Mountains of Arizona
Dark 48 Degrees
5:24 a.m.
Years ago, when I was getting started in copywriting, one of my first clients came from a pay-per-click ad I was running on Adwords.
These were born and bred Dan Kennedy style marketing folks, so it was a good fit for me. I was just getting started and they wanted some help building their business.
Their business was doing quite well breathing fresh life into an industry (furniture retailing) whose old model was dying.
I did a few projects with them and then we each went our separate ways.
Wouldn’t you know it, yesterday at 5:11 am, while heading out the door to take my seven month old daughter to the grocery store (we’d been up since 4 something!), I heard an ad for these guys come across the radio.
It was for an entirely new business in the financial industry.
These guys completely reinvented themselves, started over, and rode the wave again.
I used to move through business with a crazy mind model that there was a beginning, a middle and an end to things. The beginning was when you got started. The end was when you were “successful” and had everything figured out.
This was a holdover model from the school system that likes to train people to think in linear, easily controllable thought programs.
That way, if an obstacle is put down in front of the being, it makes it seem like there’s no way through. Instant control!
“If I can’t get X then I can’t do Y.”
That’s the training. It creates tunnel vision when, in reality, there’s nothing but infinite possibility.
A more helpful thinking model is to move through your work with the idea that everything is ever-evolving. One point segues to the next. There is no done, there is no “success,” there is only progress or the lack of it. And I generally define progress as how much better the people in the world are because of YOU.
This model keeps you from creating an entire list of destructive emotional signals. Signals like:
- I totally failed.
- I am not qualified to be doing this.
- Why isn’t this working out as quickly as I want it to?
- Everyone else seems to have things much more together than I do.
- Am I ever going to be successful?
Most people don’t realize that these emotions actually program reality. They are not symptoms of reality, they are the software.
Get control of your programming and write something that focuses your skills and abilities on making the world a better place.