The Desert of Arizona
Partly Cloudy 39 Degrees
I remember watching The Secret for the first time back in 2006-2007 I believe. I was laying on my couch late at night in the booming metropolis of Batesville Indiana streaming the $5 movie online.
Batesville is known for two things: it’s the casket capital of the world. That’s casket as in death. And it’s also where a ton of hospital beds get manufactured. It would have been an OK town were it not for the toxic fumes you had to smell each morning from the factories. I’m sure they were harmless 🙂
The movie was pretty good. To be told that you could get whatever you think about is a pretty sexy idea after all. And the presentation package was awesome. Thinking back to it, it reminds me of those movies where you see an athlete go from an out of shape loser into this finely tuned machine. In the movie, it takes about 20 minutes and there’s a cool soundtrack playing the whole time. If you’ve ever attained mastery in anything, however, you know it’s nothing like that. There’s no soundtrack and time doesn’t “fly by.”
Eventually, someone pointed out that “thinking your way to success” might not be the entire story to using your mind to create the life you want. You might actually have to leave your home and go do something out in the world to get any real results.
I was listening to a business building interview the other day where the host said something like, I don’t care what you think, it only matters what you do. That’s what gets results.
That statement jumped out at me. On the surface, it sounds like common sense. Until you start digging. And until you ask yourself, what governs the actions you take in your life and business?
And then you are right back at mindset. I define mindset as a mixture between what’s going on in your mind, your emotions and your beliefs. Those are three areas that are many shades of gray with many points that overlap and intersect. In other words, it’s messy.
But it’s that “mindset” that governs what you do. Some people might argue that they have will power strong enough to override that. Maybe… for a while. But eventually, you’re going to lose. Because your actions will be incongruent with something far deeper.
If you want to “fight” that forever, be my guest. I think it’s just simpler to rewire the control room and let the right actions flow in a more effortless way.
This is why I rarely send out an issue of The Client Letter that doesn’t touch on the issue of mindset. This is why I focus entire products and services on this very topic.
You could look over my business career so far and say it’s been a journey of figuring out how to do the right things to move forward. But that would really only tell the story on a very surface level. It would be like pointing at the part of the iceberg above the water and thinking that was the whole story.
It’s not.
Yes, I’ve figured out a few smart things to do over the last 14 years, but those were the effects, not the cause.
Again, the actions I take in the business world aren’t the cause, they are the effects of the real journey: which has been building and tuning a mindset that I didn’t have earlier in my life.
It’s that mindset that fuels everything I do. It is the source of everything. And it is the real work I am here to do and to share with the world.
Mindset matters.