Launch

After I graduated from Michigan State University with a business degree, I landed a job with Motorola in Tempe, Arizona. I had a couple different job offers, but I picked Motorola mostly because I liked the location. I grew up in the Detroit area, and I had never been west of the Mississippi River, but I had always felt a pull to move out West.

It’s a long drive from Michigan to Arizona. It took me four days. On the third night, I stayed in a tiny hotel in a town I’d never heard of—Durango, Colorado. I had never seen mountains like that in my life, and I was impressed. In the morning I called my parents to tell them about my trip so far, and I couldn’t stop talking about Durango.

After a few minutes, my dad said, “Wow, it sounds like you just want to stay in Durango and not go any further.” After all these years, I still remember him saying that, because it struck me as such a ludicrous idea at the time. The idea of my living in Durango seemed about as likely as me walking on the moon.

I grew up in a wonderful, supportive family. My parents did a great job raising my siblings and me. They gave us a good start in life and made sure we went to college. And the pattern for my life seemed to be set: get an education, find a “good job,” and then work at that job for the rest of your life. That’s what all my extended family did. That’s what all my friends’ families did. That’s what everyone in my middle-class suburban neighborhood did.

For some reason, though, I’d always had a yearning to own a business. I have no idea where that came from, but I remember having that strong desire even when I was 10 years old. But I had no role models for starting and building a business. I had no frame of reference. I didn’t know how people actually did something like that. It went against everything I saw in my life. So off I went to Tempe to follow that familiar pattern for the rest of my life.

But once I got to Tempe and I started my job at Motorola, I quickly learned I didn’t fit in the corporate world. I was a round peg trying to fit into a square hole. It just didn’t work. And that’s a big reason why, just a few years later, I found myself quitting my job, walking away from the corporate world, and staying at home to take care of a couple of young children. I had washed out of the corporate world, never to go back.

I’m typing this to you from my hometown of Durango, Colorado. My wife and I moved our family here 14 years ago. My dad was right all those years ago when he said it sounded like I wanted to live in Durango. I live here because I can live anywhere in the world that I want.

My business is 100% online, and my team is virtual, so that effectively uncouples my business from the constraints of geography. I can work anywhere I have an Internet connection.

Durango might not be most people’s first choice, but I love it. The most beautiful mountains in Colorado are almost in my backyard, and the great deserts of the American Southwest are just a couple hours away. I have easy access to great skiing, incredible mountain biking, and beautiful river trips. I love the people who choose to live in Durango, and it’s been a fantastic place to raise our kids.

Each morning, I get up when I wake up. The only time I set an alarm is when I want to get up to the mountain early on a ski day. Or if I need to catch an early flight. (I travel only when I want to—if it’s for business, I’m on my way to meet some amazing people or go to a world-class training.)

Part of the joy of living in Colorado is sharing my passion for the outdoors with my kids. Both of them are great mountain bikers and skiers, and they’ve been down some of the greatest wilderness rivers in the world.

I don’t tell you any of this to brag—I just want you to understand what’s truly possible in your life. I’ve got a business that’s helped thousands of entrepreneurs, I’ve got a great team that enables me to run the business, we’ve got raving fans for clients, I have an income beyond anything I could have dreamed of, I get to live where I want . . . and I still have the time to enjoy the beautiful outdoors just outside my door.

Of course, sometimes when people hear this, they think it’s just that I’m truly special. Or maybe I’ve got some magical powers. Or I had some insider connections. Or I got inordinately lucky.

Unfortunately, I have no magic powers. And when I started this business I had no connections whatsoever. And I certainly didn’t start with any advantage or any money.

So how did I go from a simple Midwestern boy, corporate failure, Mr. Mom, to having the life of my dreams?

It’s because of the business I created with the Product Launch Formula. Sure, there’s been plenty of hard work and more than a few lucky breaks, but it’s all in the formula.

And here’s the thing—I’m not the only one who’s done it. Many of my students and clients have achieved similar results. You’ve already read about several of them in this book.

So how do you build a business and a life where you can live where you want, work when you want, have the lifestyle that you want?

When I was about to start my first business, I went through an exercise where I created my ideal life in my mind. I read about this exercise in a training product, and I think this is what set up all my success. It didn’t take long and was easy to do. I wrote down everything I wanted—income, lifestyle, material things, travel experiences. The list wasn’t very long because I had no idea of the possibilities back then. Compared to my lifestyle now, my vision was very modest, but that list gave me the direction I needed.

The funny thing is, as soon as I finished the exercise, I tucked the list away in the back pocket of my journal and forgot about it. Then a couple of years later I stumbled across the list—and realized I had achieved nearly every single goal I’d written down. That’s when I became a real believer in creating that future vision of my life in my mind . . . and writing it down.

Once my business started growing, I rapidly revised and added to the list. I wrote down everything I wanted in my future: my target income, the amount of time I could be away from my business, how I’d spend my free time, the state of my finances, what I’d be doing in my business, the impact I’d make with my business, the type of people I’d work with, etc.

If you choose to go deeper, you can write down what you want in your future relationships, physical and emotional health, education, home, family, etc.

It’s important to understand that there is no right or wrong answers when you go through this exercise. And what you write down is not forever; you can change it at any time—and you most definitely will. This is your ideal vision of your future life right now. You can do this exercise for any time frame you want, but I usually use three years or five years from the present. Remember, this list is a work in progress. I’m continually updating my vision for my future life, and you should do the same.

So go ahead and do it. Turn off your phone, your email, your instant messenger. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to just turn off your Internet connection. Trust me, everything will still be there when you turn them back on in 30 minutes. Close the door, or get out of your home and go to a coffee shop or library. Use paper and pencil or open up a blank document on your computer. Write down what your ideal life will look like in three years:

What your income will be

What kind of car you will drive

Where you will live and in what kind of home

Who your clients will be and how you will serve them

What your physical and mental health will be like

What your relationships will be like—with your friends, partner, kids, parents, coworkers, etc.

What your spiritual life will be like

What trips and experiences you will have

What you will have accomplished personally and professionally

One more hint: This is more powerful if you write everything down as if you’ve already achieved it.

Don’t underestimate this process. Everything significant you create will first be created in your mind’s eye.

Now that you’re clear on where you’re going, let’s talk about some specifics of how to get there . . .

To create the life of your dreams, the first thing you need is security. Lots of people who are thinking of starting a business worry about leaving the security of the paycheck world.

Unfortunately, there is no longer any security in a paycheck. I’m sure you know of people who worked loyally for a company for many years, only to be laid off or have the business close its doors and shut down.

The world has changed, and the only true security is your ability to create value and get paid for that value. Once you create your own business, you understand what security truly is. Even after I lost my first business to a partnership breakup, it took me a matter of weeks until I was back on my feet and had started a new business.

The greatest investment you will ever make is the investment in your business skills. When you can create a new business from the ether, then you control your destiny. And of all the business skills you can have, the one skill that pays off better than any other is the ability to market and sell yourself and your business.

And it should come as no surprise that I think PLF is the best way to sell in this day and age.

This was one of Stephen Covey’s seven habits for personal success—you need to take time away from work to recharge and refresh. You can’t continually operate at a high level if you’re working 100% of the time. No one can always be operating at peak efficiency and creativity. Unfortunately, I see lots of entrepreneurs creating a life where they do nothing but work. They literally never take a day off.

There’s an old joke among entrepreneurs about the biggest benefit of owning your own business. The punch line is that you only have to work half-time—any twelve hours of the day that you want.

That’s not healthy. In the long run, your business and your life will suffer for it. And it’s not a recipe for living a big life.

Sure, there are always going to be some long days—especially when you’re starting out. But if you never have time away from your business, then you’re doing something wrong.

My friend Joe Polish uses the analogy of a race horse. If you owned a million-dollar racehorse, you would exercise great care in how you treated that horse. You would feed it well, make sure it was well-rested, carefully monitor its workouts, give it a clean, comfortable stable, and schedule regular checkups with a vet.

In your life and your business, your body is your million-dollar racehorse. Don’t you deserve the same care?

I don’t want to get into belief systems, but most of us would agree that we only get one shot at this life . . . at least in our current form. So how are you going to spend that one precious life? Are you going to take care of your multimillion dollar body and mind?

Will you make sure you eat healthy, nutritious food? Get enough sleep? Get outside? How about exercise? Meditation? Stretching or yoga? Regular health checkups?

Working more hours is not the answer to your problems. You need to work better and smarter, and one of the keys to doing that is continually refreshing your mind and body. You need to sharpen the saw.

One thing you can’t avoid when you become an entrepreneur are the highs and lows in your business. Of course, that happens to everyone whether or not they have their own business, but for most people the highs will get higher and the lows will get lower when they become an entrepreneur.

Most of us wouldn’t trade this life for anything—we love the control we have over our destiny. We love not answering to anyone. We love being able to create. We love the big wins. But we know that we won’t win every time; there are going to be some lows.

My friend Lisa Sasevich likes to say we live in the Himalayas—as entrepreneurs, the peaks and valleys are bigger than they are for other people. When we strap on our entrepreneur super hero outfit, life is different for us than it is for normal civilians.

That means we have to be careful to manage our mental states. It’s one thing to have a bad week or two if we’ve got a paycheck job—in most cases, the paycheck will keep coming in. But if we’re running our own business, and especially if we have a team that’s depending on us, we need to be able to pull ourselves out of the funk.

And, of course, I’m no different than anyone else. I have my share of ups and downs. But what I’ve done is create a process for this. I keep a list of things that will pull me up when I’m not in peak state. Everyone will have their own list, but after comparing my list with those of many of my students and colleagues, I’ve noticed there’s often a lot of overlap.

Here’s a partial list of the stuff that works for me. Take what works for you, leave the rest:

Exercise: This is at the top of the list. Nothing changes my state for the better more quickly than getting my heart rate up. It’s even better if it’s outside (as opposed to being in a gym).

Meditate: This is a close second to exercise. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just close your eyes and focus on your breath. Five minutes is all you need, but twenty minutes is even better.

Get outside: Few things will lift me up faster than being outside in nature.

Have an adventure: Go on a big mountain bike ride, have a big ski day or surfing day. Go for a hike. Visit a museum. Travel.

Serve or give: Do something good for someone else. I think it’s impossible to feel sorry for yourself when you’re acting selflessly and helping other people.

Be grateful: Few things will lift you up faster than recognizing and feeling gratitude for all the many good things in your life, which are sometimes easy to overlook. Take time to sit down and list all your blessings. You might want to start with your breath and your life . . . they’re not something to take for granted.

That’s my list, or at least part of it. Yours will probably be different. I’m an introvert. If you’re an extrovert your list will probably look quite different. What’s important is that you recognize when you’re in a funk, and you have a strategy for lifting yourself out of it.

My coach Dan Sullivan (of Strategic Coach®) talks about the concept of Unique Ability®. What’s the one thing (or two or three) you were put on earth to do? What can you do so well that time seems to disappear when you’re doing it?

What do you do that other people find exceptional but comes so easily you can’t understand why they’re so amazed?

In your business, you want to work on those things at which you’re great. Don’t spend your time on the stuff that’s difficult for you. Work on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Hire people to do the things that are not in your genius zone.

Once you get rid of activities you aren’t good at, the next thing to eliminate are the things you are proficient at but still aren’t in your genius zone. Again, other people are better than you at those jobs, so hire them. Eventually, you will eliminate the tasks you are excellent at—because even though you’re excellent at them, they still aren’t in your genius zone. Doing those things takes you away from doing your genius activities.

The more time you spend in your genius zone, the better for you, your business, your clients . . . and the world.

The world will conspire to distract you. Your phone, email, text messages, instant messenger, social media, and more will all pull you away from what you should be doing.

Many people wake up and instantly look at their phone. They check messages, check email, check various social media. That’s a huge mistake—the only thing that’s waiting in your phone is someone else’s agenda. If you check your phone or your email right away in the morning, you’ve lost control of your agenda. There will be emails or messages waiting for you to respond, and once you start responding you’ve lost control of your day.

You should start the day by focusing on your highest-value activities before you get caught up in other people’s agendas for you. What are your highest-value activities? The ones that are in your genius zone or a Unique Ability®.

I mentioned this in the last chapter, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it, but having great clients whom you love working with and serving is a fantastic shortcut to loving your life.

I frequently hear people complain about their clients—but the thing is, they’re the person who picked those clients.

Remember, if you want different clients, then change your business, change your product, change your messaging, change your marketing. You’re the one attracting those clients, and making the decision to work with them . . . so pick great ones.

My highest-level clients are the people in my Platinum Mastermind group, and I love spending time with them. It’s a small group that I meet with several times a year, and space in the group is severely limited. To get into Platinum, members go through a rigorous application process. My team and I screen for people who fit the group culture and who I really want to spend time with. Every time I leave one of those meetings I’m more energized than I was at the beginning of the meeting. In fact, I try to set up my schedule so I always have a Platinum meeting directly before I lead one of my large workshops, because I know the meeting will leave me on fire with energy as I head into the big workshop. As I type this, we’re in our fourth year with Platinum, and many of the members have been with me since the beginning.

Of course, that’s just one example—the larger point is this: You control who your clients are. You do that through your market selection, offer selection, and marketing.

Don’t compromise on this. Attracting new and better clients is what Product Launch Formula is all about. Now go get the clients you want.

When I started out, I had this fantasy that I could build my business all by myself.

I figured my life would be a lot simpler that way, and since it was a virtual business with a virtual product, I figured I could really scale up the business without creating a team.

In fact, I didn’t hire anyone or use any contractors for the first 10 years I was in business. That was a big mistake, and it ended up holding me back. I now see that was about as mature as a two-year-old saying, “I can do it all by myself!”

The reality is that you can’t build anything great by yourself. And if you even try, then you’re going to be spending huge chunks of time working outside your genius zone.

Once you start building a team, your life will get more complicated. That’s inevitable—any time humans are involved, things get more complicated. You will have to learn to be a leader for your team (if you don’t already have that skill). And in many ways, you will have to answer to your team.

One thing that will make this process a lot easier is if you stick to a policy that my friend Eben Pagan calls “stars only.” In other words, you want to hire only stars—the people who are in the top 10% of any skill set. In fact, you should probably take this further and hire only those people who are in the top 1% of any skill set.

Stars will make your life easier. They will be self-motivated. They will require less supervision and training. They will have less drama in their life. If they’re good at their skill set, but they’ve got a lot of drama, then they’re not stars.

As you become more successful, there’s one word that will become more important than any other. That word is “no.”

As Warren Buffett said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”

In Chapter 12 I said that the idea of “opportunity cost” is the most important consideration in business. That’s what we’re really talking about here, but on a more personal level. As you become more successful, build more personal power, and grow into the role of leader, other people will find you more attractive. It can’t help but happen—it’s automatic. There’s a huge vacuum of leadership in the world right now, and people are looking for leaders to plug into and follow.

The next step is that more people and more deals start to pop up in your life. Many of the opportunities will be very attractive and would have impressed you if you’d had those same opportunities earlier in your life.

However, you must be very careful about what you say “yes” to. You have to become increasingly more selective. You need to get better at saying no. Anything that doesn’t advance you toward your future and your bigger vision for yourself is something that will take you off your path.

I’m not saying you can’t be a friend. I’m not saying you have to abandon the people and things that got you where you are. And I’m certainly not saying you can’t lend a helping hand. You just have to be very careful of your time and your energy. Every new opportunity you say “yes” to closes the door on another opportunity.

When I first started publishing my free investing newsletter in 1996, there was another web site publishing a very similar newsletter. However, even though we targeted the same niche, our sites were very different. They charged for their newsletter; mine was free. They had a much more professional-looking site; mine was very amateurish. In fact, back then I couldn’t even afford to buy a domain name or web site hosting, so my site was hosted on a free server.

That competing site was published by a guy named Frank Collar. I would often look at his site and wander through all the pages. It was my ultimate dream to have a professional site like that and publish a paid newsletter like he did. But I didn’t know how I would get there. I didn’t know any of the tech stuff required and I didn’t have money to hire the people who did. And I didn’t know how to sell stuff. Most important, I didn’t have the confidence to ask people to buy my stuff.

In any case, one day I got an email from Frank. He asked me how I put together some of the stock market charts on my web site. That email gave me a shock. I was surprised that Frank even knew who I was or that my site even existed, so on one level I was flattered.

On another level, Frank was a direct competitor. It was like he was Coke and I was Pepsi (although in reality, I was more like some generic cola). We were in the EXACT same business. And those charts on my site were the only thing that was pulling in traffic to my site. These days, it’s a simple thing to post an image like a stock chart to a web site, but it was a different world back then. I’d spent the better part of a day and more cash than I could afford figuring out how to do it. I had invested time, effort, and hard-earned money to create those charts on my web site, and I saw them as my one major asset in my business.

So as I looked at that email from Frank, I wondered what to do. Should I give him my trade secret? Should I turn him down? Or should I just ignore his email?

In the end, I decided I might as well help him out. I knew that if I had figured it out, he would certainly be able to. And why put him through the day of tedious trial-and-error that I went through to learn how to do it?

So I took 20 minutes and I typed up a complete set of instructions for how I created and posted my charts, and I sent the email off to Frank.

Within just a few minutes I got an email back from Frank thanking me. He went on to tell me that he had many years of newsletter publishing experience in the offline world, and he had done a lot of testing of his online newsletter. He shared a lot of great information about some of those tests—including some critical pricing tests. And he went on to tell me that if I ever wanted to publish a paid newsletter, then he would be happy to help me out with his knowledge and experience.

I realized that we were operating in a brave new world, where in many (most?) cases, cooperation was more important than competition. Years later, I would coin the term “Abundance Juice” to describe this phenomenon.

Simply put, you have the choice between an abundance-based mindset and a scarcity-based mindset. Choose wisely, because your choice will impact every area of your life. In my experience if you pick the abundance mindset, there’s a lot more joy, fulfillment, and . . . well, abundance.

A few months later Frank did indeed help me launch my paid newsletter. His advice and experience gave me the confidence to create that newsletter, and it became a huge success for me. (That was the $34,000 launch I told you about in Chapter 1.) Then a couple of years later, when he was tired of publishing his newsletter, Frank actually GAVE me his list of paying subscribers. I took over servicing his subscribers and made a lot of money doing so. All because I had helped him out with a simple favor. All because I had shared the Abundance Juice with him.

One of my core beliefs is that you will be far happier if you drink the Abundance Juice and adopt the abundance mindset. And in addition to being happier, your business will grow faster and larger, you will attract better clients and partners, and you’ll have a much bigger positive impact on the world.

In my opinion, there is no other business building system with more amazing success stories in the last decade than Product Launch Formula. I have walked you through the entire formula in the pages of this book. In other words, I’ve given you the tool to create your business.

But, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. I’ve given you a lot of power.

But make no mistake—building a successful business will not automatically lead to a happy and fulfilled life. There’s plenty of miserable entrepreneurs out there. The trick is to create a business AND have a great life. To get there, you need to be intentional with the business you build and the life you create. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Sebastien Night was born in French-speaking Guadalupe in the Caribbean, and he now lives in France. He first went through my training in 2010. Since then he’s been using PLF to build his business. Initially he was in the French “dating advice” market, where he taught shy men how to approach women and ask for a date. Eventually, Sebastien transitioned to teaching French-speaking people how to build their online businesses, and he’s now known as “the French Marketer.” Sebastien has done dozens of launches, and he’s built up a serious business. In fact, he’s one of the most prominent online publishers in the French-speaking world.

As with any entrepreneur, he’s put in a lot of work to get to where he’s at. But he’s also created an incredible lifestyle. A high point so far is that he was able to fulfill two lifelong dreams of his fiancée, Cecile—dancing and traveling around the world.

Last year Sebastien took a six-month trip around the world with Cecile, and they danced the entire way. They visited Australia, Brazil, India, Argentina, South Africa, Thailand, Durango, and New York. While they were in India, Sebastien proposed to Cecile—and she said yes!

During the trip Sebastien worked one day per week. Like mine, his business is completely virtual, so he could work anywhere in the world. The entire trip was financed by one of his launches, and he’s also going to be paying for two great weddings (same bride for both, but one in France and one in Guadalupe).

The thing is, if you pull Sebastien aside, he’ll tell you that the most exciting part is that he has friends and family who have seen his success, and they’re now following his example and creating their own businesses.

(To see my Case Study with Sebastien, as well as the video of his round-the-world trip with Cecile, go to http://thelaunchbook.com/sebastien.)

	A Recipe for a Big Life
Chapter 13