The Desert of Arizona
Clear 56 Degrees
I got to meet a friend yesterday who’s in the winemaking business. Actually, she makes mead. Instead of using grapes, mead ferments honey. Most of the mead out there is terrible. It takes like cough syrup. But GREAT mead like she makes is an entirely different story.
We were talking about wine making and how the experience of a wine is often controlled by your preconceived ideas about the wine.
For example, in blind taste tests, wines that are said to be more expensive generally receive better ratings… even when the exact same wine is being served for each variation.
It’s become clear that what you think about the wine affects how you rate the wine.
This happens inside your head about you, too.
How you think about you affects everything else.
It’s easy in the world of the Incomparable Expert to often feel like a failure. People aren’t listening to you. Your lead generation isn’t producing as many new eyes as you’d like. You aren’t getting the number of prospective client inquiries you want. The revenue isn’t what you want it to be. The system you use to attract clients isn’t working at the level you’d like. That last product you made wasn’t a hit.
And it goes on… it’s enough to make someone crazy.
So how do you stop feeling like a “failure?”
Well, look back at that long list of “bad things” I just went through a second ago. You want to know what the common thread is in all of those items?
They’re ALL about you.
So let me state it plainly:
Your amount of satisfaction in business and life is in direct proportion to your ability to take the focus OFF of you and put it on the people you serve.
This isn’t about getting your business to work for you, this is about serving others.
You do THAT well and everything else takes care of itself.
When you stop trying to get it to work for you, you can put all of your focus on getting something to work for someone else.
To me, that’s the point of business: solving problems for others… enriching the lives of others.
Look at folks before you work with them, before they go through your world. Look at those same folks AFTER. Did they get what they wanted? Did they get what they needed? Did their condition improve? Did their entire world transform? If not, THAT’S what you work on fixing.
Start asking yourself how you can better serve them, more effectively, more fully, with less risk, with better certainty that the result will be delivered.
Those are the questions that lead to possibility, opportunity and everything you actually want. It’s all hiding for you on the other side of helping others get what they want first.