Think of a dream you’d really like to achieve…
Got it?
Cool…
Next… imagine that you’ve already achieved that goal…
…
Just picture yourself for a moment living that dream as if it already is happening…
…
A buck bets ten that you would talk differently, act differently, and feel different than if you see yourself in your current situation…
When I went through this exercise myself, I learned that in order to achieve a big dream… and I mean a BIG dream, like buying a house, starting your own business, getting in the best physical shape of your life, being happy in a relationship, etc…
Then you need to learn what I now call “The language of success”…
It’s not the skills or the how to’s that you need to worry about… that’s easy to come by…
It’s the deep stuff… the life changing, intuitive, spiritual side of you that needs to grow…
It’s tapping into your creative genius that’ll get you there faster and easier…
Just by reading this, you are going to start to learn the language of success…
Here’s the story…
I became an entrepreneur by accident…
… well, sort of…
(I’ll share my full real estate story later…)
… but let’s just say that after a little bit of success I realized that there is a BIG difference between owning a business and having a business own you…
All I knew was that…
I wanted to become a successful entrepreneur
… but I didn’t know what it meant to be an entrepreneur let alone a successful one…
I just wanted to be “it”…
I pictured being an entrepreneur as being my own boss…
… meaning, I’d get to call the shots…
… being free to do what I wanted when I wanted…
If I wanted to work, I would…
If I wanted the day off, I could take the day off without having to ask anyone for permission…
I figured I’d be able to afford better food, a nicer car…
I’d be able to enjoy more time with family and friends…
Travel the world!
At least that’s what I thought a successful entrepreneur “did”… enjoy complete freedom!
… but I didn’t understand that in order to get what I wanted, I needed to change…
There was a process I needed to go through in order to “get” what I wanted…
I first read about this back in 2004 in the book Cashflow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki… on pages 138-139…
I remember highlighting three words…
BE – DO – HAVE
Let me emphasize one thing… (read this carefully…)
At first I didn’t understand what this meant…
What does it mean that you must BE successful first and then you’ll DO successful things and as a result you’ll HAVE success?
Stated a different way, it means:
You don’t get what you want, you get what you are
Read that again…
Let it sink in…
This is one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned about success…
… and it took me years to understand it…
I had it backwards…
I thought I was first going to experience having some sort of success and then I could consider myself “Being” successful…
For example… I thought I was going to drive the car I wanted and then I could consider myself to “be” successful…
I thought I was going to have time freedom and then I’d “be” successful…
… but it doesn’t work that way…
You must “BE” first… be successful first and then DO what needs to get done and then… and only then the results (what you get) show up AND stay!
Anyone can “luck” into success…
… but long term success is a different story…
You can’t get the results you want long term without first becoming the type of person who can get the results…
Makes sense?
I heard one of my mentors say a quote he learned from Jim Rohn… that the greatest reward in becoming a millionaire isn’t in the “getting” of the million dollars… the reward is in becoming a million dollar earner…
Robert Kiyosaki also wrote…
It’s not what you have to ‘do’ that needs to change. It’s first how you ‘think’ that needs to change. In other words, it’s who you have to ‘BE’ in order to do what needs to be done.
As I’ve studied success, I’ve learned one of the most important lessons is to DECIDE what you want and FOCUS on it…
Well… like I said…
I wanted to become a successful entrepreneur
The problem was that I didn’t know what a successful entrepreneur looked like… I didn’t really know what it meant to be a successful entrepreneur…
That was the first problem…
How can you BE something you can’t define?
I used to think that being a successful entrepreneur meant you owned a business…
…any business…
… but I didn’t realize that you could have a business that owns YOU!
I was DOING real estate and thought I was an entrepreneur because “I had a business”…
… but I was responsible for doing so much that I was working 80-100 hours a week and had no life… I had no time to enjoy my income at the time…
That’s not what I envisioned as being successful…
My definition of being successful was more along the lines of being in control of my life.
… at that time, I wasn’t in control of my life…
My “business” controlled my life.
Follow me now…
December 2003, I bought a house in Phoenix, AZ… this was the very beginning of a real estate boom which lasted until March 2006…
The way I looked at it was that I spent 2 weeks looking for a house… basically 2 weeks worth of “work” it took to find and buy the house, put carpet and paint… then I rented the house out which paid for the mortgage and made me a couple hundred a month on top of that…
That was just the icing on the cake…
What got me started as an entrepreneur was that just eight months after I’d bought, the house was worth $80K more!!
That was more than twice what I was making a year in the Navy as a Submarine Sonar technician…
… and here’s what happened…
I started to dream bigger…
I started to become an entrepreneur though I didn’t know it at the time…
This is how I started to learn the language of success…
Here’s how…
I picked up another book called the E-Myth by Michael Gerber…
He explains the Entrepreneurial Myth (E-Myth) better than anyone…
The entrepreneurial myth boils down to thinking that…
…by understanding the technical work of the business they are immediately and eminently qualified to run a business that does that kind of work.
For example… the story Michael Gerber uses in his book is that of a lady who baked pies… and because she knew how to bake pies, she thought she could own a bakery… she thought she’d be able to just build a pie baking business.
Similarly, I thought that because I knew how to DO real estate that I could build a business around it and BE an entrepreneur…
… but that’s the myth…
A common misconception.
I found success followed the original order I read about years ago when I didn’t understand this:
BE – DO – HAVE
I first needed to learn what exactly does it mean to BE an entrepreneur???
What is the ‘thinking’ of an entrepreneur like.
In his book E-Myth, Michael Gerber defines being an entrepreneur as
The visionary in us. The dreamer.
The role of an entrepreneur is to dream…
… to create a vision!
So here’s what happened and how I became an entrepreneur by accident…
Because I had done real estate and I had success… I started to dream that I would buy more houses and make money effortlessly just like I did the first time around…
It was then that I started to dream and create a vision for a better life…
I was thinking like an entrepreneur…
I was speaking like an entrepreneur…
I was acting like an entrepreneur…
I was BEING an entrepreneur…
… but understand the order, I was BEING because I HAD success…
I had the order reversed…
… so in 2006, when the real estate market changed…
Home prices plunged…
I sold the house and I lost over $80K in potential equity I could have made if I’d sold at the peak of the market… and while I still made a healthy $30k profit my dreams and vision shrunk…
Stated differently… The entrepreneur inside me shrunk… the dreamer inside me started to vanish…
The ability to maintain the dream alive even during tough times is what separates successful entrepreneurs from others…
This is a trait I’ve noticed in the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met and learned from…
No matter what the challenge, no matter what they are going through, they are masters at maintaining the dream alive and creating a better vision…
At that time, I had yet to fully understand that an entrepreneur is a visionary… a dreamer!
To be a good entrepreneur you have to be good at creating vision ALL THE TIME.
Not just when things are going well… but all the time… and especially when things aren’t going so well…
It is even more so important to create and fuel your vision, and fall in love with your dreams in bad times… the worse it gets the more important it becomes to BE that visionary… to BE that dreamer… to BE an entrepreneur!
It’s not what you ‘do’ that makes you a successful entrepreneur… it’s who you ‘are’ that matters most. It’s how you ‘think’ that matters most. It’s your ability to create vision and dream that matters most.
Entrepreneurs push through challenges and GROW through no matter how hard the challenge is…
It may take giving all you’ve got and more… it may seem impossible, but entrepreneurs push through them because their vision pulls them.
It takes a certain attitude… a personality type to do this…
It takes a different type of thinking… at least different than the type of thinking I grew up with…
This different type of thinking is what I am now coining as a language… the language of success…
PERSEVERANCE is a trait… those who have perseverance speak a certain way… this is just one of the many “words” I found makes up the language of success.
If you read all the way to the very end, congratulations, you have another trait of successful people… finishing what you start.
People who have a habit of finishing what they start also speak a certain way… and here’s the lesson I’ll leave you with of why it’s important you learn this language to live a more fulfilling life…
It’s called the domino effect…
The people you are around determine how you think…
How you think determines how you SPEAK…
How you speak determines how you act…
… and how you act determines your results…
Your thinking determines who you are…
If you are currently not having the success you want, it’s your thinking that needs to change…
When you change the way you think, you also change the way you speak…
This is as true as learning how to speak a different language like English, or Spanish as it is when it comes to learning how to speak like a successful person… it starts with changing the way you think…
… and that’s how I realized that success is a language…
It’s a language that can be learned…
… and I’m excited to be learning and teaching it…
