It’s an understatement to say I’ve got a bit of an addictive personality. When something tickles my fancy, it tickles hard and long! It might be a game that I get addicted to and play nonstop for three weeks, or it might be things as serious as gambling at the casino or on sports and racing. It’s the same with music – when I really feel a song, I play it on repeat for the next 6 days. My latest attraction was mmmBop by Hanson that just had it’s 20th anniversary, and now it’s Growing Up by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis featuring Ed Sheeran. Such a good tune!

This week I’ve been reading The Alchemist and when I was telling a friend about the book, she told me she wanted to read it ever since Macklemore mentioned it in his song Growing Up. The song is a list of advice to Macklemore’s newborn baby daughter when he became a Dad for the first time. It’s well worth the listen. You can download the song for free and read his letter to his daughter at webpage they created specifically for this song here.

 

My favourite lines and pieces of advice from the song include:

“Tell the truth, regardless of the consequence”

“Put the work in, don’t worry about the praise”

“The quickest way to happiness is learning to be selfless; ask more questions and talk about yourself less”

“Do yoga, learn about karm, find God but leave out the dogma”

“Every day, give your mother a compliment”

“Don’t try to change the world. Find something that you love and do it every day. Do that for the rest of your life, and eventually, the world will change”

I’ve seriously been loving my parables. I really enjoy re-reading The Richest Man in Babylon and now I’ve nearly finished The Alchemist. They must be so tough to write well, but I feel like it’s such a fantastic way to give advice through story telling.

My latest revelation comes from reading The Alchemist this morning:

“Maybe God created the desert so that man can appreciate the date trees”.

Out of context, this probably sounds a little confusing. At this point in the story, a young Spanish shepherd had sold his flock of sheep and moved to Egypt. He was in search of treasure near the pyramids, but not long after he arrived at the port, he was robbed of all of his gold and was left with nothing. He worked and saved money and eventually joined a caravan to rode a camel towards the pyramids. They had spent days and then weeks riding through the hot, dry desert. Then one day, just as the sun rose, the group finally caught a glimpse of the oasis. “After weeks of yellow sand and blue sky, they finally saw the green of the date palms”.

Like most parables, the lesson here is something deeper than the beauty of date palms. I myself have never seen what a date tree looks like, but I know this is simply a metaphor for our lives. The ‘desert’ are the tough times, and the ‘date trees’ are the moments of happiness. If life was all date trees, we’d become complacent and we’d lose sight of how good our lives really were. Sometimes we might need to suffer a few setbacks in order to become truly grateful for what we have in life.

So maybe God created the desert so that man can appreciate the date trees. And maybe God created the tough, sad moments so that we can appreciate the good times in life.

A funny thing happened last week. I bought an app called “Days of Life” after a recommendation from my ‘What You Will Learn‘ co-host, Adam Jones. I’ve got notification set to daily, so every day it tells me how many day I have left to live, based on the average life expectancy for an Australian male in today’s society. It’s a little daunting to see that over a quarter of my pie chart has been used up, but it’s a little bit of inspiration each day when I get that notification. It gets me back on tracked and helps me stay focused.

I only bought it after a brief moment of hesitation though. When he told me about the app, I loved the idea and went straight to the App Store to download it. But I paused… it wasn’t free. The app cost $0.99 (it might’ve been $1.99 or even $2.99, I don’t remember exactly, but it was under $3 but it wasn’t free). I’m used to just downloading apps for free… I even download them for free then get sucked in to making ‘in-app purchases’ that would far outweigh that 99 cents. But We’ve been conditioned to expecting free apps. When I think about it, a few bucks is really nothing. It’s less than the coffee I was sipping on at the time. But it’s that notion of ‘pegging’, a cognitive bias, that meant the 99 cents seemed an enormous price to pay for something I expected to be free.

I eventually sucked it up and forked out the buck or two to get it. And I haven’t regretted it! I’m sure it’s a pretty easy thing to make, but that dollar or two has helped me regain focus and motivation every day since I first downloaded it.

 

Thanks to the advice in The Compound Effect, and thanks to my co-host Adam Jones on the ‘What You Will Learn‘ podcast, I’ve been tracking. I’ll be tracking every cent I spend to try and get my budgeting under control. Every time I pull out my wallet, whether it’s cash or card, the transaction gets written down in my note pad.

As my income has increased, my lifestyle and ‘necessary expenses’ seem to have grown with it. By tracking where I’m spending my money, I’ll know exactly where I need to focus my efforts to reduce my expenses.

In our latest episode of the podcast, we started our ‘Take Action’ series. From each book we read, we’ll take one action and apply it. The action from The Compound Effect was this idea of tracking. The punishment? Mangina. Whichever of us stops tracking first has do do a public mangina. If you’re unfamiliar with that term, have a listen to the episode linked above for an explanation…

This morning I gave a speech at a high school. I spoke to the year 12s, who have about 3 months left of school before finishing their final exams and graduating. I’m over 5 years out of high school os someone thought I must’ve had some experience to share!

I spoke about my time since leaving high school, including going to University, changing degrees after a semester, getting work experience along the way, trying to build a few businesses and entering the corporate world. My best advice to a youngster is to continuously look for ways to improve yourself.

Some of the best ways for 16-20 year olds to improve themselves are:

• Get a job. Work experience is vitally important at an early age. It gives you exposure to the real world and you’ll learn some basics when it comes to working with money and dealing with people. Also, you need many different experiences to draw upon when you’re going for more important job interviews and answering those behavioural/situational/experience quesitons.
• Start reading. I feel like reading has had a big impact on me in the past year or so. You can check the books I’ve read here. Reading has definitely expanded my horizons and I’d suggest everyone read a few personal development or self help sort of non-fiction books.
• Build a business. Te best way to learn how to real world works in my opinion. Start by trying to sell something small or sell a service. You’ll be forced to learn the ropes of sales, marketing, branding, project management, and a hell of a lot of interpersonal skills. Don’t invest a lot of money, just do it for the experience.

3 hour Brand Accelerator – hosted by Glen Carlson of Dent Global

Background:

Daniel Priestly and Glen Carlson created the “Key Person of Influence” program in Australia in 2010. Their brand has now expanded and they offer their 40 week “Growth Accelerator” program in the UK, USA, Australia and Singapore. They take entrepreneurs through their ‘5 step sequence’ of Pitch, Publish, Product, Profile and Partner to help their businesses and their brand succeed. In 2014, they were awarded Australia’s 9th fastest growing company. With a strong track record and over 2,000 alumni success stories, it’s pretty safe to say that becoming a Key Person of Influence can work for you too.

Quick Summary:

After reading and reviewing the Becoming a Key Person of Influence book, Jonesy found this event online that happened to be the night after we recorded the last podcast! We went along and brought our friend Long Nguyen along for the ride too. There was a little bit of crossover with the information in the book, but I found that this event went a lot further and went into a lot more depth. Some of my favourite bits, which I’ll detail below, included the Entrepreneur’s Journey, the five inhibitors to success, focusing on the unaware population, Complete and Remarkable Solutions, the Ascending Transaction Model, and improving your personal reputation (not personal brand).

Who should attend:

I’d say the book is for everyone, but the event was a lot more business focused. If you’re in business and want to really accelerate and add a zero to the end of your profits, this short event is a good place to start. It’s all about, as the title suggests, accelerating your brand. It’s not going to instantly 10X your sales, and there’s definitely a lot more to learn, but it definitely gives you a few things to think about and a few key ideas you can implement immediately.

Favourite Sections:

The Entrepreneur’s Journey

Great breakdown of the different stages of a business’s life. I was just agetting ready to do a write up of the story Glen tells, so I went online to find the image they created, and I actually found an 8 min youtube video Glen’s made telling us exactly what The Entrepreneur’s Journey is! It’s a lot better in his words and he’ll go into a lot more detail, so I’d recommend checking out his video here.

The 5 Inhibitors to Success

There are 5 things that your business is missing if you aren’t achieving the success you dream of:
– Lack of Clarity
– Lack of Confidence
– Lack of Capacity
– Lack of Cut-Through
– Lack of Compatibility
I like these and I can definitely see that these things would inhibit success. How do you fix these? Of course! The KPI book tells us! Pitch, Publish, Product, Profile and Partnerships. These seem to marry up quite nicely…

The Unaware Population

I hate using this term, but this is seriously a game changer.
Let’s divide the population in two: there is a segment of the population that is aware that they have the problems you are trying to solve, and there is a segment that is unaware and doesn’t even know they have the problems.

Which of these segments is larger? UNAWARE

Which segment is easier to sell to? AWARE

Of course if people know they have the problem and are aware, they will be much more ready to buy. Because the unaware population doesn’t even know they have the problem, you first need to educate them that the problems exist, THEN you need to try to sell to them. So, if the aware population is easier to sell to, of course that’s where all of your competition is! And because these people are aware, they are aware that there are competitors, so they will go shopping for the cheapest option and you get stuck in the race to the bottom of who can cut their prices furthest and still try and make a profit.

If the aware population is smaller and that’s where all the competition is, hopefully you’re starting to realise that you should be focusing on the unaware population – it’s a far bigger market and there is a lot less competition! You need to take your future customers on the journey to help show them the problems and show them that you’re the best person to buy for. By the time you take them on the education journey from unaware to aware, even though they can shop around, they’d be much more willing to buy from you because they have already got to know and trust you – you’ve shown them the light!

7 / 11 / 4

This is a simple breakdown of how customers need to see your brand before they become pre-sold. This stands for 7 hours across 11 touch points on 4 different platforms. As an example using the KPI guys, this might include doing three hour-long sessions reading their book, listening to two half-hour podcasts, reading two ten minute blog posts and watching four forty minute youtube videos. That’s 7 hours across 11 touch points on 4 platforms.

This is what you need to do to get someone “presold”, and ready to confidently buy from your brand. Big companies know this. They don’t just buy one thirty second TV commercial and hope people will come in and buy from them – the buy TV ads, radio ads, build social media presence, create billboards, sponsor events… While most of us probably can’t yet afford these, we can definitely build out our platforms and create content for potential customers and constantly build our brand.

Complete & Remarkable Solution

Glen encouraged us to have a main product that we make at least $2,000 profit on. The CRS is a way that you can charge more. By becoming a Key Person of Influence and becoming oversubscribed, you don’t need to compete on price. The CRS is how you solve ALL of the related problems, not just selling one product or service to solve one of your target market’s problems. This ties in well with the ATM, detailed next.

Ascending Transaction Model

Another amazing takeaway – “Products don’t make money – product ecosystems do”. You don’t just have one product and expect to make money. You need an ecosystem of products and you need an Ascending Transaction Model to progress prospects into customers.

You need a few gifts to give away, you need from products for prospects as the first point of sale, or products for partners so your partners can easily and cheaply recommend your services, and finally you need your core product (the CRS mentioned above that has at least a $2,000 profit margin). The gifts generate the leads, the P4P qualify the leads, then the core business is where you make your money.
Glen uses Apple as an example. Their gift was iTunes that everyone can get for free. They product for prospects include the iPods and iPads, even iPhones. And the core business is the full suite of computers, laptops, phones etc.

Personal Reputation

A lot of people are worried about building their ‘personal brand’. Especially in Australia because we have the ‘Tall Poppy’ Syndrome. We are worried people will view us as being a ‘shameless self promoter’ and constantly trying to sell people stuff. Glen says the easiest way to overcome this hesitation is to replace the term ‘personal brand’ with the term ‘personal reputation’. Who doesn’t want to have a good reputation??? Who wouldn’t want to work to improve their reputation?

Favourite Quotes:

As it was a live event, I was more focused on taking in the information, rather than writing down exact quotes, so this section will be A LOT shorter than usual. Check out the post where I review their book, Becoming a Key Person of Influence, for more quotes!

“What’s the best way to walk through a minefield? Follow someone else’s footsteps”
“Competition is the enemy of profit”
“Products don’t make money – product ecosystems do”
“Your environment dictates your performance”

I have to admit I’ve become very bad at managing my personal finances. I used to be the best saver. But the more money I’ve earned, the more I’ve spent! Your lifestyle definitely expands with your income, and your ‘necessary expenses’ grow to things that weren’t so necessary in the past.

But I’m getting back on track! The most important thing is the cliche “pay yourself first”. It’s what our parents used to always tell us, and it definitely works. Maybe they just didn’t explain it well enough or maybe we didn’t want to hear their advice. But re-reading The Richest Man in Babylon recently, I’ve committed to ‘the 10 % rule’.

Every time you get paid, put 10% away and don’t touch it. If you feel like you’re already living paycheck to paycheck, you might think this is impossible. But what you’ll find that if that 10% is gone, you’ll still survive on the other 90%. If it’s not there, you won’t spend it. If this is truly impossible, start with 5% or even 1% and commit to it. Then when you reduce you expenses, bump that up each pay cycle until you get to 10%.

I’ve made this 10% transaction automatic. I changed my pay instructions so that that 10% automatically goes in to a different account. I’ve just had my third pay go in since instating this rule and it feels great! It’s good to see those savings sitting there again and knowing I won’t spend them. As I said, I used to be a really good saver. I’ve lost my way a bit but I’m getting back under control!

This idea comes from The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. He talks about doing 30-day ‘Vice Fasts’. This is where for a whole month you go without one of your ‘vices’. This may be coffee, alcohol, TV, chocolate… anything! By doing the 30 day fast, you show yourself that you are in control and you don’t NEED these things to get you through.

I was recording an episode of our ‘What You Will Learn‘ podcast when somehow how I accidentally committed to three different vice fasts… You can listen to that episode here. I’m just going to change the order slightly, but here’s my commitment:

• August 2016 = No masturbation (I’m not sure if this is a vice for me but Adam Jones made a joke about it so somehow I got stuck with it)
• September = No Coffee
• October = No Alcohol

I’ll provide an update during the month for these. Wish me luck!

So, Pokemon Go has kind of taken over my life for the last three or four days… Along with the rest of the world! It feels that way anyway. I’m very curious to see how long the craze lasts.

I read some amazing stats online about how quickly this things has grown. Below are some of the things I read and heard today. This is amazing! The game has only been out five or six days, and currently has only been released in the US, Australia and New Zealand.

• Added $10b to Nintendo’s value in two days
• Nintendo share price shot up 36% in two days
• On android devices, more people have installed Pokemon Go than Tinder
• Pokemon Go is approaching the amount of unique daily users that Twitter has
• People spend more time per day, on average, playing Pokemon Go than they do on Instagram, Snap Chat, Messenger and Whats App
• Apparently it cost around $30m to develop the game, and in less than a week they’ve already taken in over $14m, and is now churning out about $1.6m in revenue a day

 

Crazy. Good news is, I just went out and took down three gyms!! Pokedex is currently sitting at 56.