn’t the middle of nowhere, but you could see it from there, so very rural roads. I would ride my bicycle on these rural roads, and I learned very quickly that you don’t look at the edge of the road. If you’re looking down at the edge of the road, you’re going go off the road and you’re going to end up in the ditch or in the dirt or worse.

Well, now as an adult, I’ve learned that and I continue to use that. I learned a couple of things. One, the human head is heavy. It weighs eight to 10 pounds. If you move it in a direction, guess what? Your momentum’s going to take you there. The second thing I learned is as I ride on a road bike, I got really, really skinny tires. I mean, these things are like ¾-inch wide, maybe, and they’re running at a high pressure, like 100 PSI. They roll fantastic, but they’re also very thin. If I get into sand or gravel, I am dead, like over the handlebars, broken collarbone, whatever. I’m toast. In some of these rural roads here in Utah, as I ride on them, I’ve had to implement the same idea that I can’t be, and sometimes I’m riding right on the white line because I need to be out of traffic as much as possible. I don’t want to get hit.

I can’t focus on the white line or on the edge of the pavement, that’s just to my right. What I do is I adjust my gaze and I turned towards the center. I go to where I want to go. So maybe I’m looking down the road a quarter mile or maybe I’m looking at the center stripe as opposed to the white stripe. Anything to keep my head from locking on and getting tunnel vision for that edge, because it’s happened once or twice and I’m in the sand or I’m in the gravel. It’s not a good thing to happen. If you guys have seen rural roads, sometimes those edges can drop off six or eight inches. And that’s a lot when you’re on a bicycle tire, and so obviously, try and avoid that.

As you’re setting goals, you wouldn’t have that in mind. You want to have your head up. You want to have your vision forward. It’s an important thing to be able to see where you’re going and trust that your feet will take you there. Sometimes we need to put our heads down and work, and I’m getting terribly allegorical here, but when we were working towards a goal, sometimes putting your head down and working forward is fine, but every once in a while you need a spot check and look up and see where you’re going and say, okay, and then get back to the grind and keep working and keep moving.

One of the books that I read, and watched the movie that went along with it, you guys have probably seen as well, it’s called The Secret. The Secret is fantastic for setting mindset and attracting to you the things that you want in your life and getting the responses that you want from people. One of the things I’ve learned with the secret and with some of the other learnings is that life is 90% of you reacting to the 10% of what happens to you. Let me say that again. Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

I heard somebody explain it the other day that there’s basically two teams. You got team optimists and team pessimist. In fact, I think it was Gary Vaynerchuk who said it, which the guy is awesome. I can’t stand his language sometimes, he’s a New Yorker and I get it, but it grates on the nerves a little bit, but he’s not wrong. There are two teams, the optimists and the pessimists. It’s funny how quickly we divide into those teams.

In my life, and really especially as a kid, I was team pessimists. I was not happy unless I had something to whine about. If I think about myself, go back to my 14, 16, even 18-year-old self, I want to kick myself in the face. Because I was not an optimist, so many good things happened to me in my life. I started realizing, especially once I got into sales, which I was about 17, that as an optimist, things were just going to happen right for me, guess what they did? I’ve learned to take that optimism and channel it and get better things out of life and attract those positive things like it talks about in The Secret.

Here’s the thing that the book and the movie left out, and that’s hard work. So many people are out there. They read The Secret, oh, I’m imagining this, I’m imagining $1 million to come into my life, and I’m attracting a million dollars. Well, let’s be honest, they’re not working for it. You can’t sit on your couch and eat Oreos and expect to have a six pack. I know I’ve tried. If you get to the gym and you work out and you watch what you eat and you watch your calories and you leave the Oreos in the ice cream alone, guess what? You can probably have one of those. It all depends on how much you’re willing to work and sacrifice for. Sacrifice is the big unspoken rule when it comes to high achievement.

What are you willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals? Some of that sacrifice can be hard work. You sacrifice your time, your energy, your passion. I was thinking about it today. In our house, we have one of every single video game system. We have a Wii. We have Xbox 360. We have an Xbox One, we have a PS3. We have a PS4. I used to have a PS2. Every single one of them. I loved to play video games. It was just fun. It’s a great brain dump. I sit down, exercise my thumbs for an hour or whatever, shoot some bad guys and hey, I’ve had a nice kind of mentally relaxing time.

Since I got into the realm of personal development and entrepreneurship, I’m not sure I’ve turned on any of my gaming systems now. My kids still playing, they get used. I’m not sure I’ve actually done that. I thought, oh yeah, I should go play, that’d be fun, that’d be entertaining. And I think, but I’ve got so much other things to do that I want to get that I want to achieve my goals. I have the sales funnel that I need to build. I have a foreword for Think and Grow Rich to write, so that I can publish that book out to the masses. I have a recruiting funnel to build. I have a whole Members Area that I’ve envisioned, and ultimately, I have the Renegade Recruiting System to create and to build so that everybody can get the benefit of the things that I’ve been able to learn.

I have pulled in information from all sorts of areas that I’m cobbling it together. Stuff about copywriting, about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, social media posting, sales funnel, utilizing LinkedIn, utilizing podcasting and YouTube. Those publishing platforms that are going to get your voice out there. Because here’s a little hint guys. One of the reasons I do this podcast. One, I love it. It’s fun. I get to sit here and riff with you guys and explain things that are going on in my head. It’s a great way for me to get that creative outlet, but also in the realm of MLM. If you go on the podcast rankings and search MLM and look at all the podcasts that are on there under that, most of them have not published anything in years. There’s one podcast that hasn’t published it almost five years, yet it’s at the top of the rankings still. People obviously still listened to it a little bit; otherwise, it would fall out.

There isn’t a lot of new content, and I can provide that. I have an ability and the opportunity to provide that for you guys. The trick to all of this, again, is hard work. Be Willing to put in the work to get what you want. Point out to that pinnacle where you are headed and then work to get there. Envision, feel the emotions of standing on top of that mountain and how awesome it will be before you get there and that helps drive you to get there, but it still requires work. In MLM, it is network marketing, and that’s the truth. Ultimately, we need to put in the work to be successful and when we can put in the work to be successful, we will be happy.

I am not happier than when I am falling into bed exhausted and I worked my butt off and seen success. I’m an endorphin junkie. That’s why I ride my bike. That’s why I’m in sales. When I closed a big sale, let me tell you, that is a better high than any pharmaceutical out there. There’s nothing that makes me feel better, that dopamine hit is just intense and awesome, and I crave it. That’s part of what makes me good at what I do. The other part of it is I’m willing to work my butt off and ask people to tell me where I’m screwing up so that I can fix it.

Guys, when you’re driving down the road of life, pay attention. Don’t drive off the road. Don’t let your bicycle tire get into the muck. Don’t fall down the crevasse because you’re looking over the edge. Don’t steer your ship into the rocks because you’re worried about them. Don’t give your fears nearly as much head space as your dreams because fear and faith cannot coexist. And if you’re going to work on a business, if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, your faith has to be miles bigger than your fear and when it is, you’ll be successful. That’s all I got for today, guys.

I’m looking forward to next week. We’ve got some big people coming forward. Stephen Larsen is going to join me here soon. I’m so pumped. He is one of the guys who has made my life different and different for a better reason. He is the king of figuring out how to do this for network marketing and for MLMs overall. I can’t wait to talk with him, and I can’t wait for you guys to hear it. In the interim, have a great weekend. Talk to you soon.

 

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