First of all, let me clarify that introverts aren’t necessarily shy. They are, however, quieter than extroverts. Introverts talk plenty when they have something important to say, but they tend to stay quiet when the topic is small talk. Why? Because small talk isn’t important to them. Now, let’s say you have 2 salespeople – an extrovert and an introvert.
The extrovert is likely to talk – and talk – and talk – which is exactly what you expect from a sales person. And in the midst of all this talking, the extrovert will make sales.
But the introvert will do something the extrovert commonly fails to do – the introvert will ask questions and LISTEN to the answers.
I don’t mean they wait for the prospect to stop talking so they can begin extolling all the many benefits of the product. I mean they LISTEN. They want to know what’s keeping the prospect awake at night in relation to the problem the product solves. They want to know the prospect’s fears, desires, dreams, etc. They want to know what’s worked for the prospect, what’s failed for the prospect, and what that prospect really, truly wants so they can help this prospect get it.
And this same sales person will continue to use questions as they present their product or service, questions that direct the prospect to the desired conclusion – that this product is what they want and need.
Everything else being equal, 9 times out of 10 the introvert salesperson will outsell the extrovert – all because they asked questions and listened closely to the answers.
Introverted marketers have the same advantage as introverted sales people. They dig to discover what it is their prospects truly want. They ask questions, be it in person, over Skype, in forums, via email, etc. And they pay close attention to the answers.
These same marketers spend time researching what successful marketers are doing. They don’t assume they already have the answers – instead, they look to those who’ve succeeded and they ask how it was done and how it can be duplicated.
Now mind you, extroverts can master the skills of asking questions and listening to the answers as well as any introvert, if they try. It doesn’t come as naturally for them, but it will come with practice.
And if you look at the most successful people in the world, what you will find is they stand on the shoulders of those who came before. They asked questions, got the answers and used this knowledge to carve their place in the world.
Try it. Next time someone asks you for advice, ask them questions first. Next time someone asks about your product, ask them about their needs first. Next time someone is on a forum looking for help, ask them for more information. And then pay close attention to what they say before you make your reply.
It’s an almost unknown fact that asking the right questions and listening to the answers can be one of the highest paying skills in the world.
Do you have domain names sitting around idle? Maybe you bought them with the intention of doing something in particular, but you just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Here’s a cool idea: List them for sale on sedo.com and then forget about them until one of two things happen…
You decide to use them or…
… you get an email from Sedo from someone who is offering to buy one of your domain names.
You never know if or when this might happen, but why not at least give it a shot? One marketer I know of did this with his domains. Six months later, he got an email from Sedo saying someone was offering $100 for one of his domains. He wasn’t interested in taking such a low offer, so he countered with $2,000 just to see what would happen.
The buyer countered with $300, he countered with $1800, and several emails and counteroffers later he sold it for $950. Not bad for a $9 investment. Sedo took a cut and he got the rest.
And while he did have plans for that domain name, he figures he can just choose a different but similar name when the time comes – no big deal.
There’s no guarantee you’ll sell your domains this way, or that if you do, you’ll make a lot of money. But as you know, domains have sometimes sold for ridiculous amounts. There’s no harm or fee for listing your domains, so why not give it a shot and see what happens? You’ve got nothing to lose and potentially a nice fat return for trying it.
Plus, if you’re creative and do some market research on hot topics and keywords, you could potentially start registering new and marketable domains that have a high chance of selling when you list them in a domain marketplace like Sedo, and turn this strategy into a full-time business. Some people are already doing this now… Why not you too?
Strange as it may sound, there are still a majority of marketers who haven’t yet discovered what a massive goldmine YouTube is when it comes to huge number of highly targeted visitors.
We are indeed the generation that would rather watch than read, and nowhere is this better reflected in the fact that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine, gets more than 3 billion views every day, and has 35 hours of video is uploaded to it every minute.
So how can you take advantage of this for your business?
Does your business have a channel? Are you doing anything to promote it?
Do you know whether or not video is being used effectively by your competitors, and if there are any opportunities there?
It doesn’t matter if you feel squeamish about appearing on camera: you actually don’t have to these days. Many people utilize slideshow style videos, or animation to get their messages across, and this works very well.
There are also many ways to spread your videos all over the Web to reach a huge audience. The power of social media comes into play here, and a video posted on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter can have a wide grasp.
You can also outsource this if you need to, and by doing so scale you marketing efforts even further.
However you choose to get it done, please don’t ignore the power of YouTube, and the vast audience there waiting to hear from you!
Getting traffic isn’t rocket science – it’s actually pretty easy when you know a few of the best tricks pro-bloggers are using every day to get more traffic to their blogs.
Create an not-so-secret inner circle of your best buddies.
Put together a list of your very best and most influential readers. These are the ones who regularly interact with you or post replies to your posts, share your posts with their followers, send you articles, buy your products and so forth.
Put these folks on your special inner circle list, and email them to let them know of their newly attained status. Let them know the benefits – they’ll get to see your posts before the general public and they’ll be apprised of any new offerings, updates and ideas before anyone else.
Solicit their feedback on your posts. This creates a sense of ownership for them and increases the odds they will go out of their way to share your content with their followers. Give them special benefits to thank them for their help, and offer to help them in return.
Make it brain dead easy to share your content.
If content is too difficult to share, your readers and inner circle are less likely to share it. So add the appropriate social sharing buttons for sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Write in-depth content that makes your readers look sexy-smart.
Here’s a little secret: People like to look super smart to their readers and friends. Okay, so maybe it’s not a secret. But the fact is, in-depth articles tend to get shared more because the people sharing them want their friends to think they read in-depth articles. Plus, when someone new lands on your in-depth article, they are more likely to subscribe to get even more info than if they land on a simple fluff piece.
Another secret: Posts with images, lists and videos will attract over 5 times more links than posts containing only plain text. So don’t stop at just the words – add things like images and graphs to make it share-worthy.
Cheat. Just a little.
This isn’t really cheating, but it sure feels like it. Look at your old content and find the pieces that are still relevant, whether they were written 3 months ago or a year ago. Now share them again via social media. This way you get new traffic without having to write new content – how awesome is that?
Write a mini-sales letter to promote each blog post.
Traditionally, when a blogger writes a new post she sends out the title and first paragraph to her list with an invite to click the link and read the rest. But the real meat of a blog post isn’t in that intro paragraph, which is why this method isn’t worth beans.
Instead, write a mini sales letter that gets the email reader curious and excited to know more. This doesn’t have to be long; 50 -100 of the right words is perfect. Build curiosity and show them what the big benefits / takeaways of reading your article will be, and your click-through rates could double if not triple.
That’s it – 5 simple tips to increase your blog traffic. Pick out your favorite and try it right now, then make a note to use the other 4 within the next 7 days and you’ll begin to see a real boost in your traffic within the month.
We’re taught from early on that success is everything. Win the game or ace the test and you get the grown-up’s approval. Then we get older and succeeding becomes even more important. You got into a hot shot college? Congrats! You won the contract? Great! You built a multi-million dollar business? Super!
But here’s what nobody tells you – before you can win you’ve almost always got to lose, and lose big, and lose often. You’ve heard the expression, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” right? Well, when you venture you don’t always gain. Many times you lose, and you lose big.
And when that happens, your confidence takes a nosedive. The next time out you hedge your bets, you pull your punches and you don’t try as hard. Why? Because that way if you fail again, you can tell yourself that you didn’t lose as big. It’s funny, but it’s also human nature.
People fail a time or two and then what do they do? Sadly, many quit. They just give up. Failure hurts too much. It’s humiliating and embarrassing and they’d rather play it “safe.” Which actually means they don’t want to play at all, they just want to sit in their cozy cotton lined box and never venture outside into the cruel world again.
Here’s what those people don’t know: The ONLY way to truly, absolutely, permanently fail is to quit. Everything else is simply a step on the way to success.
Did you know…
– The average millionaire goes bankrupt 3.5 times.
– There is a new millionaire created every 58 hours.
– The average millionaire doesn’t realize their dream until age 45 and becomes a millionaire at 54.
– The average millionaire dabbles in 17 different businesses, concepts, schemes and enterprises but doesn’t hit it big until the 18th try.
Entrepreneurship is the quickest way to become a millionaire. 74% of all millionaires in America became millionaires through entrepreneurship.
The average millionaire goes bankrupt and what does s/he do? Dusts themselves off and tries again. And again. And again. Failure is a temporary detour, not a roadblock. I absolutely promise you, if you’re still breathing then you can still succeed and succeed BIG, regardless of how many times you’ve failed in the past.
Remember those Chicken Soup for the Soul guys, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen? Their manuscript got rejected 140 times by 140 different publishers. Most people would have quit after the 10th or 20th rejection, but they just kept sending out that manuscript until the 141st publisher took a chance. Result? Both of them are millionaires many times over.
Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade and he was defeated in every public office role he ran for. Then he became the British Prime Minister at the age of 62 and led his country to victory in WWII.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill
R. H. Macy had a long and undistinguished history of failing businesses, including the first Macy’s in NYC. No one would have bet on him, but he went on to create the biggest department store in the world.
Marilyn Monroe’s first contract with Columbia Pictures expired because they decided she wasn’t pretty or talented enough to be an actress. But Monroe kept plugging away, and even today’s audiences know and love her decades after her untimely death.
Toyota passed over Soichiro Honda for an engineering job. He could have quit on his dreams. Instead, he went on to make motorcycles and cars and became a billionaire in the process.
Thomas Edison’s teachers told him he was “too stupid to learn anything.” Imagine how that could impact a child, hearing from the ‘experts’ that you’re too stupid to learn. Most kids would stop trying. Not Edison.
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. – Thomas Edison
Vera Wang failed to make the U.S. Olympic figure-skating team. Then she got passed over for the editor-in-chief position at Vogue. Time to realize she was a failure, right? Wrong. At age 40 she began designing wedding gowns and today she’s one of the hottest designers in the business and a self-made billionaire.
You’ve probably heard that Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” But did you know that he had several failed businesses before the premiere of Snow White?
The difference in winning and losing is most often…not quitting. – Walt Disney
Albert Einstein’s teachers labeled him “slow” and “mentally handicapped.” What if Einstein had actually believed the people who made these proclamations? For one thing he never would have won the Nobel prize in physics.
Henry Ford’s first auto company went out of business. He abandoned a second because of a fight and lost a third to declining sales. Yet he went on to become one of the greatest American entrepreneurs ever.
If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right. – Henry Ford
J. K. Rowling was unemployed and living on social security while writing her first Harry Potter novel. It was rejected by 12 different publishers and finally picked up with a paltry advance of just 1,500 pounds, but now she became the first person to become a billionaire through writing.
For every failure to success example I’ve given here, there are literally hundreds of thousands of others out there. And the only thing stopping you from becoming the next failure to success story is you. So what are you waiting for?
Hurry up and get your failures out of the way so you can go on to create big success for yourself too. And maybe someday your story will be featured right along with Einstein’s, Ford’s, Disney’s and all the other great people who refused to let a little thing like failure get in their way.
You can have all the traffic in the world, but if it’s not converting, then you’re not making money. That’s why the crucial key to making money online is conversions.
How compelling is your presentation? How many prospects out of 100 actually BUY your product, both today and during your follow up sequence? Conversions are where you make your real money, both today and in the future. Affiliates won’t promote you if your offer isn’t converting. But if you have a high converting offer, affiliates will send you as much traffic as you can handle and sometimes more.
So how compelling is your sales letter? How branded are you? People buy from those they perceive have the answers. People buy from those they admire and from those they trust have the solutions to their desires.
There are many conversion techniques, but the big 3 to focus your efforts on are:
– Social proof factors like testimonials – Claims backed by proof – Scarcity
In fact if you were to focus all of your efforts on the first two – proof – then your offer would convert. Add in scarcity and you can’t miss.
I’m going to say something here that will seem almost sacrilegious to many marketers: Forget traffic. Traffic is simply a byproduct of conversions. If your offer is converting, you’ll have affiliates wanting to promote it. Just get 3 affiliates, and those affiliates will tell their affiliate friends how great your product is converting and so forth.
But if you can’t convert then you can’t get affiliates. And if your offer isn’t converting you’re also not going to spend time or money on traffic because it will be a waste. Think about this: When you convert and convert well, you can BUY all the traffic you want. You don’t even need affiliates. If you can spend $100 to make $110 then you’re in business. Increase your conversions and make $150 or $200 or more for every $100 you spend, and lounging on that beach can finally become a reality.
But you probably won’t want to get lazy on a beach because when you can convert, this business becomes addictive. You suddenly find you can make a LOT of money and you want to see that money continue to pour in.
Traffic is not money – CONVERSIONS are money. Yet I see marketers totally focused on getting traffic. They think if they can just get MORE traffic, they’ll make money. But if the traffic they’re already getting isn’t converting, how will more traffic help?
Sadly the vast, vast majority of people in this market don’t know a thing about conversions. They’re newbies and they ignore the one thing that is the most critical, most crucial, the paramount thing to make money in this business. It’s the one place you find the money – conversions.
Yet everyone stays away from studying and learning conversions. If they would just focus on how to get their offers to convert, they’d have tremendous results, more than they could even anticipate.
When you start focusing on conversions, the money will come.
So what should you study to convert better? What should you test? I’ve covered many conversion techniques in the past, but here’s a short list to get you started.
Study copywriting. I don’t know why, but copywriting tends to be something most marketers just gloss over, as though it’s the least important element. It’s not. If you have a great offer but do a lousy job of selling that offer to the prospect, you won’t convert. It’s that simple. Changes in your sales letter, or even entirely new sales letters or videos, can make all the difference. You’ve simply got to study what works and practice, practice, practice.
Social proof is huge. The prospect wants to know for a FACT that your product will do what you say it will do. They want to know that others have tried it and gotten the results you promise. They even want to know that your product is selling and selling well. Don’t just dump a few testimonials at the end of your sales presentation – weave them throughout. Make them the foundation upon which you build your sales letters and videos. And make them real, from real people who had real doubts until they actually experienced your product.
Another conversion element online marketers tend to ignore is branding – especially branding yourself. Make a name for yourself in your industry or niche. Become the go-to expert, the answer guy or gal people turn to for solutions. When you’ve built yourself a name, your name alone will make sales from your most loyal fans. They really will see you’ve got a new product, scroll down and hit the buy button. But it takes time and effort to build your brand and your reputation, and most marketers aren’t willing to do what it takes.
Decide what you and your brand stand for. You can’t be all things to all people, so choose who you want to be and then become that person, that expert. Build relationships with people in your niche, especially with potential JV partners who will mail your offers for you. Put a great deal of thought into how you present your products, what you put into your email sequences, what your graphics look like and so forth. This is a BUSINESS, not a magic button.
Branding and being a celebrity is actually the highest form of conversions because you build a reputation of knowing your niche. You’re talked about and people know you only put out real value and they buy based upon your name alone. You’re an expert, an authority figure. When Stephen King puts out a new book, do you think he needs to ‘sell’ it to his readers? No. They just buy it because HE wrote it, and they know they’re going to like it.
Give yourself a title. Who said, “I’m the greatest.”? Mohammed Ali, and everyone else took up the cry. Who said, “I’m the hardest working man in show business.”? James Brown, and that became his title.
Gary Halbert said, “I am the world’s greatest copywriter, and if you don’t believe me, you can go to my website. It says it there.” And the branding caught on and people called him the world’s greatest copywriter.
So don’t wait for someone else to give yourself a title, give it to yourself. Repeat it often enough and it will in fact stick, and after a while few people will even know or remember that it was you who gave yourself the title.
Bottom Line: When you focus on something (like conversions) the answers just start to appear. When you study emails and sales letters, ask yourself what the technique is, what the person is doing that makes it successful. Read between the lines. Make ‘conversions’ your mantra and you cannot go wrong in this business.
One of the toughest things about blogging is the self-imposed pressure to always have a terrific, earth-shattering, life changing blog post that makes people catch fire reading it.
You know what I mean. You’ve got that little voice whispering in your ear that if your posts don’t measure up to some impossibly high standard you’ve set, then all is lost and the world will know that you’re a fraud.
The good news is, it simply isn’t true. You don’t need every post to be a 2,000 word masterpiece or the final definitive word on your topic. Instead, all you need is content that gives your readers what they want. That’s it. Your readers want to know the latest news or the best methods? Then that’s what you give them. Forget trying to be a great writer and instead focus on being your readers’ ‘friend in the business’ and you’ll be an AMAZING blogger.
Here are 10.5 more tips to take some of the blogging pressure off of you and put the fun back into blogging:
Make yourself a posting schedule and then stick to it as regularly as you brush your teeth. Surprisingly, having a blogging schedule actually makes it easier for you to blog. It provides soft deadlines that keep you motivated to sit down and write. You won’t be able to put off your blogging if your readers expect a new post every Tuesday and Friday, and you know it.
Keep a running list of blogging ideas. Use a program like Evernote to keep track of your ideas and the resources you can draw from when writing your posts.
Forget being totally original. Seriously. Every idea is built upon or inspired by someone else’s idea. So give credit where credit is due, provide your own unique twist or take on the subject and relax – no one expects you to reinvent anything.
Re-purpose your content and other people’s content, too. Curate, list, pull bits and pieces from here and there – it’s all good. Just give credit to everyone you sourced from. And go back to your own content and see if you can’t update it, re-purpose it, mix it up or whatever. Odds are if you’ve been blogging for more than a year then you’ve got a small goldmine of content you can mine to create new content.
Be more of a reporter and less of an expert. Being the go-to expert in your niche is difficult, especially when you’re new to blogging. The pressure can become so unbearable that you cease to write, afraid you’ll pen something that will make you look foolish in your readers’ eyes.
But if you place your focus on reporting instead of being the absolute authority, magic will happen. You’ll feel freer to express your own opinions, you’ll find it’s far easier to write posts, and because you are referencing other authorities and experts in your niche, you become your own authority to your readers.
Mix up your content. Are you only writing blog posts? Then add videos. Are you only podcasting? Then write blog posts. If you limit yourself to one media, you’re also limiting the number of people who will engage in and benefit from your content.
Short is great. So is long. There was a time when it was suggested (actually, I saw this again quite recently) that no post should be under 2,000 words, and all posts should take days to write and be the absolute authority on whatever you’re writing about.
Hogwash. I briefly mentioned this in the beginning – write as much as you need to. If you can cover your topic in 200 words, DO IT. If it takes 2,000 words, then just make sure you’re holding your readers’ attention for the ENTIRE 2,000.
This reminds me of the “short sales letter vs long sales letter” debate. It’s a stupid, ridiculous debate, and here’s why: A blog post or a sales letter should be exactly as long as it needs to be and no longer. Period.
Stop leaving terrific blog comments on other people’s blogs. Seriously. You just read a post on a high traffic blog and you’ve got your own opinion or insight you want to share that you’re sure will help that blog’s readers.
Don’t do it. Instead, create your own post on your own blog and link back to the original blog. Then let the original blog know that you mentioned and linked to them in your post. This way your blog has more great content and who knows? You might get a backlink from the blog you referenced.
Use images. Every. Time. Maybe more than once, too. It’s irrefutable that images work at grabbing attention, so make sure that every post you make has at least one image. And be sure to place a caption under the image, because people are far more likely to read the image caption than anything else on the page (other than the headline, of course.)
Publish your articles on other sites. Sites like LinkedIn, The Huffington Post and many, many others allow content to be republished on their sites as long as it fits their guidelines. This is a terrific way to pick up new subscribers by posting a link back to your own profile or blog.
And what about Google’s duplicate content penalty? The duplicate content penalty doesn’t apply to syndication or curation. If it did, you’d never see a major news site appear in the top of the search results because they all subscribe to services that helps them get duplicate content, such as the Associated Press. And bloggers who frequently syndicate their content to other quality sites report that they receive no penalties what-so-ever.
10.5. Ask for the subscribe. Ask. And ask. But don’t be obnoxious. You wrote a post on getting traffic, and you’ve got a free report on even more ways to get traffic? Ask them to subscribe right there at the end of your post. “To get 27 more ways to get targeted, free traffic with the push of a button, simply tell me where to send the report and it’s yours.”
If you’ve been having trouble blogging on a regular basis, hopefully reading this has made you realize that blogging doesn’t need to be stressful. The rules are not as rigid and some would have you believe, and the most important thing of all is to simply give your readers what they want and lots of it, in whatever form it might take.
Wouldn’t it be terrific if you could go from being Mr./Ms. Marketing Nobody to immediate “guru” status overnight? You’d enjoy instant authority in your niche and a high level of credibility with your potential customers as well as your potential JV partners. People would trust your opinion. You’d be quoted in blog posts and asked to do guest posts…
You could get interviewed. You could join lucrative joint ventures and mastermind groups. Your social media accounts would become magnets to followers and fans. Customers’ sales resistance would go down and your sales would go up, and so forth.
Becoming an ‘overnight’ authority in your niche shaves a few years off of your online marketing career path. You’re taking a quantum leap from being an unknown to being – well, KNOWN in your niche. And you receive all the benefits a known expert in your field gets, only without the years of work.
Sounds pretty good, don’t you think? Yeah, it’s cheating, but it’s not. Who ever said you have to take years and years to accomplish what can be done in a few days or weeks?
Here are 5 ways to do it:
1. Interview others. Oprah wasn’t an expert, she interviewed experts. And by doing so, she became associated with every expert she interviewed. In your case, you’ll want to go much more narrow and deep than Oprah, choosing your targeted niche carefully and then interviewing anyone and everyone in that single niche.
2. Buy named rights products and sell them. These are products sold by big name marketers that allow you to keep their name on the product when you sell it. You’re basically co-featuring with an established expert. At the bottom of the salesletter you can write something like, “From the desk of ‘your name’ and ‘guru’s name.’ Buyers will assume you have partnered with the guru in putting this product out. These types of resale rights generally aren’t cheap, but that plays in your favor as well, since it greatly limits any competition.
3. Create a product yourself, then let a big name marketer be the co-author and co-owner. This heightens your profile and generally brings in a lot of sales from that marketer’s list, as well as from affiliates who promote for that marketer.
4. Write/edit a book full of other people’s articles. Choose a topic and then find articles written by the experts on this topic. Ask their permission to place their articles in your book, giving them full credit and links back to their website. You do the editing, write the introduction, and also add notes at the beginning and end of each article if you choose. But the experts are still doing all the heavy lifting, while you get to associate your name with theirs. In fact, it looks like a collaboration between you and all these big names, with YOUR name on the front cover.
5. Do all 4, along with guest blogging and being active in social media. All of a sudden people will say that they see and hear you everywhere.
Some people take a lifetime to go from the mail room to the boardroom of a company. But this is your business, and YOU make the rules. Don’t wait years to become an expert in your niche – decide to become one today.
I see new marketers all the time freeze up with fear. They’ll have a great idea for their business and start to act on it, all excited. Then something happens, something that plants the seed of doubt, and suddenly they’re asking, “Who am I to be doing this?”
Maybe they have something great to teach that would help others, or they have a different way of doing things that would solve people’s problems. Whatever their idea or their business, that seed of doubt takes root. They get scared. They become self-conscious. And they doubt themselves and their abilities.
This is when I tell them, “It’s not about you, it’s about your customers. It’s about the people you’re going to help.”
Imagine you’re about to go on stage to present information that will change the lives of your audience. But you’re nervous. You think you’re not a good presenter. You’re focused on how you’ll look and how you’ll sound and what the audience will think about you.
This is the wrong focus.
If you focus instead on helping those people, if you focus on THEM and not YOU, then you will find it easy to give your message.
I’ll give you an example: Just as you’re going on stage to make your presentation, someone whispers in your ear, “The building is on fire, we’ve got to evacuate these people NOW!”
Do you hesitate? Do you wonder what you’ll say at the microphone? Do you worry about how you’ll look and sound? NO! You rush onto the stage and immediately start directing people to find the nearest exit and go to it now. You tell them to stay calm, to move swiftly, to leave no one behind. If you see smoke coming from the back, you direct people to the front. You say and do whatever it takes to get those people out of there.
And lo and behold, not ONCE during that process did you think about YOURSELF.
Magic indeed.
If you have doubt – If you’re worried – If you’re scared – Then you’re thinking about yourself and you’re NOT thinking about your customer.
Whatever it is that you want to do – just begin. Don’t think about doing the whole thing, because you don’t have to do the whole thing… You only need to take the first step.
Most people don’t start because they’re thinking about the whole thing. It’s too big. There’s too many obstacles. They don’t know how they’ll do it all.
The thought of the whole project is overwhelming and paralyzing. It’s easier to put it off…
“I’ll start it later when I have time. When I finish this and that. When the kids are gone. When I’m retired. When life isn’t so hectic.”
Life is always hectic. It’s busy. It’s a whirlwind. But we decide what we do with each moment. So just start. Just begin.
You want to exercise but you don’t have time? Just do 10 minutes a day, everyday. Just start. Don’t worry about running marathons, just do 10 minutes today. Then tomorrow, do 10 minutes more.
You want to write a book? No one can write an entire book. But anyone can start. Just write for 10 minutes, that’s all. Easy, right? Look at the clock. An hour has passed and you’re still writing.
Challenge is good. Little challenges. Lots of them. Just begin. Don’t climb Everest, climb the jungle gym. You can do that. Tomorrow climb the hill behind your house. Lots of little challenges add up.
Do you want to learn to play the piano? Just begin. Imagine if you had started when you were a kid and played 10 minutes everyday. By now you would impress almost anyone. Now imagine you start today – in 5 years, who knows? You might be entertaining your family and friends during the holidays, but not if you don’t begin.
You want to start a business. Ooooh, scary. So many things you’ll have to learn. Better to wait, right? No. Just begin. Just start.
Everything conspires to keep you from beginning. But there is power and magic in taking that first step, because it’s the first step that leads to the second, and the second to the third.
If you never begin, you will have only regret. By starting, you can create your own future.
