Success Isn’t Always Visible: 7 Signs You’re Already Winning

Today I'm gonna talk about the 7 signs that you are successful even if you don't feel like it. So one of the hardest things that entrepreneurs have to go through when you're starting a business is you're putting in a lot of work, you feel like you're grinding it, you're hustling it, and you're not getting the results that you want. You're not getting the customers yet, you're not getting the growth. You thought you'd be a lot further ahead than you are. And a lot of people give up too soon. A lot of people give up before the momentum allows them to be carried to achieve their goals and to have the impact that they want. They just quit too soon. So today's video is going to talk about the 7 signs that you're on the right path, that you are secretly successful, even if it doesn't feel like you actually are. So number 1 is your customers see value. At the end of the day, business is providing value. If you want to make money, you need to provide value. You want to make more money, you got to provide more value. If your customers are liking what you do, they're saying, man, I couldn't imagine my life or my business without you, that's a really good sign. It may be that you're only helping 1 person though, or 5 people, or 10 people, and you wanna be helping thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, but one of my first mentors used to tell me that if you can sell 1 person, you can sell 1,000 people, you can sell 100,000 people. And so that's the start, right? If your customers hate what you do, if they're apathetic, if they don't like it at all, if they're not using it, That's a big problem. But if your customers do appreciate your service, they're finding value in what you do, then it's a sign that you're on the right path. Number 2 is that you're getting referrals. Referrals and word-of-mouth business is one of the fastest ways to grow your company. It's one of the most effective. It's one of the least costly because your customers are telling other people and the word is getting out. At the start though, It takes time to build up because you may only have one customer, and so, you know, that one customer may not be telling 1,000 people. It's harder to get the word-of-mouth multiplier effect happening when you're really small. But are you getting any referrals, right? Are the people that you're connecting to, that you're meeting up with, trying to form alliance partners with, customers have already bought from you, is there any kind of word-of-mouth happening, right? Do people meet you and they want to tell somebody else about it? It's not happening on a mass scale, obviously, right, or we wouldn't be watching this video. It's not happening for you in a big way yet, but is it happening in a small way? Do people see the value in what you're doing enough that they want to share it with somebody else? Because if you're getting 1 or 2 new customers or leads coming in because somebody referred them to you, then you are on the right path, and that will continue going. Just keep what you're doing, keep the momentum going, and you will achieve your goals. Number 3 is you're getting better. As I mentioned at the top, business is about providing value. So to provide value, you need to learn how to give good value, and that comes from you getting better at what you're doing. Whatever your craft is, whether you're making YouTube videos, whether you're making a product, whether you're selling t-shirts, whatever it is that your company is all about, you need to be getting better. And so look at what you're producing today and look at what you did last week, and look at what you did last month. Is it better? I could look at my YouTube channel and look at what I've done. I could look at where I was last month, and where I was 6 months ago, and where I was last year, and say, I've gotten better. And that's a good sign, because the more that I can get better, the more value I will bring to you guys, and the more my business will grow. So are you getting better at your craft? Are your skills improving? Because if they are, then that will help the momentum grow. As long as you continue to get better, it's a sign that you're on the right path. If you've stalled, if you're not growing, you're not getting better, it's the same output, the same result, then it's hard to imagine the business really taking off. Number 4 is that you're seeing growth. You're not seeing the growth that you want, you're not seeing the growth that you expected. It's almost never the growth you expected, right? If you make your business plan and you have your best case scenario and the realistic case scenario and the worst case scenario, it's often worse than the worst case scenario, right? And that's a huge letdown for a lot of entrepreneurs when they're starting up. Like, I never thought it would be this bad. Like, I read about how hard it was, but I didn't expect it to be this hard. This is crazy. So the growth may not be where you want it to be, but are you getting any kind of growth? Like, are you seeing more people coming to your website? Are you seeing more emails coming in, more leads happening? Are you getting more followers on your social accounts? Are you getting more engagement? Are you getting some kind of growth? Because if you get some kind of growth, you know, percentage, that's pretty high, right? If you have 2 customers and you get 1 more customer, that's a 50% growth. That's pretty good, right? Obviously you won't continue that exponential rise, but showing that you have some kind of growth, some kind of momentum is a positive sign. And again, we get frustrated early because it's not happening soon enough. But if you are having some growth in your business, no matter how small, it's a sign that you're on the right path. Number 5 is that your environment is changing. A lot of times as an entrepreneur, it's really hard because we don't have the people around us that we need to. We don't have parents who are entrepreneurs, we don't have friends who are entrepreneurs, we don't have people who can guide us and mentor us to be what we want to be. And so to do that, you need to create an environment yourself, right? Not just blame them for not not being there for you and not giving the guidance that you need and saying, oh, these people were successful because they had a silver spoon and they were gifted all this money. Who cares? Do your thing, right? What are you gonna do? Just sit here and be upset for the rest of your life? Go get yours. There's nothing holding you back from doing what you should be doing. Create an environment for yourself, right? Are you watching these kinds of YouTube videos to invest in yourself and make yourself better? Do you have a morning routine? Do you have habits in the morning? Reading from successful entrepreneurs? Do you have something that motivates you on a regular basis? If your environment is changing, if your environment is growing, what it does is makes you become better. The more you hang around successful entrepreneurs, even if it's not face-to-face in person, just online with video, the more you hang around them, the more that magic dust will rub off on you and the more your mindset will start to shift. And so if you're feeling that your mindset is shifting, you're feeling like you're starting to think bigger, you're starting to play a bigger game, like even if it's just in your mind, you feel like you've grown and you're learning, the results might not speak for themselves yet, but it's a sign that you're on the right path. If you're filling your head with knowledge from these successful people who've done what you're trying to do, it will make you better. And so that changing of the environment, changing maybe your friends that you're hanging out with, changing the resources that you read in the morning, changing your habits and your structure to support something that's more growth-oriented towards a goal that you wanna accomplish. If you're doing that, then it's a sign that you're on the right path. Number 6 is you're trying new things. Most businesses don't end up with the business that they start doing. So many businesses pivot and they change, and it may be a massive difference, it may be something totally unrelated to what you started with, or it might be a series of minor changes. But quite often the initial business plan that you have coming out of the gate is not the business plan that ends up making you successful. And so the way to find that success path is to try new things. You gotta experiment. You gotta add new, new, new parts to your business, parts to your process, new products, new services, new tweaks. You need to constantly be trying things, and most things will fail. That's part of being a success is failing over and over and over again, and you will fail way more than you succeed, but hopefully a lot of those failures are just small failures. It's a small failure, okay, it didn't work, I'm gonna try something else, I'm gonna try something else, I'm gonna try something else. And when you're trying all those things, it feels like you're not successful because you haven't found the thing that can help you explode, and that may feel like you wanna give up and you wanna quit. But the fact that you are trying things constantly over and over and over and over again Eventually you will find something. The real risk is not trying anything new, just trying to do the same thing repeatedly and not getting results and expecting something big to happen. It will only happen from you constantly testing, tweaking, and trying new things. So if you are trying those new things, you are constantly innovating, are trying to add something new consistently to your business, it's a sign that you're on the right path. And number 7, and the most important one of all for me, is that you still love it. It's like you can't help but do it. You know, all the odds are against you, everybody's telling you that you're crazy, it's not the logical, smart, safe thing to do, doesn't really make any sense. You just have to do it. There's something inside you that says, "I need to do this. I don't know why I'm doing this, I love it. Like, it makes me come alive. I need to continue to do it." And there's this, you know, debate I guess in the entrepreneurial world of When do you quit? Is it that I will never quit, I will keep going, I will constantly do it, never give up, go, go, go? And others will say, hey, you know, quit, move on, go do something else. For me, it comes down to as long as you love it, you owe it to yourself to keep going, because that's what's going to get you through. That's what's going to get you through all the experiments and the trials and the failures and all the crap that comes with running the business, is that you still love it. It's like you You enjoy the process. You're not so addicted to the outcome of getting a sale or getting this big goal. That's not the main reason for doing it. You're doing it because you love the work. Like, I love making these YouTube videos. I love watching my YouTube videos. I love the work. It's not just because I want to hit a million subscribers or reach a billion entrepreneurs. I love the process. I would do it even if I never hit A Billion Entrepreneurs because it makes me come alive because I look forward to doing it. If I stopped loving making videos, then I should move on to something else. And that can happen. So the sign that you're on the right path and that you will be successful is that you still love the work. And the minute you stop loving the work, the minute you dread having to go in and do the stuff that's on that paper, your checkboxes, you can only force yourself to do something for so long. And then you gotta stop it and change and find the next thing that makes you come alive because if you do not love your business, you will not have success. So those are my tips on the 7 signs that you are successful and on the path to success even if it doesn't feel like it. I'd love to know which one resonated the most with you and why. As well as what you might add to the list. Is there an 8th, 9th, or 10th one that I'm missing? Leave it in the comments below, and I'm gonna join in the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.