The Keys To Guaranteed Success and Growth

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What's up everybody? This is Ryan Daniel Moran and you're listening to Freedom Fastlane. On today's show, I'm going to be going over two major keys to success. Two major things that if you just do these two things, you will achieve so much more than you're achieving without them. I promise I'm going to be focusing on these two things because they are things that I have implemented in my own life and what I have seen other successful people regularly implement in their daily lives. And if you take these two keys and you implement them, I promise you that they will make a meaningful impact towards you achieving whatever it is that you want to achieve. I'm doing this because I'm putting together a little bit of a free mini series over@freedomfastlane.com which I'm calling the 10 Day to Success plan. 10 days to success. And it's a free series that we're gonna be going through as a community in order to achieve rapid changes in people's lives very quickly in 10 days. Now as I'm recording this, it's not quite ready yet, but it's gonna be ready in a couple of weeks. And we'll be going through that as a community and, and watching the changes happen as a result of people going through just that, that 10 day sprint of doing one little thing every single day that makes a meaningful impact in their lives. And that's going to be over@the freedomfastlane.com blog as soon as it's ready, which should be in a couple of weeks. Now I'm going to be going over two of those major action items on today's podcast because most of the audience that listens to Freedom Fastlane, which probably includes you, is very goal oriented, meaning you probably have something in your life that you are working towards. Hopefully if you don't have something that you're working towards, you're either a Zen master or you're dead. Most of us have something that we want to achieve and that we're working towards there this thing called goal. Now most people don't have real set goals, meaning that they have some sort of specific outcome that they are, they are aiming towards and they're taking regular, consistent action towards that. Most people just have dreams, meaning they have ideas and things that they're going to get to someday. If you have real actionable goals, which most entrepreneurs and most freedom minded people do, people who listen to Freedom Fastlane, you are in the minority. You are in the small and probably high achieving group in the world that is working towards something. And that's why achievers achieve, because they believe that everything is possible and they work towards achieving that on a daily basis. And if you're that type of a person, then these two things are going to make achieving those goals much, much easier. And the first key to success is a daily focus on result driving activities. Let me say that again. Daily focus focus and daily attention on result driven action. What that means is that your time and your energy and your focus is on actions that produce a specific result. You see, most people fall into a trap of inaction. And a trap of inaction is that's when you see the type of people who are constantly learning about something but they never take any meaningful action. I was really frustrated in university by some of my professors who taught business and entrepreneurship but had never run a business by themselves. They were academics, they had PhDs in business, but they had never owned a business themselves. And here they were teaching me about the tenets of running a successful empire. Well, they really knew nothing about that. That is a trap of inaction or an example of a trap of inaction where you constantly learn about something but you never take any meaningful action on that. Some people are professors are academics on fitness. They've read all the books. They can tell you every diet that's hot and in right now. They can tell you all about CrossFit and Six Pack ABS or whatever, but they don't go to the gym themselves and they eat cake. That is an academic of fitness. And most aspiring entrepreneurs that I know are academics in entrepreneurship. Meaning that they don't take regular, consistent, consistent action towards results. They are not focused on result driven action. And if you take an inventory of your time and you look at what activities produce a result, you will be shocked when you measure those results. The truth is that there are very specific and a very small handful of actions that really produce the meaningful results that you see in your life and in your business. You know this if you've ever worked a 9 to 5 job or if you're working one right now because you know that you do not work productively from 9am to 5pm you know this. Chances are you're like Peter in the movie Office Space when he's meeting with the Bobs. He says, I probably get a meaningful 20 minutes of work done on an average work week. That's the reality of the nine to five, because all we've really done there is we haven't said you're productive from nine to five. It means that's the Time window. You have to get whatever one thing that is productive done. That's what the 9 to 5 window is. We as entrepreneurs are not confident by those hours and yet we often still find a way to be horribly unproductive in whatever window we put around work. So if you have been spinning your wheels and have become an academic of entrepreneurship, but you've never taken any. I'm sorry, let me say that again. If you've never seen any meaningful results, that is likely because you have not consistently focused producing result driven actions. Take inventory of the time and energy and mind space that you are giving towards entrepreneurship and identify what is that going towards. Is there a specific result that you are getting from that activity? And I may offend some people when I say that studying something is not a result driven activity.

Studying and planning, even journaling, visualizing, meditating, whatever it is that you prep to get something done is not a result driven activity. That is what I call buffer. And buffers are fine. I set plans, I journal, I write out my goals. These are all fine and dandy. They're buffers, but they mean nothing if they are not followed by some sort of result driven activity. I know I sound like a broken record, but I need you to get this. Because without a consistent focus on result driven activity, you are paralyzed in a trap of inaction. And you will be the dude or the gal who has five years of study into some topic, into some business idea, but has never seen any meaningful action. This is a daily habit that successful people practice. Identifying what result driven activity they are going to focus on and realizing that all other activities, while possibly important, are distractions from that result driven activity. Most of us spend 80% of our time in buffer zone. We spend 80% of our time chatting with people. Which is great if we're massaging relationships that could participate in result driven activity later. But it's not a result driven activity in itself. Journaling or planning or studying or checking Facebook or doing email. These are all things that keep plates spinning. They're things that keep. They keep our plate full. But they don't drive us towards the result that we want. They don't drive us towards the goal that we want to achieve. Most of us only spend 20% of our activities on producing specific results. If we can flip that and spend 80% of our time on result driven activities and only 20% of our time buffering, not only will our productivity go way up and we achieve our goals much faster, but we also free up time because buffers don't take that much time and you'd actually be very surprised at the little amount of time that result driven activities take when instead what we usually do is we put off those result driven activities and fill that empty space with a buffer because we are afraid of a poor result that may come from the result driven activity. You may have experienced this. If you have ever put off something because of perfectionism, you are a perfectionist because you are afraid of the result that you might get by rolling out something that may not be up to your expectations. That's totally ego based and it's based in an idea that you set. It's not based in reality, it's not based in real results. I need you to get a specific concept and that is this. Failure is different than feedback. They are very different. Feedback can come in the form of zero sales. Feedback can come in the form of pissed off customers. Failure is not that. Failure is not taking action or not being better as the result of taking a specific action, which can come in the form of quitting. If you put something out there and you get negative feedback and you quit as a result, that that is failure. But failure does not happen until you respond poorly to the feedback. Feedback and failure are very, very different. Now we need action in order to get feedback and we need feedback in order to be successful. But most of us confuse feedback as failure and as a result we never push through the feedback in order to get success. Do you get that? Most of us are afraid of feedback because we think that it is failure, but it is actually the precursor to success. And the only way you get feedback is by taking result driven action. That is putting something out there that gets feedback from the marketplace so that you can test it and tweak it and make changes that will lead to success. And all of those things are result driven activities. Anything that gets feedback from the marketplace or allows you to tweak a message or a product to get different feedback. Result driven activity. That's what results are. They're feedback, right? That's what we, that's what we're going for. That's what sales are. That's what profit is. It's all feedback from the marketplace in some form. And that is what ultimately drives us to success. Failure is different than feedback. I've also found that what stands in between you and your goals, often just a few simple action items, just a few things. Most of the activities that we do are simply details that we could easily cut out and would actually bring our success curve way down. And it would allow us to Be successful much faster. I have one friend, one of my best friends in the world. His name is Travis. I have never seen a guy keep his businesses so darn simple. He's been in business for about 10 years and I have never seen somebody stay so simple. We did a product together once and it was an excellent product. And I was in charge of marketing, he was in charge of content. And he said to me, he said, Ryan, you know, I think we should just keep this simple. I think we just put together a simple sales page, get some feedback from the marketplace and we test and tweak from there. And I said, no, no Travis, that is far too simple. That is not going to have the type of, that we want. So I'm gonna spend three months creating a complex sales funnel that is just. It's gonna make us millions of dollars, Travis. You just wait. You just wait. So I put off profit for three months as I went into my hole and tried to produce one sales funnel that would make millions of dollars. And guess what? It didn't do so hot. It would have done a lot better if I had just kept things simple, got a little bit of feedback, and then tested and tweaked from there. I was just speaking with someone this week who was saying, I feel like I gotta do this one thing that I hate to do in order to get financially comfortable so that I can stop doing it. Well, that this, this is just backwards thinking. I've done it. I only can identify this because I've done it. It's this misconception that we can do something that we hate for a while so that we can afford to, to not do it anymore. I no longer believe in this. I now believe in taking consistent action out of whatever scenario we don't want to be in and towards the scenario that we want. And it often comes down to just a few simple action items that put us on the right path and keeping it simple and not making it some complex stream of buffers that we think that we have to do. Success rarely looks like that. It usually comes down to consistent result driven activities that bring us closer to the goal that we ultimately want to have. So what are these action steps? Well, sometimes they can be as simple as calling that person and saying, what can we do to achieve X? What can we do to move X project along faster? Identifying certain bottlenecks and holes and saying, what is that thing that we can do to open up this bottleneck so that we can have more free flowing activity in order to get results in your personal life it might be as simple as going to the gym and getting a membership and hiring a personal trainer. Or it might be going to the grocery store and buying different foods. These are very basic, simple examples. But I bring them out to show you that most of the time our best and highest use is something simple. And it mostly requires us cutting out the things that are holding us back. I have five steps to freedom. And the first one is to decide what we want. The second is to cut out those things that are holding us back. And in entrepreneurship, sometimes that is buffer time. It is time that we could spend better somewhere else. Cut out what is not bringing you the vision that you have decided upon. And then it is expand. Then it is expanding your income and your possibilities and then investing the profits and giving back. Those are my five steps to freedom. Right now on the freedomfastlane.com blog, I am doing a promotion for a product that I fully endorse. It's something that changed my life. It's called Amazing Selling Machine. It is the, it was the catalyst for me growing my million dollar Amazon brands. And I think one of the reasons why that product has been so successful is because they have one major action step that their clients go through every week throughout the program. There's just one, one major item that they have to accomplish. And at the end of the course, if you've done all those steps, you have a profitable business. It's and just breaking it down into those action items and focusing on those action items that you need to do every week you have this blueprint for success that just works. But we all have this. We all have this in every area of our life that brings us towards our goals. We all have this list of things that we just need to achieve in order to get that. But we try to consume it all at once and fill it with all this buffer. If we cut out all this buffer and just focus on the result driven activities, we achieve our goals much faster. So my takeaway from this first key to success is to focus have daily consistent focus on result driven activities and getting feedback that leads you to success. The second key to success.

Is to elevate your social circles. You know, we often hear that we are a product of our surroundings, that you are the company that you keep. And for the most part this is true. We've all heard the adage that you are the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. Or put another way, pull out your phone and look at the last five people that you've texted and average Their income, their happiness and their health. And you are likely that person. You are usually about the average of the five people that you spend the most time with financially, health wise, happiness wise. So if there is an area of your life in which you feel is lagging behind, the fastest way to elevate that is to change the people that you hang out with. If you are dissatisfied with your health and fitness, start hanging out with people that are really into health and fitness and not just talk. It don't just talk about going to the gym while they're eating cake. I mean, actually are in shape and care about their bodies and regularly have habits that feed their bodies rather than their bellies. So if you are struggling with your business or your finances, start to surround yourself with people that have that handled, that are way ahead of you on that topic, that are 10 years ahead of you on the goals that you want to achieve. The reason that this is so powerful is because our biology tells us that who we surround ourselves with determines what is acceptable. It's biological, it is in our brains, it is the safety of the community. It's built into us to participate in communal things. This is why we have things like religion in certain communities, because we are biologically wired to support the beliefs of our community. If your community says that weighing 250 pounds is acceptable, then you will automatically adjust to being 250 pounds or at least being overweight. Whereas if your community changes and now your community says that it is not acceptable to look that way and it is acceptable to be in shape and to exercise and to eat well, you will automatically shift towards that because we are biologically wired to support the beliefs of a community. Some of you know my story, and I'm working on a podcast right now called Losing My Religion. It was so painful for me to release the beliefs that I had been brought up with because of the community, we are biologically wired to support the beliefs of a community. The same thing goes for entrepreneurship, business, money. If you are hanging out with people who believe that rich people are bad and that earning money is hard, then you will constantly hear and constantly think of all the negative things that people have done for money and why rich people are bad and why getting money is hard, you'll start to see why there's so much lack in the world. It's because of those greedy entrepreneurs. Whereas if you hang out with rich people, if you hang out with good, honest entrepreneurs, you'll start to see that there's money everywhere and you'll start to believe that Making money is easy and your brain will start to support the beliefs of that community. So if you are dissatisfied with an area of your life, elevate the people that you hang out with on a regular basis and your biology will kick in and you will start to change that area of your life. Where do you find these people? Well, there's places everywhere now. We have this thing, it's called the Internet. It lives in these boxes called computers and hangs out on this website called the Google Machine. And you can find communities of people anywhere within your area with a few clicks. And if you're in, if you're in the northwest parts of Alaska and you've never seen daylight, well, guess what, there's still things like user communities and forums that exist online that gives us a little hint of what it looks like in order to elevate our communities. Obviously the best thing is to hang out with people in person. But if you can't do that, you can at least get a taste of it by hanging out in user groups online. Although just know that that is buffer activity, that is not result driven activity. The best places obviously are in person. And you can go to conferences all over the world on whatever topic you want. You can go to meetup.com and meet up with people who have a certain mindset that you want to adopt. And another way for you to start to elevate this is to get a mentor. And mentors don't often come easy. But if you offer to contribute value for free to someone, they can only ignore you for so long. So if you consistently give value to someone, they will eventually allow you to come into their community and introduce you to other people that have that vision, that have certain beliefs that will grow and foster the beliefs that you need to have in order to achieve the result that you want. I have a friend who talks about this topic a lot and he has a great benchmark for who we need to be spending our time with. And that is that 30% of our time or 33% of our time, one third needs to be spent with people who just scare the crap out of us.

They are at such a higher level in whatever area we want that we get nervous hanging out with them. And we can tell that we're doing that because they are talking about things and using language that we have no idea what they're talking about. We feel really uncomfortable when they're using certain language because we don't feel that we can adequately have that conversation with them. That's a good sign that we're with people who stretch us a third of your time with those people. And you find them at conferences. You find them by getting mentors and having your mentors introduce you to other people. You find them by seeking out the thought leaders in whatever area you're interested in and giving them value. And then a third of your time with your peers, people who are at the same level that you are, people that you can share knowledge with. This is where Most people spend 100% of their time. But if you spend a third of them, you get filled up by them. You get their ideas, but you don't stay there. You don't stay at that level. You're consistently growing. And then a third of our time with people who are not at our level yet, people that we can mentor, people that we can give back to, and people that give us a sense of contribution because we are contributing to their lives. Another great way, and I just went full in on this one, is to join mastermind groups. Mastermind groups are usually your peers. I treat them as a way to get around people who are in that third that just scare the crap out of us. When I was 21 or 22 years old, I joined a $20,000 a year mastermind. I was fresh out of college. Like a few months out of college. I wrote a $20,000 check. And this is when I didn't. I couldn't just play with $20,000. It hurt to write that check. But I paid $20,000 to be around people who just scared the crap out of me who were at such a higher level than I was. Because I wanted to start having my mind be affected, have my buy up, my biology, respond to different thoughts. And I wasn't going to get that in my apartment in Cleveland, Ohio. I just wasn't going to have that. It wasn't going to result in the changes that I wanted to see. So I paid a lot of money to go be with very, very rich people for one year. And the result was that I started to see that there was a much higher level that I could be playing on. And it did not happen right away. In fact, I was very uncomfortable in that group when I started. But the result over the period of six to 12 months was that I was a different person when I came out of that group. I ended up being in that group for two years and I was a different person. And everyone agreed that I was a different person by the time that I had spent two years with those people because my biology had started to support the beliefs of the Community. Now, there are mastermind groups that are really expensive. There are also mastermind groups out there that are free. It just comes down to the network that you have. And we'll probably do a podcast sometime on this, what I call your success network. But the cliff notes of your success network are the people in your life that contribute to your success that you want on board, supporting you in a certain vision and that brings some sort of value and that you can create value to as well. And you foster that success network and you treat it like it is the support and the mastermind group that is elevating you. We all have this. We have people at church that are really successful. We have the owner of that place that we go to all of the time. We have that uncle or that cousin who's successful that nobody quite knows what they do. That's me and my family. No one has any idea what the heck I do. I sit in front of a computer all day as far as they're concerned. But we all have those people in our lives that are at a different level that we've always wanted to surround ourselves with. They can become part of your success network if you foster them. Mentors as peers, as your personal mastermind group. You treat that and foster that and nurture that. And that will pull you up into having the beliefs that you need in order to be successful so quickly. To recap, two things that you can do right away that will start to accelerate your success. One, take inventory of the time you're spending and focus daily on producing results, focusing on result driven activity. There's a great book on this topic. It's called the One Thing. It's by Gary Keller and it talks about this topic in length. About focusing on the one thing that will make all other things unnecessary or easier. What is the one thing that you can do today that will make all other things either obsolete or easier or unnecessary? If you ask yourself that question, the result driving activities become very clear. And he gives a great exercise on this, on looking at what you want your ultimate goal to be and then dividing that into what your five year window needs to be. And then your two year window, your one year window, what needs to be done next month and then what needs to be done today? What's that one thing that will allow the rest of this path to become obsolete, unnecessary or easier? So that's the first thing is consistent focus on result driving activities. And the second being choosing your surroundings and the people that you associate with very carefully because you become a product of the five people that you spend the most time with. And hey, if you're not part of a mastermind group or you need a mentor, I do happen to be doing my next round of group coaching in the month of April 2014 starting this month over@freedomfastlane.com it's on the app Amazon Business Model and it is a free bonus for people who choose to sign up for Amazing Selling Machine through my affiliate link and you can find out more at one of the blog posts at Freedom Fastlane. You can check out www.freedomfastlane.com amazonprofits. There's more over there, as well as some of the other blog posts over at Freedom Fast Lane. I hope this was helpful for you, and as always, I hope it brings you one step closer to your version of Freedom. Thanks for listening everybody, and I'll see you at the next episode.