Nothing surprising, people said they ate, listened to music, talk radio and motivational “tapes,” some sang, talked on their cell phones, some thought about problems, one rehearsed a speech, a salesman worried about a client, they checked email, they texted, one sexted, one woman put on lipstick, several drank coffee, and a man planned dinner. Some of them were doing a few of these things at once.

But not one of them just drove.

You see, driving is one of these activities we can do without paying the
slightest attention, despite the fact that it’s actually quite complicated. And it turns out that driving isn’t the only thing we do without paying attention. When you stop to think about it, there is very little besides video games, golf, and television that we actually give our full 100% attention.

Much of our life is done on semi-automatic, and sometimes – like driving – full-bore-auto. And it’s not just one thing that’s on auto-pilot, but often a whole bunch of things going on at the same time and none getting anywhere near our full attention, our minds flipping and switching and jumping from one thing to the next to the next.

Of course, what you end up with is sub-par performance because nothing is getting our very best, difficulty focusing (what a surprise), a lack of creativity (creativity definitely requires focus and you’re out of practice), procrastination (because when you’re doing 7 things at once who wants to do anything else), fuzzy thinking (again, no surprise), no spontaneity (we’re never really present), and more kinds of stress you can possibly imagine.

So I was driving to the talk on mindfulness, and practicing JUST DRIVING…

“Feel the foot on the gas and the hands on the steering wheel…”

And then I’d jump to thinking about what I was going to say. And then I’d remember to JUST DRIVE.

“Push the turn signal control down, turn the steering wheel slightly and sense the car moving into the left lane…”

And what was I going to say? Oh right – JUST DRIVE…

And so on. Then I started breathing into the driving. That made it easier. My focus became sharper.

When you ease into it, when you breath into it, everything starts to feel better. The mind chatter settles down almost instantly and your senses become sharper. Whatever else there was a moment ago falls away. Breathing is really key to mindfulness practice.

Try this:

Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Pay attention to the air flowing in through your nose and down your windpipe and into to your lungs. Hold the breath for a second and then slowly let it out, again feeling to the air as it leaves your deflating lungs, flows up your windpipe and out of your mouth. This is what yoga people call
“watching your breath.” Do that a few times. If you’re still with me, count from one to ten along with your breathing.

Go ahead. Just stop reading . Breath and count. After you’ve done it for a while come back to me.

How was it?

Most people get lost somewhere between 2 and 10. Their mind wanders and starts thinking about… Something.  Maybe you remembered what you were doing, came back and kept counting. And then lost it again. And then kept counting. And so on.

No matter how it went, if you did it at all, you did a great job.

You might try this little process again at different times throughout the day. You’ll find it refreshing and energizing. And yes, you’ll begin to get bits of everything I promised above. This really works.

One more thing…

Mindfulness is a funny word; it almost sounds like the opposite of what we mean.

Just an hour ago I was picking up a rental car at MCO. Alamo has an interesting system they let drivers pick out the car they want. So I jumped in the Jeep, didn’t like the seat adjustments, and the Kia felt like it was made of cheap plastic, so I ended up with a nice Dodge SUV something.  I moved my luggage in and out of one car and then the other. Got in the winner car, looked up the hotel address, checked the Nav, which was on the blink, finally figured out where I was going, acclimated to the chosen car, adjusted the mirrors, adjusted the seat… My mind was so full with the details of choice, hopping from one car to the next, driving at night in a strange city, the semi-broken navigation on my phone, so filled up with stuff, that I didn’t realize until 24 miles later that I’d foolishly left my trademark blue blazer in one of the cars. Called lost and found. Called the garage itself. No Blazer. No Joy. Complete failure for paying attention to the present moment.

Which brings me back to the mindfulness idea…

Most of us pass our lives paying very little attention to the present moment because our minds are so full with all the stuff we’re doing. Mindfulness is the practice of becoming aware by letting go of all the stuff and focusing on the one single thing we chose to do whether it’s driving while we’re driving, or walking while we’re walking, doing the dishes while we’re doing the dishes, or counting while we’re counting.

Over the next few weeks I’ll give you some other easy exercises to draw you into the present moment.

I’ve been working with a few of my business coaching clients on mindfulness practice as was a way of deepening concentration, sharpening focus and stimulating creativity. As if those things weren’t enough, it instantly floods you with energy (without caffeine) and it just plain feels good.

So go count from one to ten again, and when you’re done, leave me your comments and tell me what’s happening.

I’m going to share it with you in the simplest way possible. Mindfulness is paying attention to what is going on at this very moment. That’s it. So try this during your day today. Whenever your mind goes somewhere – and you’re typically deep into something – and you’re almost unconscious, but at some point your mind pops back into awareness. At that moment, ask yourself, “Where am I?,” or “What am I doing?” In that moment, your experience is transformed…

You can do this by reviewing your goals once or twice daily: end of day to prepare your subconscious for sleep, and the beginning of day for obvious reasons.  An even more powerful strategy is to have a daily (weekly, whatever) ACCOUNTABILITY CALL with a partner. Use my four questions: what’s working, what’s not working, what’s missing, what’s next as an easy way to keep the conversation focused. (See the post here: http://www.paullemberg.com/unstuck/)

THEN… and this step is super critical — make sure that to the degree possible, all your actions, moment to moment, are in support of those goals.  Do that and the magic happens. Do that and your results will be magnificent.

It helps to be clear about the purpose of your goals and the meaning of achieving them. When purpose, goals, and actions are aligned everything becomes easy…

When “normal people” stop there’s a pause.  And you can see it.  It’s a break in the action. Sometimes, they stay like that for a long time – like a still photograph.

But unstoppable people?

It’s not the same thing at all…

They might stop for a short bit of time, they just don’t stay that way.

They don’t get stuck.

What they do is completely different and it can mean the difference between outrageous success and a lifetime of mediocrity…

By the way, if your business has sales of more than a quarter million and less than a million, and you’d like to find out about serious business growth coaching for your company, take a look at http://www.paullemberg.com/emerging-business-coaching/. I’ll be doing a small promotion for this in a few days and as you can imagine, there aren’t too many spots. If you’re interested, jump on it right away.

My immediate answer is YES.

But aren’t entrepreneurs, and especially entrepreneurs who work alone supposed to do whatever it takes?

Well, yeah…

But “doing whatever it takes” isn’t the same as doing everything.

Doing everything is a bad idea, it costs you money and it costs you growth, and I can prove it.

Watch the video to get the whole scoop.

When you’re done leave a comment with your insights and if you’re up to it, your next steps.

PL

It might be time for you to face the facts…

Roughly half of whatever is rolling around in your head got there by accident and probably isn’t doing you much good.

But when you try to figure out what’s what, it tuns out the situation is a much like something David Ogilvy said while talking about advertising…

Half of it worked, half didn’t.

He just wasn’t ever sure which half was which.

 
Beliefs are scarily like that…

Until you take a closer look it’s tough to figure out which are “true” and which are garbage.

The good news?

You can do something about it, and the effects are phenomenal.

Watch the video.

And when you’re done, add to the conversation.

Comment on the things you used to believe and the things you now believe. Or comment on whatever you feel like.

Maybe grow your profits 27%, maybe lose 36 pounds, maybe change your life… Whatever.

You had a plan and you worked out the steps, but you weren’t taking the actions necessary to get anywhere.

What do you think would happen?

Duh… Nothing.

Of course, nothing would happen, because you weren’t doing anything. How could it possibly be any different?

But that doesn’t make any sense…

You knew what to do but weren’t doing it? Why not? That’s never happened, has it?

Well it may NOT make any sense, but for a lot of people this happens every single day.

Here’s why:

When you’re done, take a minute and post your comments on the blog, because going public with this sort of thing can really make a difference.

Seriously…

BE BOLD

Now I don’t know whether Buffet really told this to the pilot, but if he didn’t he should have. Either way, it’s solid advice.

The things you choose to focus on obviously have loads to do with what you achieve, but the things you choose not to focus on? Those things make focus possible.

Watch this 4-minute, 16-second video for a simple exercise to dramatically increase your focus and your results.

To your outrageous success.

Paul

P.S., take a minute and tell me what you think in the comments. Does this work for you? What are some of the things you’re going to avoid like the plague? Watch it now…

Now in the interests of full disclosure my friends will laugh because everyone knows I know next to nothing about sports. But I know this much: top pro athletes have a ton of experience with peak performance, so I figure that what they know would be useful for entrepreneurs.

Todd shared what he believes is the key secret champions use to be champions. I’ve distilled it into a 3-minute-15-second video.

Watch it below

When you’re done tell me what you think. Also, if you could do me a favor and let me know if you prefer video posts or written ones and why.

Thanks.

-pl

Improve Your Sales With Market Research

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re thinking of rolling out a new product.

And because you think you’re pretty smart and that your opinion about things matters, you don’t take time to find out whether your market wants it or not because you just know…

You’re certain that you can rely on your vast experience, just guess, or maybe trust your intuition to guide you…

So you barrel forward, invest a ton of resources, money and time into your next great idea, and…

Nobody cares.

Believe me, there is a better way. It’s called research, and there are many ways it can be used, all of which will make you more money.

One of the coolest things about the Internet is that it has taken a lot of traditional research tools and made them so much easier and cheaper to use. That goes for primary research, where you “talk” directly to customers and potential customers, as well as secondary research, where you study other people’s primary research.

Here are ten things you can do with market research.

1. Understand what people think of you. Use research to gage you or your company’s reputation among your customers, prospects, bloggers and other opinion-setters, and anyone else who has influence on your future.

2. Know how consumers compare your offer to similar offers from competitors. Think it would boost your sales if you knew which parts of your product people thought were not as good as someone else’s?

3. Figure out what features will most appeal to your potential customers. This little gem tells you where to put your product development energy and which parts of your new service should be left out.

4. Determine what should go into creating the ideal offer to your market, including price, terms, benefits, format, delivery mechanisms, sizes, features, packaging, bonuses, sequence, and so on.

5. Use research to create the best messages to sell your products and your services so that you can get people’s attention and keep it all the way to the close.

6. Research can help you define your target market or niche. Are they men or women? Old or young? Small businesses or medium ones? Rich or super-rich? Industry? Job title? Hobbies? Experience? Getting these factors right – and many more – can make the difference between a hit and a flop.

7. Interestingly, you can use research to figure out what language appeals to your buyers. Moving toward or away? Fear versus greed? Pain or pleasure? You can identify which kinds of words work best.

8. Zero in on what products or services people want from you and are most willing to pay for. It can’t guarantee a slam-dunk, but it can get you much closer than if you guess. This simple use of research, which can be anything from a 1-question survey on your webpage to something much more elaborate, can save you a fortune in lost labor, and can identify opportunities you’d have never thought of without help.

9. Clarify what part of your marketing is making the greatest difference so you can use the good parts and improve the parts that aren’t helping.

10. Position your business perfectly in the minds of your prospects. Even great marketers often have trouble selling themselves. Research can tell you why your best customers ARE your best customers and what things about you they find most attractive. Then all you have to do is tell other people those same things and you’re golden.

There’s no limit on how you an use research to dig into the collective mind of your market. These ten are some of the most important ones, and they will make you money if you use them.

Let me know how you use research, or any other thoughts you’ve got below.

In the meantime. to get you going with some of this valuable research and apply it to how you market your business, I’ve just put together a brand new product you may want to go grab quickly.

It’s an easy to follow step-by-step method to create your brand and marketing message based on information you can easily get from your customers and prospects.

If been putting off creating your company or personal marketing message, this is the simplest way to do it now and go get it done. Your only other choice is to hire me or some other marketing consultant for $15,000-$25,000.

This new self-paced program will sell for $197, and for $197, it’s a real deal. But since it’s brand new, and I haven’t really started marketing it, the pre-publication price is $67, until May 9th.

Use this code: EXRMM508 to get the discount. I want to warn you, the sales letter isn’t much, but for 67 bucks? Go get the Marketing Money Magnet here and remember to use the discount code “EXRMM508.”

Or use this link: http://paullemberg.com/mmm

Remember to use the discount code EXRMM508 so that you only pay $67 until May 9th

Why would you do this to your business?

How many lifetime customers would you be willing to sacrifice so that you could trim your operations and maybe save a few bucks here and there?

If that question makes you sense to you, then you can safely skip the rest of this post…

But if it tickled a little thought in the back of your mind, read on.

Consider this: Since the start of the last worldwide recession many businesses have tightened their credit policies so that only the best-rated customers get payment terms. Everyone else has to pay cash.

Do you do anything like this? Sure, it makes sense to hold down “unnecessary costs” and avoid risky business. But have you bothered to figure out whether net profits are up as a result?

I’m willing to bet that at the end of the day, tight credit policies are costing tons of money in missed sales, and that the “saved” losses are dwarfed by the missed opportunity, the lost life-time value, simply because it’s harder to do business with you than with your competitors.

Losing repeat business… Forever

And that’s just one example of how companies push away perfectly good customers. There are tons of proven ways to lose sales by making it extra hard for customers to buy from you. Mostly these are just bad decisions people make to limit expenses, but they are almost always short sighted. They repel good customers, and not only for the all-important first sale, but for all the otherwise super-profitable recurring sales as well.

Once pushed away, those potential customers are pushed away forever. They never come back for that ever-more-valuable repeat business.

Here are some other ways business owners make it hard for customers to buy.

Limiting forms of payment.

I like to eat at a local place that serves a fabulous “Mediterranean Frittata” with a wild greens salad. But they only take cash. What a pain. It makes me think twice about meeting people there, and I never go with a big group. Who wants to peel off $300 in cash for breakfast? Of course they save anywhere from 1.9% to 3.5 discount on each diner, and that’s not nothing. But what about all the lost business?

The list of widely used payment options is not long. Online you can use credit and debit cards: Visa, Master Card, American Express and Discover, or PayPal, or electronic or e-Checks. Offline, you’ve got the cards, plus checks and cash. That’s pretty much it.

Why on earth would you not accept ALL of them? To save 1% on the transaction free?

Suppose someone doesn’t have a Visa or Master Card because they’ve gone over their limit and their bank has shut them down. But AMEX plays by different rules so they actually have plenty of spending power. But you’re wiling to lose the sale in order to keep 1% of extra margin.

By the way, 1% saved on nothing is nothing.

And 1.9% saved, even 3.5% saved on nothing is still nothing.

Online it’s even worse. At least offline the customer is already in the store, and has maybe consumed the purchase already, so they pay. Online, they just abandon the shopping cart. Many smaller businesses only accept PayPal and don’t take cards at all, which is just nuts. I estimate it cuts into their sales by 30-50%.

Wake up! You’ve spent all this energy getting shoppers to your store. Why not make it easy for them to give you their money?

Shipping and Handling

Another area doing business is made harder than it needs to be is shipping, and the mysterious “handling.” I’m not sure who people think they’re fooling when they add $28.00 to ship something everyone knows costs $4.95 to deliver. If I discover it before clicking the order button, I usually ditch the vendor, just out of spite.

Automated shopping cart systems make it easy to give customers a choice of shipping methods tailored to their needs and their budget.

Easy + Fast + Cheap = Repeat Business.

Or do what Zappos does and ship for free. More and more e-tailers are doing it and those who don’t will get left behind. Make it easy for people to get their stuff and they’ll want to get it from you. One of the reasons cited for Zappos incredible success (and $800 Million sale to Amazon) is free shipping, even on returns. And get this – choose the free shipping option and they still send it overnight. Now that’s easy.

You can’t always find what you want…

Make it easy for customers to find stuff. Online, give them search capability that actually finds things and make the search box PROMINENT on every page. And since shelf space is infinite, feature the same products on every appropriate category page.

Offline, organize your store to match how customers think about products. Use big readable signs, along with on-shelf labeling. Scatter specials around your store. Put them right in the traffic flow. Supermarkets are great sources of merchandizing inspiration, study what they do. And add staff to helpfully direct shoppers. Train them to ask, “How can I help you?” instead of “Can I help you?”

Grease the Wheels

What about handling the transaction itself? Offline this isn’t much of a problem, except in my local Ralphs. They’re great merchandisers but now they’re pushing automated checkout and the scanners don’t work very well. The machines bark rudely at you and the “place the item in the bag” system is clumsy and inefficient. Plus it’s impossible to pay for self-serve items from the “olive bar.”

But I was in the new Fresh and Easy the other day, and they’ve rethought the whole process. Every bad aspect in the Ralph’s system works beautifully here. Now I know it’s possible to get it right.

Online, checkout can be hard if you can’t find the checkout button or the “show my cart” button. Or what about losing your order information when you accidently hit the back button. And why can’t your shopping cart handle dashes in my phone number. What’s wrong with dashes? And why wouldn’t your system save things in my cart for a day, or even two? Get interrupted and have to start over again? How frustrating. How inconvenient. Amazon saves things in my cart… forever.

Did you know that 70% of all orders started in a shopping cart don’t complete? Put some thought into improving your process, and it could pay hugely.
Faxing in the Age of the Internet

This one is my absolute favorite. I tried to purchase an exotic version of anti-oxidant Glutathione from a company in New York. The only way is to print out their order form, write my order by

Sources of Friction

Here are a few other sources of friction you may wish to consider.

• Are you store open hours long enough, or early enough, or late enough?
• Do you have enough staff for the volume of shoppers?
• Is your customer service line responsive?
• Are your on-hold times out of whack?
• What about your toll-free phone numbers? Easy to find, prominently posted?
• Is your phone tree a button-pushing nightmare? “Please listen carefully because our menu has recently changed…” Don’t waste my time, just tell me what I need to know, and ALWAYS give me the option of talking to an operator. Outsource this if you don’t have your own.
• If you have online chat, make sure it’s available most of the time. People aren’t idiots, and when your chat is always closed, they know you’re scamming them with some “conversion tactic” you read in a blog post.

Think about your customer’s buying process. What steps do they have to go through to make a purchase. Where do they get hung up? Where is it harder than it needs to be. Find the sources of friction and reduce or remove them.

By the way the people running Amazon are the kings of this. They continually refine their ecommerce system to reduce friction and make the buying process easier and easier.

One-Click is perhaps the most friction-free method of buying anything anywhere, and it gets smarter and smarter over time.

What is you version of “one-click?” Figure that out and your sales could jump quite a bit.

PS, I’ve just published a brand new product you may want to go grab quickly. It’s an easy to follow step-by-step method to create your brand and marketing message based on information you can easily get from your customers and prospects. If you don’t yet have your marketing message nailed this is the simplest way to do it now and go get it done. Your only other choice is to hire a marketing consultant for $15,000.

The program will sell for $197 but the pre-publication price until May 8th is $67.

You have to use this code: EXRMM508 to get the discount. The sales letter isn’t much, but for 67 bucks? Go get the Marketing Money Magnet here and remember to use the discount code “EXRMM508.”

Or just use this link: http://paullemberg.com/mmm Remember to use the discount code EXRMM508 so that you only pay $67.

Being unreasonable leads to breakthroughs in profits and everything else (DNA)

Compare and contrast: incrementalism and breakthroughs.

The Incremental Improvement Strategy is based on finding things in your business that could work better and making small changes. Year after year your operations improve slightly and bit-by-bit become more efficient and more effective, producing small, consistent dividends for you and your family, and your investors if you have them.

Continuous improvement, or optimization, is always going to be a sound approach to running your business. Over time, those small but steady gains add up to solid increases in income. At 7% growth, your business will double in 10 years. At 10%, it will double in 7 years. At 15%, it will take 5 years.

If you’re risk averse, this can be very effective…

• As long as the external environment remains stable (for instance, no sweeping governmental changes in the Middle East.)
• As long as there are no oil price increases or surprise shortages of other critical raw materials.
• As long as there are no across the board price reductions (as we’ve seen in housing over the past 3 years.)
• As long as consumer tastes don’t change
• As long as there is no technological shift striking at the core of your product line.
• As long as there is no gorilla competitor altering the fundamentals of your market.

So as long as none of these things happen, it could all work out for you.

But when your market isn’t stable (and whose is?), when great sea changes are tearing at the very fabric of your environment, the only thing that is going to keep you in business is creating a business breakthrough.

A breakthrough is a discontinuous, non-gradual change in your business that shifts the revenue, production, and profit curves in a completely new direction.

Breakthroughs-the kind you’ll need if you are to compete with a global competitor or deal with a radical swing in consumer tastes-cannot come from “being reasonable” and sticking to existing business rules.

Breakthroughs are not predictable from where you currently are, and they have the nasty habit of making everyone in your organization totally uncomfortable.

Until 1983, Intel made most of its money selling memory chips. The company had come under increasing pressure from Japanese manufacturers, who were building significant capacity while cutting price to grab market share. Grove concluded Intel couldn’t continue to compete like this, and he came up with a new approach.

Intel saw that the future was in microprocessors, which until then had been a tiny portion of the company’s profits. He refocused the entire business to become a “single source” for computers-on-a-chip, increasing quality and diversifying the company not by product, but by geography, making it a more stable and reliable supplier.

He risked the company’s future on this strategy, broke every rule in the business doing it-and transformed Intel into one of the three most important players of the personal computer era.

Sometimes breakthroughs happen by accident, yet even when they do, it takes guts to pursue them, because the consequences create unbelievable levels of stress.

They are almost always – by definition – totally out of alignment with your current direction.

To deliberately set out to cause a breakthrough from scratch requires nothing less than a complete sacrifice of everything you hold to be reasonable. So what if profits are down; that doesn’t mean you should dump the main source of them, does it?

In Intel’s case, it did.

I decided to post this adaptation from my book, Be Unreasonable, to show the “other side of the coin” from my best selling programs, FormulaFIVE and BlueprintsToProfits, and even my newest program for start-ups and early stage companies, Getting Started in Business. Each of these programs use my “15% solution” combining incremental and breakthrough thinking, to reliably double entrepreneur’s businesses. These programs work so well because the incremental nature is easy to implement and pretty much failure-proof, while the breakthrough comes in combining small strategies into a blockbuster one.

It’s important to remain flexible and not get locked into one model. Think big and think small at the same time. Insure steady, incremental improvement and simultaneously, look for the breakthroughs.

By the way, if you don’t yet have your own copy of Be Unreasonable, get one from Amazon (They were temporarily out of stock but do have the Kindle version) or Barnes and Noble.

I’m pretty sure not everyone agrees with me on this. If you’ve got a minutes, let me know what you think in the comments.

And stay tuned, I have some really interesting promotions coming up.

Don't make bad decisions because you didn't know any better

This is serious…

And it might come as a surprise, but from time to time, I’ve been known to make bad decisions…

And weirdly, some of my clients do too.

Bad decisions will cost you money, cost you time and eat into your profits. In the worst case, one bad decision can totally kill off your business.

Actually we all make bad decisions, and most of these “mistakes“ are not caused by a lack of knowledge or a shortage of skill. Often they are errors in judgment, caused by one or another of the basic personality flaws, the kind that are deeply imbedded in our brains and our culture.

What follows is the first half of a list of common ways entrepreneurs – and other people – decide the wrong way to do the wrong things.

I adapted this from something I saw in a quirky book called “Seeking Wisdom – From Darwin to Munger,” by Swedish author Peter Bevelin.

They say that recognition is the first step on the road to recovery. If you’d like to make better decisions and avoid some mistakes in the future, it would help to first understand how you make them.

Study the list, zero in on the parts that apply to you. Resolve to, at the very least, notice when you are making these mistakes, and fix them.

Okay, here goes:

1) Liking things similar to the things you already like.

If you like “A”, you are predisposed to think well of anything similar to “A.” This is the basis of a lot of advertising. After all, why do we say sex sells? Because we like sex, and, by association almost anything else. If I like playing golf, I may be predisposed to think that golf products make good investments. (They generally don’t.) The same mistake goes for disliking “B.”

2) Underestimating the power that rewards and punishments have on our thoughts and actions.

People are biased towards taking action and moving towards whatever we are incentivized to do, and we try avoid doing what will get us punished. As decision makers the trick is to explicitly understand the rewards and punishments implicit in the decision you’re making. For instance, you end up making a purchase decision based on the recommendation of a salesperson who is paid a special bonus for selling that product during a promotion, without considering that their expert opinion is biased.

3) Forgetting that people act primarily to serve their self-interests.

This is related to the mistake above. People ALWAYS act to increase their personal self-interest. This is fine (and to be expected) as long as your interests align with theirs. The problem is that realizing this may lead you to think that people’s actions are guided by some higher truth. For the most part, they are not.

4) Having an unrealistically high opinion of our own abilities, and tending toward seeing a rosy future.

As an entrepreneur you probably have a pretty high opinion of yourself. And just as likely, you’re optimistic about the future. Together these two qualities make it hard for you to evaluate the potential success of a project, especially one that hinges on your personal skills, abilities and business acumen. After all, you’re going to make it happen, aren’t you? How could it be any other way?

5) Wishful thinking and other distortions to reduce perceived pains.

When you are in some kind of pain – physical or emotional or financial— any kind of discomfort – you tend to act on things you believe will alleviate that pain. And your belief that something will help grows stronger the longer the pain goes on. After a while anything with a remote chance can look like a winner. Wishful thinking starts to seem quite grounded, and grasping at straws feels like anything but.

6) Being consistent with past decisions.

Psychologist Robert Cialdini makes this point in his book, “Influence.” He calls it “commitment and consistency,” and says that you’ll act in a way to confirm that your past decisions were the right ones. Deal makers use this against you when they repeatedly offer things to which you can easily say “yes,”making it so much easier to say “yes” to something big.

7) Bias towards maintaining the status quo

Most people don’t like change. It’s hard-wired into the species dating back to prehistoric times when any change meant some kind of danger. Most of us will go to great lengths to not have to change, including sticking with employees and vendors and, yes, clients, long past the time we should have parted ways.

Impatience – having a greater concern and valuing more things in the present, than things in the future

It’s easier to make a decision in favor of something we think will bring gains today or tomorrow than for a strategy or a project which may take months, even years, to materialize. This means a fortune-changing project can get sacrificed to something mediocre with a short-term payoff.

9) Comparing things to some random “standard” rather than looking at quantities objectively.

This one is weird. Most of us hate abstraction and don’t like to think about things without some reference standard. We’ll compare quantities, even when the underlying things we’re quantifying have nothing to do with each other. Nassim Taleb talks about a study where people who were asked to share the last four digits of their social security number unconsciously used those numbers when estimating the number of dentists in New York City. (I said this was weird.) Taleb calls it anchoring. This introduces a certain randomness into your evaluations, unhinging them from any kind of objective reality. It’s easy to manipulate people this way. Start your negotiations with a firm declaration of the true value: “It’s worth every bit of $2 million, and I won’ take a penny less.” Your counter-party offers an absolute top price of “a million and a half.” You would have been happy with $900,000.

10) Reciprocation

This is another one from Cialdini. Reciprocation is another hardwired trait, and is critical to the tribal structure of people, the ultimate purpose of which is to insure survival. We are willing to do people favors and kindnesses now, because we know they’ll pay us back in the future. All well and good, but in the future, you may find yourself making a bad decision because at a certain level you are driven to pay back the favor.

I said this earlier, recognition is the first step on the road to recovery, and understanding your how your mind works will pay tremendous dividends in making the right decisions. And making the right decisions will pay huge dividends in terms of sales, profits, happiness and satisfaction.

What do you think?

Do me a favor and post your comments below. I’ll pay you back some time soon.

If you want extraordinary results you’ve got three choices: execute an extraordinary idea well, execute a decent idea extraordinarily well, or best, execute an extraordinary idea extraordinarily well.

But no matter what, something has to be extra-ordinary, because doing it the ordinary way, the way you usually do things…

The way most people do things…

Won’t get you what you want.

There’s just no way around this, whatever it is you currently think and do is giving you whatever results you are currently getting. No more.

And if you’re wanting more than you’ve got, much more, you have to step outside of whatever box you’re in.

In other words, you’re going to have to be unreasonable.

Don’t get me wrong…

If you’re okay with your current output, your current lifestyle, your current level of happiness, then doing “it” the way you always done it is fine.

But if you want “extraordinary…?”

Bob Dylan wrote in 1965, “He who isn’t being born is busy dying.” Or as Warren Zevon sung more colorfully, “The sh** that used to work, it don’t work now.”

It’s now 2011, and things are decidedly different than they were just a few years ago, even a few months ago. So to make sure your business is closer to being born that dying, to help you get more of what you want, I’ve updated The Unreasonable Manifesto from my book, Be Unreasonable.

Here goes:

Your tried-and-true ways of getting things done are slowing down and running out of gas. They sometimes appear to work, so you think they still do and will work forever. That’s just an illusion; they’re only going to look that way for a little while longer.

Being unreasonable means achieving the extraordinary by doing things that are unexpected, unpredicted, and beyond what normal people consider normal.

Being unreasonable requires rejecting compromises. Compromises are based on your current belief system and force you to sacrifice what truly matters in exchange for something easily attainable. Question your beliefs about the situation and the compromise can melt away. That’s how you can really get what you want.

Don’t hold back your high cards waiting for the best time to play them. Being unreasonable means giving your best in every single situation that demands it. Play your best cards now. You’ll be dealt more later. Count on it.

Do more than you are asked to do and ask for what you really need. Most people do neither which means most people never get what they want from others. You can and you will.

Consider whether what you want is possible, and if you think it is, get busy. Don’t worry about the likelihood or the probability. Assessing the odds will always keep you from getting extraordinary things. By definition, the only ordinary things have good odds. Extraordinary things can’t.

Ask this question: how do “normal” things get to be called normal. Normal equals average. What you want – extraordinary is never normal. Being unreasonable doesn’t take normal into account. Being unreasonable is about figuring out what’s best, and doing that without worrying what normal people think is.

Think whatever thoughts. Your “reasonable” mind edits, censors and disapproves of your non-normal thoughts. Don’t go with it. Think “whatever” thoughts arise, and follow them to their best conclusions. The most transformative ideas come to you randomly, and then… Your reasonable thinking kills them. Don’t do that.

Expect the best. Unreasonable as it seems, expect the best from yourself and from those around you. Expect them to succeed. Count on it. Plan for it. Budget for it. Start with the best scenario you can imagine and ensure that it happens. Expecting the worst has a similar, but opposite, effect.

Warrior-sage Sun Tzu wrote that nothing is as dangerous as an enemy who has been backed into a corner. Such enemies will fight to the death, for they have nowhere else to run. Use this strategy on yourself: Back yourself into a corner, it will stop you from having any excuses. About anything.

“Should” always implies the status quo. It’s based on how everyone else has always done something. Whenever someone says (or worse, you say),”You should…”, ask, “Why should I?”

You can’t improve you don’t understand. Most plans are based on wrong or incomplete assumptions, which always lead you in some other direction. If you don’t know (accurately) where you stand, you can’t chart a true course to your true goals.

Freedom comes from responsibility. Normal people look for causes, something or someone to blame for the way things inevitably turn out. Be completely responsible. For everything. Every miracle, every failure. It’s the only way you can make sure you can get what you want.

A conservative model produces conservative results. Repeating the successes of the past, preserving tradition, and keeping everything the same can at best only give you results like those from before. But in the new future, the now future, those results will not be as good as they once were.

Take time off. Working nonstop (24/7 for 365 or whatever) until your fuel tank is empty is for dullards and plodders. Take time off and refill your tank. Going full steam ahead, day after day after day can produce excellent short-term results, but then it produces exhaustion. Physical fatigue, exhaustion of the spirit, and exhaustion of ideas. Take time off to re-create yourself.

Perfection prevents progress. New ideas have to be tested against real people. If you wait to get everything right, it will be very late when you get there. It may even be never. Think functionality and workability. Just get it going. Experiment in the chaos of the market and fix it later.

Be afraid. If you’re not scared, you’re not doing something worthwhile, and that’s something you really should be afraid of. All great ventures contain risk and the promise of failure as well as success. Unreasonable people are often afraid. Just be sure you are afraid of the right thing.

Being unreasonable is about breaking rules, not about creating new rules. Don’t break old rules just so you can replace them with new ones. When your new “extraordinary” way of doing something becomes “the rules,” you’re going to get stuck all over again. If you must, create signposts, guidelines, and indications. Anything but rules.

To put Being Unreasonable into action in your life, get yourself a copy of my most recent book, Be Unreasonable or the Kindle version


By the way, I’m about to do something I’ve never done before. It’s tax time again, and it seems the I.R.S. would like more than I had planned on giving them and I have to do something about it. I’m the higher-prices guy so this may come as a surprise, but I think you’ll be really pleased. Stay tuned…

Got comments? I’d love to hear them. Put ‘em below…

I can’t say why not, except perhaps we just don’t come across these things that much. In any case it means these folks aren’t getting much advice about marketing and positioning and such.

So when I got this question in my inbox the other day, I decided to spend a few minutes and answer it.

I’m pretty sure you can use the answer in your business, even if you sell some other kind of service because this simple marketing approach will work for just about any service business.

Take a look… (listen?…)

Would you like that?

Stupid question, right?

I hear it all the time…

How do I grow my business? How do I get more customers? How do I increase sales?

How do I add customers and increase revenue when I can’t pay my bills? How do I grow my business large enough to sell it? How do I keep my kids in school and pay my mortgage? How do I stay afloat and support my family?

How do I survive — in this economy?

I recently realized just how much entrepreneurs need help now more than ever.

That’s why I created this new video series: The 7 Master Keys to Rapid Business Profits. 7 short sessions to get you thinking about how to grow your business. Each one between five and ten minutes. You may be doing some of this stuff, but I bet you’re leaving something out.

And in times like these? I want all the edge that I can get.

So give yourself an edge.

I’m really excited to be doing this series, so leave me your comments and tell me what you think.

Click the video and get started now…

Click to watch Master Key #1

Even your momentary blood sugar or hormone levels can shift your context. It colors how you interpret every event both internal or external. Whether you see something as good/bad, happy/sad, opportunity/threat, friend/foe, partner/competitor, worth it/not worth it, investment/expense, nourishing/poisonous, etc., is all given by that mental framework.

So while “out there” the event is the same for all, your inside experience can be completely different because it exists in a different context. From the point of the individual, context is decisive.

From the perspective of persuasion and influence, whether personal or in business, shifting someone’s context can shift every single thing about their behavior. And lasting influence comes from your ability to get someone’s context to change.

I’ll be writing more about this over the coming weeks. If you want to know more, sign up for my newsletter. I’ll keep you posted.

The yearly Ourobouros – see the image of the snake eating it’s tail – when the twelfth month turns into the first, is a nice time to make a clean break from both good and bad of the previous year.

I have never published a list of res… of res… I just can’t get the word out… of resolutions. There that’s it. I’ve never published a list of resolutions before, but in the spirit of clean breaks and fresh starts, here – forthwith – is a list of 12 resolutions – for me and, if they interest, intrigue and inspire you – for you.

1 Learn from my mistakes

This year, I will learn from my mistakes. It is getting tiresome to continue making some of the same ones over and again, so this year – I’m going to examine my actions closely and understand the results they produce. And, I vow, to examine my proposed actions and consider the possible ramifications in light of what has worked and not worked in the past.

2. Value my time

I don’t know about you, but when my guard is down, it is quite easy for large blocks of time to slip by without anything of value happening. Jeffrey Lant, in his book Cash Copy, did a calculation for us, which goes something like this: Let’s assume you have 20 good working years left. That means you have 20 years x 12 months x 20 working days x 8 hours x 60 minutes – or 2,304,000 minutes of productive time left. How much of that do you want to waste checking email?

3. Get organized with a system that works, and keep it up.

This needs no explanation. And just to add to it, make sure your backups are always up to date.

4. Read something useful everyday, and something important at least once a week.

I don’t manufacture anything. The value I provide is in the realm of thought and to increase that value, I read voraciously. Of all my resolutions, this one is the easiest for me to keep. It could be anything – general business, history, biography, science, technology, psychology, philosophy, even marketing. Those tend to be my choices.

5. Meet someone new

Ssome people call this networking, but that seems to suck the humanity out of it. At least once a week, go to a meeting, have lunch with someone, reach out to a colleague…

6. Find ways to provide more value

It’s been said that the surest way to earn more is to provide more value. Ask youself how, and then do something about it.

7. Express my gratitude.

Be thankful for the bounty and the abundance in my life. Recognize just how great things are, even if there are times when you think it’s simply not true.

8. Find ways to reach more people

Not sure about you, but one of my goals is to impact people. And here more IS better.

9. Journal Daily

To make sure that each day’s events and learnings whatever they may be, get captured rather than allowed to simply drift away.

10. Don’t rail against the wind

Understand and accept the prevailing conditions, then mold them to my vision This is not to live in denial, but to realize that the only thing that matters about the current reality is how I deal with it.

11. Accept no negativity

This one is hard, people are going to be who they are and do what they’re going to do. Perhaps the better resolution is accept no negativity from myself. Still hard…

12. Never give up.

They say that failure is temporary, and only becomes permanent when you quit trying.

It’s something I use with my private coaching clients, and it’s also part of Blueprints to Profits. It’s called the Personal Strategic Blueprint.

Now if you’ve spent any time in that weird place called Corporate Planning, you might recognize this as a deviant, somewhat casual form of a S.W.O.T. analysis.

But don’t let that scare you, because it works! Follow along and you’ll get the key to taking full advantage and getting maximum leverage from your strengths and your assets.

The video is a quick 28 minutes. I know… A bit long for most attention-deprived internet surfers. Hang in there, it’s worth it. You can also download the mindmap of the video and use it as a guide to the personal strategic blueprint, as well as a two of the tools I use with my private coaching clients. Set aside some time and do this.

Make sure to post your thoughts and comments below.

Download your mindmap and worksheets here

Personal Strategic Planning Blueprint (S.W.O.T.) Mindmap

Evaluating Your Strengths Worksheet

Listing Your Assets Worksheet