Success Lesson 4 – Luck & Lies Don’t Work

Successful entrepreneurs do not depends on luck, and they do not lie. As these both will never last. Your business and reputation will sure be impacted by your own act sooner or later.

Lies

There is no room for anything other than total honesty, integrity, respect and trust as an entrepreneur.

That is both honesty with yourself and with others.

Firstly, let’s look at honesty with others; i.e. customers, partners, investors. Business is all about belief, and making other people believe in you. Only when other people believe in you will they buy from you or invest in you.

If for any reason you fall short of the ‘total honesty, integrity, respect and trust’ standard, then it is all too easy for your customers, partners and investors to walk away and never do business with you again.

You need to apply the same level of total honesty to yourself, as you do with your partners and customers.

You need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and say for certain that you are doing everything that you can to make your business successful. The only excuses are the ones that you tell yourself. Hope is not good enough, action is what matters.

Only you know 100% if you are not. You need to be brutally honest with yourself. Are you putting in the necessary effort, support by passion, desire, belief, courage and action to reach your goals, or are you suffering from a common entrepreneurial flaw which is just a few degrees apart from belief – delusion !

Luck

The second part is luck. Many people think that entrepreneurs are lucky. Tha fact is that there is no room for relying on luck as an entrepreneur, but it is true that successful entrepreneurs create their own luck.

It was the golfer Gary Player who once said, ‘the harder I work, the luckier I become’. Hard work and luck go hand in hand.

Luck is often acknowledged as the crossroads of preparation and opportunity and it’s for you to be prepared when opportunity strikes. Read, ask questions, watch trends and network to create luck.

What are some of the ways that lucky people think differently from unlucky people? One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They’re prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

Just as you won’t find your future partner if you sit at home watching TV, you won’t achieve success as an entrepreneur sitting at home watching TV either! Opportunities will not come to you, you need to get out, network, sow seeds of opportunity, have an insatiable curiosity and interest in things, and seek out connections and opportunities which other people cannot see.

In a psychology research done by Richard Wiseman, found that lucky people’s minds operate differently. Those lucky people practice “counterfactual thinking.” The degree to which you think that something is fortunate or not is the degree to which you generate alternatives that are better or worse.

Unlucky people say, “I can’t believe I’ve been in another car accident.” Lucky people go, “Wonderful. Yes, I had a car accident, but I wasn’t killed. And I met the guy in the other car, and we got on really well, and there might be a relationship there.” What’s interesting is that both ways of thinking are unconscious and automatic. It would never occur to the unlucky people to see it a different way. In other words, positive thinking create luck and negative thinking draws bad luck !

According to Richard Wiseman, the following four principles found in lucky people can create good fortune in your life and career:

1. Maximize Chance Opportunities

Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing, and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, which include building and maintaining a strong network, adopting a relaxed attitude to life, and being open to new experiences.

2. Listen to Your Lucky Hunches

Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. They also take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities — for example, by meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.

3. Expect Good Fortune

Lucky people are certain that the future will be bright. Over time, that expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because it helps lucky people persist in the face of failure and positively shapes their interactions with other people.

4. Turn Bad Luck Into Good

Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, they don’t dwell on the ill fortune, and they take control of the situation.

In life there is such a thing as cause and effect, and only by sowing seeds of opportunity everyday and create your own lucky breaks will you ever become lucky to reap the benefit in the future. “I’m a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it”—Thomas Jefferson

 

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Success Lesson 3 – Self Challenge

Are you progressing in life? Do you think you can do better than what you currently have? Are you trapped in your comfort zone ?

A good way to imagine a comfort zone is to stand up and draw a large imaginary circle around yourself.

Whilst you stand in this comfort zone, everything feels safe and secure. Most people live within their comfort zone most of the time and without realizing it. This is a dangerous trap !

However, success does not come from standing in your comfort zone ! Success come from challenging yourself, from stretching yourself  and from feeling uncomfortable.

Fears & Limiting Beliefs

Fear is the enemy of entrepreneurs. It lives within our mind. Fear goes hand in hand with self doubt and is simply the emotion that’s triggered from the doubts in our mind. All fears, no matter how small, are magnified when we are alone. Our mind, as well as being our greatest asset, when gripped with fear, can be our worst enemy.

Think of a few examples of your own fears. Perhaps you can relate to one of these, fear of starting your own business, fear of making phone calls to new prospects, fear of public speaking or fear of leaving your existing job.

Fear expresses itself in many ways, but the most common manifestation is lack of action. For example, not making decisions, procrastinating, avoiding the very thing that causes fear in the first place, indeed lack of action in doing anything other than confronting your fear head on, which by the way is the best way to conquer it.

Fear is the biggest reason most people don’t become entrepreneurs. It is the fear that they wouldn’t succeed, or in other words, it is the fear of failure. For example, fear stops you making the necessary phone calls, stops you saying no instead of yes, or could even stop you making the decision to fire a troublesome member of your team.

It is this type of fear that leads to direct negative impact on your sales and therefore, your cash flow. And as we know, from insufficientcash flow comes business failure.

Successful entrepreneurs comes from facing and conquering fears of the future, and overcome limiting beliefs about your past head-on. They realise that there is no room for fear or crippling self doubt in the making of an successful entrepreneur.

Success comes from doing the things you do not want to do. Successful entrepreneurs have a healthy respect for the challenges they take on, and at times it may feel uncomfortable, but those who achieve success have one key weapon against fear, this weapon is Action.

Direct action against your fear is the fundamental method of conquering it. A popular approach to conquer fear is to ICE your fears. That’s to Identify, Confront and Eliminate them. What’s needed however, is courage and mental strength.

Closely coupled with fear are limiting beliefs. A limiting belief, as the name suggests, is a belief that limits your success. It is your view of the past that puts constraints on your future achievements.

A classic example of this is back in the 1950s, when it was believed that no human could run a mile in under 4 minutes. This was a self imposed limiting belief that many world class athletes measured themselves by. This belief lasted until the mid 1950s. However,in May 1954 on an Oxford race track, history was made. Roger Bannister believed that a mile could be run in less than 4 minutes and he broke the 4 minutes mile barrier and shattered the limiting belief that held others back.

Within the year, 37 other people had broken the 4 minutes mile barrier and in the following year, another 300 people had got the better of their limiting beliefs. At the start of the new millennium, the world record stands at 3 minutes 26 seconds, over half a minute faster that 50 years ago.

Although fear of the future may stop you from taking action, limiting beliefd built around your past impose the boundaries on your future success. It doesn’t matter how successfulyou are as an entrepreneur, you may still have limiting beliefs about how successful you can become in the future. Like fear, limiting beliefsmust be eliminated in order to achievethe true level of success that you aspire to.

A constraint which holds us back from achieving more is the concept of comfort zones. Most people operate witin their natural boundaries and refuse to stretch themselves beyond that, even though they are blessed with an abundance of ability and natural talent. It’s their reluctance to step outside ther comfort zone that limits their success. An example of this may be starting a new business or building an additional income stream, both of these however require you to stretch yourself to new limits and will feel uncomfortable.

As an entrepreneur, you must do the very thing which scares you. You must sow a seed of opportunity everyday by do one thing everyday that makes you feel uncomfortable. This may be making a phone call to a high profile prospect, making a speech to an audience of 500 people or closing the door on one chapter of your life to pursue a new future.

Whatever it is, you know when your are stepping outside your comfort zone as you get a feeling in your stomach. If you want to become successful, then it’s only when you are stretching yourself that you are moving forward and challenging yourself as true entrepreneurs do.

This is a good feeling, is it means you are doing something that other people are not prepared to do. It also means that you are getting closer to reaching your goals.

It was Eleanor Roosevelt who famously said that you should do one thing each day that scares you. What do you do each day that scares you?

“I don’t run away from a challenge because I am afraid. Instead, I run towards it because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your foot”—Nadia Comaneci

 

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