I don’t know about you, but for most of us there are times when business just gets stuck.

If you keep doing what other people want you to do, and thinking about what other people want you to think, what do you suppose is likely to happen?

Repeating the successes of the past, preserving tradition, doing things as they are “supposed” to be done, will- at best – produce results like those had before.  Except that in this new future – our present – those results can’t possibly be as good, as productive, or as powerful as they once were.  And probably not as much fun, either.

Great success in life requires two parallel streams of effort. Small but important things done consistently day in and day out provide a nurturing base of sustenance, while an occasional breakthrough brings true success and prosperity.  Breakthroughs – extraordinary accomplishments – begin with extraordinary ideas and find their realization in extraordinary actions.

Think about that word for a minute.  Extraordinary… break it down and it means extra ordinary.  Not extra in the sense of “more ordinary” but rather from the Latin root – beyond, outside, superior – to the ordinary. What I call unreasonable.

Everyone wants to be more successful, but often, hard work seems just too hard. Some people turn to the Law of Attraction for help, so I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Hey, you know what? All hoopla aside, I like the LOA. And why not? It’s a cool idea, and if the choice is between focusing my mind on things I want versus focusing on things I don’t want, I’d rather spend my mental energy on things I want.

But here’s the question: Is “just” thinking, and emoting, and visualizing, and meditating, and yes, praying, about things I want going to bring them into my life?

In times like these one the easiest things you can do to earn more is to make sure you upsell your customers and clients.

There are no rules that fit all situations. (Check the Ten Commandments if you don’t believe this.) Our businesses and our lives are far too complex for any guidelines to be 100 percent appropriate in all cases. This is not meant as an inducement to break very basic rules, such as your core values. It means that when your beloved rule comes smack up against holding back progress, you should at least be willing to question whether the rule is still appropriate, or whether it’s some kind of holdover.

Maybe you’re like this – I definitely am. One of the most common “issues” for people is not having the time to get everything done. If you talk about this, you’ll find that people think that if they had “more time,” like more hours, during the day, that would solve their problem, but I just don’t believe that’s true and here’s why:

At this point I have surveyed thousands of folks asking them how much “high productivity” time they send during an average work day – high productivity being time when they are increasing the value of their businesses. The answers average about two and one-half hours, and this despite how much time they actually work. In other words, this same 150 minutes holds true for an seven-hour day or a twelve hour one.

Mastery: 

Practice,

Improve,

Plateau,

Study,

Decline,

Practice,

Improve,

Repeat

Here are three “Marketing Mistakes” that business owners routinely make.  (I saw an article in Direct Magazine which inspired me.)

1. Marketing plans and not aligned with business goals.   For instance, say you have a goals to grow top-line revenues by 50%. (Only 50%?  Well, it is a recession.)  In Formula 5 terms, that would mean a three-part combination of strategies to improve pricing and margins, monetization of each customer, and of course, lead generation.   Most business owners never think this way. They never try to figure out what it will take to reach that 50%, in action-oriented terms.

Talk about important decisions. 

“The barnacle” the author explained “is confronted with an existential decision about where it’s going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock.”  (This quote is from John Gardner, who was quoting an unknown author)