Category Archives: Motivation/Inspiration

Blogging, Motivation/Inspiration

Are Your Views On Money Holding You Back?

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A few days ago I introduced a guy to you named Brendon Burchard, who wrote a book I recommended called the Millionaire Messenger.

Over the course of signing up for some of his free videos, I have had a chance to check out some of the comments after the videos. Most have thanked him for the information he’s given and have written that they felt inspired to look at things in a different way. But what has surprised me is how many people are put off because he talks about how much money he’s made in such a short period of time, saying it’s distasteful.

I often wonder if some of us are kept from success because of our beliefs about money. In another book I’ve talked about here, T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, he talks about how he would make a million, then lose a million, and how this pattern was perpetuated a few times before he realized that, because of how he was brought up, he was equating wealth with being evil, and since no one wants to be seen as evil he’d then lose it all each time. Once he came to grips with the inaccuracy of the belief he started holding onto his money and life improved dramatically.

Let’s get this one out of the way; there is no such phrase in anyone’s Bible that says “Money is the root of all evil.” No matter which Bible you believe (if you do), every time the statement is used in 1st Timothy, it begins “The love of money…”, and then goes on to explain what it means. Basically, it’s not the idea of having money or being wealthy it believes is evil, it’s how one gets that wealth that might be evil.

I don’t think anyone can gripe with that one. We’re allowed to applaud titans of industry who saw a lack of something, created what was missing, and made millions of dollars. Anyone who faults these people for filling a void, no matter what it is, and making lots of money from it is a hypocrite because all of us probably wish we could do the same thing. How many of us see something and say “man, I had that as a thought years ago; I wish I’d followed through on it”? I certainly do, and often; ugh.

The fact is that most of us don’t have a love affair with money; we can’t because we never seem to have enough of it If we did most people wouldn’t fall for the scams I talked about. We’d already have the money we needed and wouldn’t give these things a second look.

Think about it another way; why are there so many “make money now” blogs? Or so many posts, including many of my earlier ones, about making money in some fashion? Because we don’t have enough, and we want more.

Some of you have seen my buddy Sire and I debate the merits of those people who promote themselves and talk about themselves because they’ve made money, and they want you to know it. He sees it as bragging; I see it as telling it like it is. If I’ve succeeded I want to tell you I’ve succeeded and I want to tell you how I did it. Who wants to follow someone that hasn’t succeeded if the intention is to make money? And if we have the big name bloggers that we know have done it and achieved financial success, what’s so wrong with them letting us know about that success?

I say all of this as I celebrate my first $600 month blogging income. It may be a fluke but it was the next step up after mentioning my first $500 month some time ago. No, it’s not enough to live off just yet, but at least it’s moving forward. Of course I’m looking for other ways to make money because I have things I want to do, things I need to do. All of it takes money.

And if I have to find and listen to the guys who can tell me how much money they’ve made, I’ll do that.
 

Motivation/Inspiration

Only Concern Yourself With What You Can Control

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I was on a roll last week. After reading a post on Ileane’s Basic Blog Tips I was inspired to write a post titled Is Your Work Worth Nothing. It seems that, for this person, just because he didn’t understand something he felt it prudent that the people doing SEO work for him should be paid based on results and not based on the fact that they did the work. Of course when I asked him if he wanted to be paid that way he said no, but that SEO work is different; no it’s not.

My comments on that post and then my post here got me an invite to write a guest post for Ileane, which I’ll do when asked, and I came up with one I called 5 Ways Your Blog Might Be Irritating People. That post got a lot of responses, and I appreciate everyone who participated; it was a lot of fun. And I didn’t gripe about anything I haven’t griped about here every once in awhile, but it ended up being a pretty long post; I’m glad Ileane was okay with that.

I had been on a pattern of criticism, all of which started with how my grandmother was treated while a patient in the hospital. Oh, people were nice, but overall competence wasn’t up to standard; being a health care consultant, I know. I even wrote a small bit of that criticism here.

Funny thing about criticism; once you’ve opened up your eye and started looking for things that aren’t going well, you get really good at it, focused on it, and suddenly all it seems you’re seeing is incompetence everywhere. And man, it’s easy to find. It’s a place that’s easy to get into, but in the long run it might not be all that much fun.

Hence, the day after writing that post, being on Twitter and complaining about the weather. Yeah, the weather. lol In central New York, it’s like we jumped from winter to summer and totally skipped spring except for the rainy part. The temperature hit 92° (33C), and I’m sorry but that’s just way too hot for me. It was already over 80° around 9:30, and I was griping about that as well because I had hoped to cool the house off before it got really hot.

That’s when one of my online friends, Shirley George Frazier of Solo Business Marketing said: “Concentrate on the things you can control, and the rest will fall in line”. Goodness, what a thing to say to me at that moment. She hadn’t known what I’d been going through and what I’d been like, yet it was a very timely statement. I needed to see it and hear it; heck! Of course, being cool, I wrote back with “You mean I can’t control the weather?” She wrote back “Controlling the weather — something to add to your wish list!”

Funny lady, but the point was taken. It’s easy to complain about things, but harder to think about those things that we could actually do something about. There were a lot of things I was complaining about that I actually did something about, but others that I knew there wasn’t anything I could do. In an odd way I didn’t get all that depressed about any of it, but I also wasn’t as content and happy as I could have been, as I had been before my grandmother got hurt.

An important lesson for those of us who blog is to not get so into complaining about things that we don’t try to fix and resolve what we can. For all the complaints I wrote in the post on Ileane’s blog, I could control only what I do on my blog, and I don’t do any of the things I find irritating. For what happened to my grandmother I had a meeting with a representative at the hospital, and so far have also ended up talking to a couple of department directors on how things could have been improved. I feel good about that because I know that everything I say, if they fix it, will help the next patient that they encounter.

If you’re going to complain, do something about it as well; otherwise, maybe channel those thoughts towards something more positive. I think I can say that most of the time when I complain about something I’m also about to do something about it as well, or have done something about it, like when I talked about our smartphone issues. Are you making sure you’re doing something about those things that irritate you? Are some of those things on this tolerations list (it’s a pdf)?

Motivation/Inspiration

Are You Planning For Your Success?

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I had a pretty good week this past week. The week before I felt like I was leaving way too many things to chance, so I thought it was time to regain a bit of perspective. After all, one doesn’t just fall into success; no matter what it is, you have to work it, and it works better if you have a plan of some kind.

So I worked out a plan based on a marketing plan I’d put together for 2011, things I want to do to earn the bulk of my cash for the year. I’ll do other things hopefully but you have to start with something. The next step was putting together a monthly plan of attack, which I started at the beginning of the month. In doing that, you also have to put together a portion of three types of things; things you want to do daily, things you want to accomplish during the week, and things you can to complete for the month.

After that I decided I needed to plan my time daily as well. So I did, and I got to everything I wanted to do that I planned for. This coming week is going to be kind of a mess since it’s Thanksgiving week and I’ll be out of town for a couple of days, but that’s okay because the plan helps me be prepared to have most everything done before I leave; whew!

As Snoopy shows, I got a lot of things checked off my list. See, I’ve been asked in the past how I get to so many things, and how I can find the time to write so many blog posts. When I plan my time, when I have plans of attack, I’m very good at it all because I don’t have to think about it. Everything’s written down in some fashion, or logged somewhere, like in my computer calendar associated with my Palm; that’s my alarm system, as well as my cell phone (remember, the stupid alarm on my Palm doesn’t work anymore). And I make sure to plan breaks and meal times as well. And weekends… I don’t plan those, but if I stick with my plan, then weekends are mine to work on my other projects, or just to try to relax a little bit; I don’t do that often.

So, I plan my blogging time, both for myself and some clients. When I’ve got other contracts to work on then I plan that time as well. I need to readjust my plan some because I’ve been thinking about trying the Chris Brogan thing and writing at least two posts a week in the coming year; kind of hard to do with multiple blogs though, but who knows right?

Are you planning for your success, or are you just waiting for it to happen? Maybe you need a planner; look at the cover below.

Classic Legacy Binder with Snap Closure - Black

Franklin Covey Classic Legacy Binder with Snap Closure – Black

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell

Motivation/Inspiration

I Get Motivation From Things Like This

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Ten days ago I wrote a Sunday Question post asking people how they motivate themselves. Almost everyone stated that they motivate themselves in a way that doesn’t involve anything on the outside.


by multimedia student

You know, I have to say that, in general, I’m not believing most of that. Yes, I’m taking a controversial stance, but I’ll explain why.

I’m known as the observer of people. I like humanity, even though I don’t like everything people do. But I see a lot of people go through their day as if they’re just following a script. They get up, go to work, come home, watch TV and go to bed. There might be some deviation, but in general that’s pretty much it. And they’re not often happy about it.

I’m an independent consultant. I do most of my work from home. When I’m on the road, I partially do what everyone else does, except I have to go out for my meals or have something delivered. The one thing I rarely do on the road, and don’t necessarily do all that often at home either, is watch TV. I find that I like deciding way in advance what I want to record for the week and then will watch when I’m ready.

So, I sit at my desk, at my computer, and I work a lot. Oh sure, I take breaks to do things like write my blogs and participate on Twitter and Facebook, but a lot of what I do is business oriented. This means that I don’t really take a lot of time to just relax and get things off my mind. I am at the computer until it’s time to go to bed, and it’s the first place I come after the bathroom when I awake. I’m always here.

But sometimes I just can’t get in the mood to do much of anything, even if I’m sitting here. I could easily say I’m driven to succeed, and that would be true to a degree. There are times when I just don’t want to do anything; who reading this can say that doesn’t happen to them every once in awhile? And when I don’t want to do anything, I don’t care about success, I don’t care about family, I don’t care about eating… I don’t care about anything!

Well, that seems kind of depressing, doesn’t it? But it’s not. The reason is that I only allow myself to be in that mode for short periods of time. Hey, if I don’t work, I don’t earn any money. I can’t fall back on vacation time because I don’t have it. I can’t just fall back on my reserves because that just takes money away from me and I then have to figure out how to replace it.

In those times, I look for motivation in other places. I’ve talked about motivational movies like The Secreticon. I’ve shared motivational videos on this blog, things that have made me feel better. I’ve mentioned the name Zig Ziglar here before, but haven’t talked about what he does as a motivational speaker all that often. He loves telling the tale about a guy who comes up to him and says “Motivational speaking must not work all that well because it seems people are always needing to be motivated.” Zig says “People also need to eat and bathe, but I don’t hear you saying people don’t need food or soap.”

His belief is that we all need to find ways to motivate ourselves at least a few times a day because no one is a machine. Thoughts of others won’t always get it done. Dreams of eventual success won’t always get it done. But finding other things that offer at least a moment of uplift… man, that’s priceless. So, I figure that if someone like me, who has stated many times on this blog that I want to be successful and a big deal, needs outside motivation from time to time, actually probably a little bit at some point every day, that everyone else almost has to as well. No one is happy or upbeat 24/7; not even Zig.

With that in mind, I want to share this video with you, although it’s not a great video. But it is a great song. Michael Jackson has done lots of motivational songs. This one is called Keep The Faith. He didn’t do a video of it, and it’s too bad. I thought about just posting the lyrics to this song, but I didn’t for two reasons. One, it’s super long; this is one of those songs where the chorus is repeated many times, but it’s a short chorus, so there’s a lot of new lyrics through to the end of the song. And two, I didn’t want to risk copyright by posting everything here, although truthfully that’s secondary to how long the post would end up being.

So, I post this video that has the music and the lyrics. I hope you listen if you don’t know the song, and I really hope you follow the lyrics. This is powerful stuff, and I doubt that anyone who listens to this entire song can’t say that the words aren’t motivating and uplifting. And if you really think that, don’t write it here. Enjoy:

 

Motivation/Inspiration

Where I Find Inspiration

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Our friend Peter asked an interesting question in one of his comments. His question was where I find the inspiration for all these posts and newsletters that I do. I guess it’s because I have a large output for all my blogs and my one newsletter, and of course all the writing I do for other people here and there.

I find inspiration in many places. Almost anything could spark an idea for writing a blog post. Even visiting other blogs or reading news stories or seeing what’s going on via Twitter or Facebook can spark something. And sometimes it’s a comment, like this post. Let’s take a look at my previous 10 posts on this blog to see where I got the inspiration from; I’m not going to link to them, just so you know.

I wrote about evaluating when to end something because I was reading another one of those blog posts where it was recommended to never give anything up because success is just around the corner. I had just a couple of weeks earlier stopped writing one of my newsletters because I realized I didn’t have what it took to write it anymore, and thus I felt what I was reading was contrary to what I was doing, and so I wrote about it.

I wrote about the song We Are the World because I was walking on the track at the gym listening to my MP3 player and it came up and I got chills listening to it. The impact was still strong when I got home, and there you go.

I wrote a Sunday post on cravings because I’ve been having a lot of them. I had just days earlier started a new metabolic eating plan that I’m being evaluated on, and I had been craving chocolate almost nonstop.

I wrote a post on the Count Per Day plugin because on one of the blogs I write for they had it, and I tested it to see how it compared to Analytics and wrote my thoughts on it all.

I wrote a post on blogging and Twitter because of a local event that showed just how fast news, good or bad, can spread based on a blog post and its popping up on Twitter, and how a business can either be ruined or have a chance to save their reputation.

I wrote a post on simple answers to what seems to be difficult problems because I’d just gone through two things, one literally a couple of days earlier, where I’d done a lot of work for nothing.

I wrote a post on the things a blog should have because of a comment someone left asking about it. Then the next day I wrote a post on the administrative area of WordPress because I had just helped a friend of mine set up a new blog, and she looked inside it and was really confused over what she saw.

I wrote the next Sunday post on trust because it’s the political season, and thus all those political commercials are on TV these days. It’s interesting how much we all hate them because they’re so mean, yet these people keep putting that trash on, and thus we don’t trust them because we know they could care less about us and are only in it for their own reasons.

And finally I wrote about the components of a newsletter because my friend has been thinking about writing one and kept asking me about length, images, etc, and it seemed like a good idea to write a post about it in case someone else had been wondering.

And there you go. See, it doesn’t take a lot to determine what to write a blog post about, even if I were writing a niche blog. Of course, this is the fun blog, so I write more posts on this one than the others. Inspiration really doesn’t have to be hard most of the time; all you have to do is pay attention to what’s going on, what people are saying to you, and of course your own feelings.