The comfort zone sounds so obvious, but personal development is much more involved. If you want to grow, succeed or do anything new, you need to go outside it. 



The comfort zone is in a situation where a person is familiar, at ease and in control. Outside of the comfort zone there is increased anxiety and stress. So, the further out a person gets the greater the level of stress. The easiest definition I have found is from Wikipedia



. 



The most comfortable place in usually not the best for learning or working.



If a person repeatedly leaves the comfort zone and has a successful outcome, they will actually decrease the stress of being outside the zone next time. While that may sound so easy, why do so few really leave the comfort of their familiar surroundings.



The very fact that so few venture out into new paths during their life, is interesting. The very reason this topic seems easy is that everyone thinks they understand it and do know it is crucial. If you ask people, most will say they do venture outside their comfort zone. 



So many say they go out of their comfort zone, then why do so many stay in home towns that have no future or jobs they dislike? Why do so many follow the same path as their parents or neighbors? It is the most comfortable of places.



Success, by its very nature, means you have accomplished something. Therefore, success is always outside of the comfort zone. In order to have success, you need to do something new or different. Continual learning means that at least minimally, you constantly feel uncomfortable.



Meanwhile, the further out the greater the stress, anxiety and fear which can hold you back. Repeated success outside the comfort zone will increase confidence. As you increase experience, confidence increases, and these new experiences become part of your larger comfort zone.



Over time, you will grow accustomed to being uncomfortable and  continually making progress. It all becomes easier. So, learning begets more learning. Success begets more success. The key is how to get to this point and to recognize the pitfalls and negative pressure from many around you.



Going outside may appear crazy.



On a humorous note, you might say that success is based you intentionally making yourself uncomfortable. You are intentionally outside your comfort zone. So, seemingly this is an almost masochistic behavior subjecting yourself to discomfort. Yet, this is a basic and key ingredient to success. So, if you truly are extremely successful, maybe you  have to be a little crazy too.



The concept of the comfort zone is a very useful psychological tool. You can only grow if you step outside your comfort zone. You must be willing to learn new things and skills through new experiences to grow and be successful. 



From time to time, you must re-assess and step out to new or revised goals. The process would only stop when you decide you don&#39;t want to go any further or want a break on the way your goals.

Comfort Zone – A guide to Personal Development

Why you should be looking at your future career as an ongoing process. You will have change, probably many times, a career is either planned or decided by others for you.  



Career Change and paths to new jobs or professions are confusing and don&#39;t always go where expected.



Why now is one of the best times ever for career change and career
development.



It may last 2-4 years, but you’ll need every one of those years to make the most progress. 



Largely I am setting a framework for thinking about careers in this episode. It will be followed by more action-oriented episodes and hopefully ideas to motivate thoughts.



You should always be planning on changing careers.



On average people have 10-15 jobs during their lifetime.
Some of these jobs are completely new careers.



If you aren’t ready for a career change, it will happen by
default. Now, sometimes that may be an unexpected promotion. Most often, if by
default, you are in a situation that is less than you wanted. 



So, if you want to grow and progress over time, you don’t want to let a change affecting you to be a default change. That is, a new job where you might not have a good choice or at a time of desperation. Start your research and include social media to gain contacts, but be cautious of what you say.



Think about it. You will see many changes, do you want to
plan and figure out how to maximize the results, or even just see progress, or
do you want to leave it to luck. 



Also, if others around you are working toward positive
change, it may be like musical chairs and you were not ready when the music
stopped.



Yes, the music may stop because companies are not living as long as they did fifty years ago. 



Now for some great news.



Record Opportunity for Career Advancement



According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 7.6 million job openings and only about 6.5 million unemployed. This is a remarkable time in history. There is such a huge shortage that companies are more willing to train career changers and even are hiring felons that seem to have true potential. 



This will not last forever. It is a rare job market in history and caused by the strong growth in the economy and in both new and reinvigorated industries. Simultaneously, so many people left the work force by the end of 2016 that while unemployment appeared low, there was discouraged workers that gave up searching for good jobs. Companies that were looking for workers were trying to keep the hours below 30 per week to avoid large health care cost of the Affordable Care Act. Enough of that issue, we only are concerned with how to take advantage of today’s work environment and why we shouldn’t wait. 



Over the next few years, many people will be retraining for new jobs and many are already returning into the workforce. You need to look at both what skills you have and what additional ones you may need. You probably have transferable skills that while not exactly reques

Career Change – Plan it or Take the Default

Goal setting for your personal growth is one of the most rewarding tasks people can do. Do you know what you want to be in five years? Do you know where you want to be in 3 - 5 years?


Your goals should be distant at the start of your journey.



You want to develop your own big picture of your future life. Success is personal. Are you on the correct path to reach your goal? Do you know what you want to accomplish this year, within 6 months and today? 




While some might feel they don’t like to set goals, it is important for everything from health and family to wealth. This encompasses all factors for personal growth.


A goal should be thought of as similar to a map and directions to some long destination. The wrong decisions lead to wrong or unfavorable direction and can make the trip much longer or even impossible. You want your GPS to be accurate.


Goal setting process


Your goals are your personal goals. If you have a business or career you may be trying to use it for the wealth and financial freedom you desire or just something that makes you happy. However, all of these are the means to an end in your own personal goals.


They should be measurable goals, but I argue against smart goals. Smart goals are good and important for short term accomplishment. Do not use or set them until you have long term goals and a plan in place.  In the longer term, you need to allow flexibility. As you learn and gain experience revision is often useful and sometimes necessary. 


Big Goals and Life Change can Take Time


If you are after some big personal goals over the next 5 –
10 years, you are working toward something that you don’t already know well.
That is, if as you work towards it, you will find attributes of the new career
or business that you may not like or just don’t want to do. That is, just like
you had ideas and dreams of a future career in high school, college and later,
you changed your mind. Either your likes and dislikes changed, or your
understanding of the career changed.


Decide a reasonable time frame for your goals. In some careers, 5 years is more appropriate while other careers may only take 6 - 9 months. Choose according to the career or goals you are setting, either 5, 7 or 10 years. Anything shorter than 5 probably indicates you are aiming too low for a real life change. This complete change might include a new career, getting out of debt, i.e. debt free, owning a home in a location you want to be.


Let&#39;s say you use 5 years for your goal endpoint and you have a big picture of what you want your life to look like. Review your likes and dislikes. This should be a list just like a list of pros and cons for something you might decide to do. 


Big Goals are the Ultimate Satisfaction


The ultimate objective or long term goal if a true breakthrough, will not be easy. You will almost certainly need to develop new skills and become familiar with new technology.  If you didn&#39;t need new skills, you could step into

Goal Setting for Personal Growth and Development

Welcome to another episode of Life Unsettled New Path, Better Future. You&#39;ve all heard things like, &quot;Everybody makes mistakes. Learning from mistakes. Don&#39;t worry about your mistakes. It&#39;s just part of the process of growing and learning.&quot; I&#39;m going to as usual disagree with many of the gurus out there that tell you to just continue to make mistakes as you progress.

This episode is extremely important but maybe a little bit more complex. As I understand the general logic that people have, you learn from your mistakes so you should expect them and you just keep on making them as part of the learning process. The more mistakes you make, the better off you are because you learn from those.

Well that sounds good, but what are some of the keys to making those mistakes and why and what circumstances is that a bad idea? First of course the good. Yes, by not worrying too much about mistakes and realizing you can correct them and learn from them, you have less fear, less hesitation. You move forward and take on new things and do new things. That&#39;s really, really important, and that&#39;s where most of the stress or emphasis is.

But that&#39;s also just in part. It is good in many situations, but when is it bad and how do you learn? Well when do you have to make a mistake? The idea is that first there&#39;s two types of learning. One is from actually making mistake, another is actually looking, researching, understanding, thinking through something logically. You have the two differences. I refer to one as wisdom and one as knowledge.

Knowledge is something that you can acquire, somebody can pass it on to you. Wisdom is something for some reason you just can&#39;t logically deduce it. It&#39;s why over thousands of years we tend to make as human beings some of the same mistakes over and over again.

I have a chapter in my book, &quot;The Mechanics for Breakthrough Success&quot;, on that. You can find it on Amazon.  Hopefully when they refer to mistakes, they are referring to wisdom, because otherwise you should be able to get it and learn from somebody else, something logically and then make progress a lot faster. That&#39;s going to be a key thing and that is the speed and time.

If they&#39;re referring to wisdom, what&#39;s wrong with learning from other people&#39;s mistakes instead of just your own? I have an episode there where we learn from other&#39;s mistakes, OPM. That&#39;s not other people&#39;s money. It&#39;s learning from other people&#39;s mistakes. That is when you see something else, observe it, think of the why, think of what happened, learn from that. Or if you have somebody who&#39;s a mentor or somebody that you truly trust in certain situations, in those situations should you take their idea over your own? One could say they already have the wisdom that you don&#39;t.

So if you disagree, should you take your own idea or somebody else&#39;s? I&#39;ve explained that in another place where I actually

106 – Everybody makes mistakes Learn from mistakes

Today I&#39;m talking about sales, sales process and the sales environment and the business environment. Do we all think of it in certain ways as we&#39;ve always experienced walking into stores, online even, walking into a car dealership? Things are changing very rapidly now and in the near future.

I want to go over a couple of the things that are changing, and have changed, recently. Really to my entire surprise is how fast those changes are about to take place. Now, it&#39;s important, of course, that we understand and adapt to the changes that are already taking place. The changes that are in the near future are even more awesome.

The average consumer today researches his information to make a purchase. Over 50% of them do this before they even have any interaction with any sales associate. Now, think of that. That&#39;s a whole lot of difference between what it was in the past, but it also means that the sales associate has a very different purpose today than in the past. In a couple of years, it&#39;s expected to be over 80%. Are you ready?

The biggest thing this means is that the salespeople really need to be interacting with potential consumers before they ever become the consumer for your product or your company. That is, doing things on social media. In fact, even if it&#39;s not the exact same customer, the understanding and what&#39;s going on plus the idea that they may be captured within the sales research process, along with that more mobile devices today are used than desktops, and it&#39;s expected to be 80% in the very near future.

93% of people doing research on mobile make a purchase. Think of that in terms of how important it is then to be on mobile, given it&#39;s the dominant search criteria today, and that 93% of those people are going to make a purchase after doing that research. How do you become aware of their search and use it? First, how do you make sure that everything you have, your web site and everything else, is mobile-friendly? It&#39;s a lot different than just making slight changes in the size and positioning of the interface.

Now, one key point to make is what should you do if you have sales associates, particularly if you&#39;re in a store? You&#39;ve got a store or storefront. For your sales associate, one of the best things you can do, make sure they have mobile devices with them. They can facilitate. Help the customer do research. Obviously, if you hand the customer something to do research with and talk to them about it, you have a much better chance of making that sale in your store than a competitor, providing you have a good story or a good store.

Now, with all the information, cloud-based and now we see artificial intelligence being used. Yes, today, artificial intelligence is already being used in many of the apps that you have on your phone. What does that mean? It means they&#39;re adapting to your decisions and your process, the way you click and the things you do, such as your location. Ye

105 – Sales Process Changing at Hyper Speed

The future marketing like everything else today is impacted by technology. Most people today have no idea how much information on them is changing marketing to them. In the future marketing, companies will use AI. VR and augmented reality to build marketing for them specifically based on what they do and did.

Today, we’re going to continue from a previous episode where we talk more about what was going on with sales and the sales process. Let&#39;s talk a little bit more now about the technology and the future that’s coming up as well as what is existing today and what we have to look for.

Now, to carry on a little bit from last week, we talked about social media, sort of the final part, the final cut. With social media, you can, today, build relationships and build relationship with people who are influencers in your area or your field, as well as people who may potentially be influencers within the sales process of your business, of your product, but relationships can’t be abused. There are some approaches that are really weird and they reek of the time when people thought that they could do it with business cards.

There was actually even some car dealer or something or a used car salesman. He used to talk about and teach people how to just buy tons of business cards and leave them all over the place. Throw them places, et cetera, and it’s almost like we have some of those people out there. As you’ll notice in social media whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, you go and make a contact and somebody sends you back an immediate message saying, “Oh, here’s what I do and here’s what I’m selling. Are you interested?” Well, that’s today considered very obnoxious. It&#39;s annoying and while it might work once in a while and will cause stories to be told about how I did this. Some will say I generated sales without thinking. It’s the without thinking part that really is troublesome because it’s not going to build a good business.

What will build a business today, and future marketing? Of course, more and more so, it’s customer service. Customer service now is always on. Think of not just like your instant TV but it’s always on. Customers have access today to more information from other customers, as well as ratings, et cetera, some of it false. You have to monitor things for that reason. It’s why you often hear that buyers are right now considered to be 65%, two-thirds of the way through the sales process because of research before they even reach out to the sales person in your company or any of the company for your product or competitive product. That number is expected and will probably grow easily to 85 plus percent. How do you get ready?

That tells us two things. Sales is rapidly removing the salesperson. What is it replaced by? Customer service, information, the things that make your company and your product more attractive and how comfortable that person is. Get back to building that relationship with

104 – Future Marketing – Customer Sourced

Today is the episode on marketing today. Marketing, I&#39;m gonna break it all down into two parts. Originally I thought this was going be one piece, but it turns out that it&#39;s just too big. And one of the things, and reason that I want to separate it is, there&#39;s not just what&#39;s going on today. As I&#39;ve mentioned many times, technology is moving just so fast that we really have to plan, or at least be aware, of what&#39;s happening towards the future. So, we will be taking a look at a second part next week, and this week we&#39;re talking about what&#39;s going on today, what you can do.

Now, marketing is different than it has been years ago, not in the sense that the customer has changed at all, not at all. However, everybody is able to focus so much better, and refine their marketing to such a degree, because of all the information available today, and the new ways of marketing that are available today. So you have to really know your customer better, and that&#39;s where, really, marketing today starts, and begins very much with customer service, customer satisfaction, and learning from those experiences and those customers.

This will all give you the ideas, of course, on how to attract many new customers and expand your market greatly, but the idea is to first understand them well through those means. Now, that means leveraging your community, networking with the customers, whether you have groups or information or whatever, run competitions. That is, if there&#39;s any way you can put together some sort of competition, or experience, or something that the customer can have with your product or with you, that can be a great way to both build loyalty and gain information. Starting off today, YouTube, webinars, et cetera, you don&#39;t want to waste time, or other people&#39;s time, but you see so much about how you can turn around and learn just about anything on YouTube today, or eHow, et cetera.

So one of the ideas is, of course, to put some out on your own. Yes, there may be others out there. Can you do it better? Can you do it well? Can you do it in such a way to demonstrate your product and how to use it; not selling at all, just engaging with the customer so that you become an authority. If you become an authority, or at least thought of as an authority, particularly if you&#39;re in a local area, you become more attractive. If you&#39;re worldwide, it&#39;s the same thing. So the idea is to give it away for free; that is a free class, free seminar related to your product, doing a demo.

You could be a local hardware store. Recently, interestingly, and that&#39;s why I mention it, I was asked how could they survive. They were talking about, you know, there&#39;s Lowe&#39;s and Home Depot, and how are they gonna survive. Well, first of all, keep in mind, they probably can&#39;t survive on price. So what do they do? They have to have other dimensions; know and understand your customer well, maybe you can survive or do bet

103 – Marketing Today; Social Media and Customer Focus

The second episode of eight in comprehensive business strategy, target marketing, in the overview of building or expanding a strong business.

This episode addresses the following topics and questions.

Who are your customers and targeting your prospects?

Use the attributes of your product or service and describe well what it will do for them
They only care about the benefit to them

Watch and survey with customer satisfaction to either learn possible expansions or to at least find who they are and what they like and don’t like. It is the customers' perspective that is crucial, not yours or your friends.

What do they do?
Where do they live?
How do they use your product or service? They may id something that you didn’t think was in your marketing.

In an earlier episode, I discussed how to increase the probability of success in business.

Does the picture you had of customers before you started match your real customers
Why do they buy your product?
Why from you?
What excites them? What is valuable to them in your product?
If you can answer and reexamine these questions you wil be ready to market you product and will later be ready for expansion and growth!

102 – Target Marketing & Build Customer Loyalty

So now is the first step in looking at business strategy, your product line strategy. What is your product line strategy or business line strategy? How are you going to expand your product line over time? Now this doesn&#39;t matter whether you&#39;re just starting out, whether you&#39;re about to start, or you&#39;ve been going for a little while. Even at the very beginning as you&#39;re planning your business, you say you only have one product or one service. It doesn&#39;t matter. You have to think of expansion in the future and start it from the beginning, and I&#39;ll explain why right now.

There&#39;s an old adage in business; grow or die. I heard that for the first time from my accountant many, many years ago, 25 or so years ago. It really is true. But, let&#39;s take a look at how you might grow. If you&#39;re going to grow, most likely you&#39;re going to have to either expand your products and that could be to related products, or it could be variations of versions of the current product you have.

Now why do I say related products? A lot of products are complimentary in that you buy one, and you will probably have a large percentage of people who buy another. It reminds me of two different scenarios. One was when we studied early about complimentary products if you ever noticed in the ads in supermarket magazines, you&#39;ll see things like a sale on bacon or there might be a sale on eggs. Why is there a sale on one and not the other? Because the one draws you in but then you will buy the other more than likely. The same thing with peanut butter and jelly.

A lot of different things go together, i.e. complementary. I saw a commercial oh probably about 10 years ago that really made a point that I had been trying to make so many times and had made, but it was a lengthy thing. Now I could just point to the commercial. You might remember it but if not, I&#39;ll replay the idea.

There was a guy who worked in the store. This is a supermarket. He&#39;s over in the vegetable area, and he picks up a bag of those little bitty carrots and he says loudly, &quot;Why are we selling these carrots?&quot; Now all of a sudden a voice from overhead comes loudly and says, &quot;Because the same people who buy those carrots are the ones who buy those expensive cheeses that we have in the cheese section.&quot;

Now another story was I went to a supermarket and they had ... it was a relatively small supermarket, but it was the one that was close ... nearby to us. They stopped selling whole milk. Now I went up to them and said, &quot;What are you doing this for? How come you seem to have run out?&quot; They said, &quot;No, no we don&#39;t sell that anymore. There&#39;s not enough people buying it.&quot; I had to teach them a little bit of economics. You guessed it. I said, &quot;Well, the problem is if you don&#39;t have whole milk and I want it, it is considered a staple, not just in my house but in many other homes. Even those few people who want to buy w

101 – Product Line Strategy, Service Strategy

Business strategy is often overlooked in small businesses. Too often a small business while a way to pick up some extra money or to gain financial freedom, neglects a comprehensive business strategy.

There are over 40 million people in the United States with side gigs. Now, these don’t even include people that have separated from there job and set up their own business. I wonder how many of those 40 million would be able to have a complete business if they looked a more closely at strategy. There are an additional 500,000 people per month starting new businesses.

This episode is meant to touch on the eight points that everyone, regardless of the size of their business, should be familiar.

The detail and motivation of each is contained in the audio of the episode. However, here is a brief overview of what they mean. Listen to the episode to understand why it’s important to anyone and any business. The eight categories are:

1. Product line - this not only includes what you’re selling now, but what you might want to sell in the future.

2. Targeting your market – while current trends and recommendations say concentrate on one person as you target your product or service, you may have to at least be aware of more segments.

3. Marketing - while much has changed because of technology today, much has also stayed the same.

4. Sales - there are diverse sales methods today because of online skills and techniques. However, each of these tend to attract different types of people and must be used differently.

5. Distribution – whether you have a product or service, distribution channels have expanded and your market potential depends on your distribution method and size of your channel.

6. Production - how is your product or service created? With today’s technology, however it is done, will probably be changed within the next couple of years

7. Labor - this is not only about the people you have, but how efficiently and how well skilled they are. It concerns the training. If you are one man shop with a limited time, then you need better time management, no matter how good you think you are.

8. Finance - probably the most important was saved for last. I’ve been told by my former accountant and read that 70% a business failures are caused by financial mismanagement. So, while it may be boring for some, this is a crucial area for any business.

There are a wealth of opportunities to start businesses today. However, you not only want to own a business you want to increase the probability of a successful entrepreneurial venture with sound ongoing business strategy.

Now, as I said this episode is to help understand the motivation and the reasoning why each of these is important to everyone in business. Over the next several episodes, each of these Will be gone into greater depth.

This episode was motivated by several questions I received and the observation of so many failures for lack of understanding of business strategy and for ignoring

100 – Business Strategy Comprehensive View

Startups, whether you’re expanding a business, starting a new business, there’s so many opportunities out there, probably more than there ever.

I keep on hearing people saying that they’re looking or they’re trying to think of something to do as a startup. Don’t think necessarily of just what you’re doing. Instead, think of problems that you, your neighbors, or other people that you see have. Solving a problem is what makes a business. I want to give you a ton of examples here just really to generate thoughts, generate ideas, and start thinking about things. Some of them are very simple, some of them are a little bit harder in the sense that you have to make something or do something with it. If you have an expertise, yes, you can teach it online now. This is just taking advantage of the technology along with your knowledge.

Remember what I’ve said in earlier episodes: Master what you know. Gain your authority by being the expert; not just by being recognized, but by being solidly known that you are an expert.

How many times have you heard: “Oh, there’s no new ideas”? I keep on hearing that from people, I don’t know whether they want to fund things or what they’re doing, or they want to just convince you to have their help to do it, but there are ideas every day. Sometimes when you’re watching TV and looking at the advertisements, look and see: “Wow, I never thought of that. Gee, that’s interesting.” Example, this weird thing that climbs stairs. It’s basically three wheels that rolls and rotates, and it gives you the ability to climb up the stairs more easily with whatever you’re dragging behind you, a package, etc., some heavy weight. It greatly reduces the ability. Somebody thought that up.

Even dash cams. What were they? They were nothing more – we already had cameras, phones, and everything. Somebody took that camera and the recording capability and put it up as a dash cam. Simple things like: Do you like crawling along the floor and wiping the baseboards? Somebody said: “Okay, I’m going to put a funny-looking cloth on a stick,” and it’s actually sort of a sponge, but it’s something that very simply you can walk along the area and clean your baseboards around your house without ever bending down.

You may remember, maybe about a year or so ago, I mentioned that there was somebody with cerebral palsy that interviewed me for her podcast, and she was the first woman or first person that had an exoskeleton, that is that support around the body to help her walk, and she was the first one this is a little over a year ago. Now they are taking AI (artificial intelligence) to modify the way that the brain is thinking that the person will walk or wants to walk because of how we learn to walk in the first place when we’re younger, it basically takes, responds, and helps and adjusts to your behavior.

Somebody came up with a problem, kids don’t like to carry around or they don’t have with them the

99 – Startups Unlimited Opportunities with New Technology

Let’s talk about branding and positioning your strategy. I truly mean your strategy. This can be your business or yourself. If you’re dating, you must have a brand to position yourself. You must be appealing to someone else. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about. This is crucial.

I’m going to get to products very quickly and very soon, but first I want to talk a little bit about the positioning, and the scope and breadth of a brand or a strategy. If you have it too narrow a scope, you may have difficulty broadening your appeal. We’re always hearing about find your niche. Find your niche. If you define it so narrow you will not be able to branch out very easily. You’ll have to create a new brand or a different brand, it becomes very, very difficult. However, if you can position it in such a way that it implies something more even though you’re selling. Can it easily adapt to something more, that can be very different? It depends on how you position it, how you sell it. What you do with that brand as you’re marketing it, as you’re selling it.
Even Big Brands make Branding Mistakes or Over Reach
Look at some of the big brands that really stand out. As soon as you mention them you immediately know what they are and what they stand for. Colgate, Heinz, Harley Davidson, Xerox. All of them have very strong brands, and you know what it means as soon as you hear the name. Wasn’t always that way.
Yes, Colgate always was toothpaste, but they decided they had something else and they actually introduced lasagna. Can you imagine Colgate lasagna? Just the thought of it doesn’t seem realistic.
Harley Davidson came out with a cologne. Maybe that might work for some limited group of people who like the smell of Harleys, but for most people cologne and Harley Davidson just don’t match very well.
Heinz came out with another sauce. They were so good with the Heinz-57, the Heinz Ketchup, they came out with a green sauce. The green sauce for Heinz was at first attractive to a bunch of little kids. The kids thought it cool or fun, but they of course aren’t going to be the ones that are going to stay interested in something like that for a long period of time. It wouldn’t matter what the flavor and other things were. It just was not consistent with their brand image. It’s not appealing.
Branding even relates to your own image
You may have a very good product, but if the image of your company or your own image is very different… Relating to yourself, think in terms of social media. I’ve helped and guided several people and companies on social media habits, etc. I’ve tried to help others, but they just know better for themselves. What happens? Something like 30% of people are rejected in job interviews because of their social media content. They have branded themselves with social media. I have some people who I know who would like to expand and up-level their careers, but they’re so infatuated with the responses they get from

98 – Branding, Position your Business and Self

Best to listen to the 8 minute episode. In the meantime though, how is hiring of employees as well as contractors and advisors influencing customer satisfaction.

Why do some companies have great customer satisfaction and others seem to be never able to attain it? I go through some of the thoughts and observations from wondering about this topic.

Comparison of Companies

I first noticed some of the great attitudes between companies and others where the customer experience is not so good. It raised many questions and I discuss those in the episode and then my conversations both about the hiring and training practices.

Those around you and Others

When you have some bad employees they infect your organization. Training doesn't help that may be attitudes people have carried for years. Remember your income determined by those close to you from the earlier episode (click here for more detail and understanding).

Training or Hiring Correctly

You might not be able to train good attitudes with the wrong people. How do you hire properly to raise customer satisfaction? Hiring employees is more important than trying the wrong employees. I discussed this topic with some good companies and found some interesting information. It seems rather clear that you should hire people with certain attitudes and experiences. In fact, it may be better to hire people without skills that can be taught but the desire.

97 – Hiring Employees, Contractors, Advisors

Let’s talk about short term goals versus long-term goals and the accompanied planning. I know that sounds dry, but: What do you think about it? You see people changing their minds all the time and doing things. It is imperative that you have those long term goals and dreams.

Imagine that you have your life’s goal or your business goals for the longer term, and by the longer term then you’re able to turn around and see what you can do in the short term. That is whatever you’re doing, as long as it’s within those broader, wider, long-term parameters, you can continue on. You might change, technology might change.

Be careful as most systems that use SMART goals (see Smart Goals - Really? Get Real!), almost always forget the long term. It&#39;s alright only if your a minor worker and not involved in any strategic planning.
Without a Vision on the Long Term, You Miss Opportunity
Remember in 1986 and ’87 I said a lot, in both speeches and on radio, that we were about to go through a technological revolution that was going to make the Industrial Revolution look small. People thought that was crazy, absolutely crazy. In ’96 when Microsoft first got into the internet, etc. and I started going around, we were talking about how that was going to disrupt and hurt the bigger companies while everybody was trying to say: “No, no, no. They’ll drown out the small companies.” You have to take a look at how technology is affecting it and looking towards that longer term.

I’ve heard recently people thought about some of the things, and the slowdown in many ways of certain areas of technology: “What are we doing? How much more can we do?” Let me say, we’re just starting. It is incredible what’s happening and what’s about to happen. Some of it is actually quite dangerous, but that’s for another time or for your questions.
Watson was a Long Term Goal with Short Term Goals and Projects
So often we get bad examples of people really screwing up one way or the other, but here’s a great example of something that IBM did starting out with what you see now on TV: Watson. You see these little ads where Watson is out by an airplane or something, and they’re asking questions or asking Watson what do or what they should do. When that all started, think way back to 1997 when Watson first beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion (details at Wikipedia). Sure, that was a demo. They certainly didn’t get any money or weren’t expecting to make any money off of that. Even a few years later when Watson played Jeopardy against two others and won “a lot of money,” really, the money wasn’t there, it really didn’t do anything. It might have even been donated to charity, I don’t know, but that’s not important. They started to realize what they could do with artificial intelligence and decision-making. Keep in mind this started well before ’97. They built it and started to play with it, and started to do things. It wasn’t until 2

96 – Short Term Goals vs Long Term Goals

“Statistics and Bias - Which one of these are better for you, nutrition?”



This may start out sounding a little bland, but I want to blow your socks off. It is also not about politics except as an example. You need to be aware because biased statistics has you following bad medicine; eating the wrong things and making bad decisions for your business or life. I may be talking about biased statistics, statistical bias, etc., but what are we really talking about?

We’re talking about the information you get and hear about every single day from the media, from teachers, from other people. If you’ve ever seen some of those movies or listen to some of the songs from the 60s, one of the big themes was: Question Authority.
Question Authority
Question authority is important for lots of different reasons, but what causes bias? Some of it is biased in the sample the way they choose people. Who do they choose to ask about a certain question? Some of it is actually that they don’t know any better, but many times what people are doing is they’re trying to influence you and give you some reason to believe in what they believe. Now, they may be thinking that they’re doing well, but they’re giving you bad information to base your decision on and trying to convince you or tell you what is the case.
I’m going to give you a lot of different examples of this, a lot of background, and a lot of things for you to think about, some of which you probably believe – but they’ve been proven wrong or certainly have not been proven that you should listen to them.

It’s one of my favorite topics anyway, but it came up because I was sitting there watching some things on TV, and they were talking about the popularity of Trump. I don’t really care whether you like him or dislike him. I’m trying to talk about the statistics. Both sides might do it, all kinds of people, I don’t really care about that. What I care about is you getting good information.
Politics only as a Statistics Bias Example
The reason I’m talking about it is not because of Trump or politics, but because if you’re doing a business, starting up a business, or trying to grow your business. You have to be able to discern and listen to true authority (how to establish authority), and understand a little bit about what may happen in statistics. People might be doing to convince you, convince you of their product, their company, or whatever. For example, what should you be investing in? What should you be joining or starting up?

There are different reasons that people have. Some of it is just bad information; they don’t know any better, they’ve just never really understood statistics enough to know what’s good or bad. I’ll give you an example of that, too, when I go into some of this.

First of all, what about that political example? Just recently Rasmussen and John McLaughlin of the McLaughlin Group came out, and they both have Trump’s favorability ratings at about 50%, a

95 – Statistics Bias, Fake News, Question Authority

Age for an entrepreneur, how old are startup entrepreneurs? Are you too old or too young? A constant question always seems to be: “How old should I be? Am I too old?” I have a few surprises for you, both with examples, and some survey material.
Many Famous Startup Entrepreneurs began Later in Life
First, let me give you a few examples. Ray Kroc, Founder of McDonald’s franchise, you may have heard, he didn’t start. Actually, he met the McDonald’s brothers when he was 52 years of age and that’s when he literally started with the idea. Wally Blume. You may not have heard of Moose Tracks Ice Cream, but age 57 was his starting time. Even though you may not know it, they are making 80 million dollars a year. The co-founder of LinkedIn was 35, that’s sort of on the young side actually. The founder of Curves was 40 years of age. It goes on and on.

Remember from Episode 01, an introduction to entrepreneurship and lifestyle success, the economic and technological change is a major reason to get a side gig or your own business.

Do you know that Martha Stewart was nearly 50 before she moved from the catering business into Martha Stewart Living and became that big magnet? There are even some people. If you remember the old TV show that had Justin Bateman on it, you’d think she wasn’t very bright. At age 48 she realized that some of the things that she wanted to do, she had to go back and she had to learn programming. She went back and learned how to program at 48. Vera Wang, she didn’t do her first dress design or any design until she was 39 years of age. It goes on and on.
Surprising Facts about the Age of Startup Entrepreneurs
Let me give you a few facts that you probably haven’t even thought of and that are really crucial for you to feel a little more confidence if you’re older and thinking: “Gee, what am I going to do now?” Remember the whole concept behind Life Unsettled is that if you’re a 50-year-old person then you have more years ahead of you than your entire adult life. Yes, living past 90 is greater than the 32 years you’ve been an adult, so plan on your next journey, plan on your next adventure.

A couple of little facts to help you out, too. What is the average age of an entrepreneur? It depends on where you are a little bit. It turns out in the United Kingdom it’s 47. For US, there was some research done by the Kauffman Foundation finding that the average age of a successful startup in the high-tech industry was actually 40. Yes, not 19, 20, 25, and all those years you heard, but the average age was 40. Gee, I thought they were supposed to be over the hill already for tech.

It turns out that high-growth startups are twice as likely to be launched by people over 55 than by people 20 to 34. Wasn’t it just a few years ago we were constantly hearing that it was the young people who were starting up all these neat, new companies? Yes, they may have started up Facebook and a few others, but a lot of the high-tech

94 – Startup Entrepreneurs – Older than Thought

We’ve discussed many different topics. Here is a great real life example of overcoming adversity, which bring many topics together. This particular episode and its example brings in many different pieces that we’ve had in the past and shows a great example of goals, ensuring the drive to succeed; hitting a plateau, striving and obtaining super success – all of the things that most of us want to do. This also is why and where we stop.
Aaron Curry, one of the top linebackers entering NFL ever. You need to know why he failed and how he rebounded for your life lessons
Let me get on with it by first saying and introducing a football player, Aaron Curry. He was a tremendous athlete, one of the top prospects as linebacker for a long, long time. As an example, linebackers in general are not taken early on in the draft; there’s just so many of them. I think there’s only been four times, that somebody has been drafted as a linebacker in the top 10. He was taken number four overall. Let’s look at a little bit of history. It has nothing to do with football, except for the story which is really tremendous. His goal was to get an NFL contract and take care of his family. He defined well his major life goal. (click here about setting goals)
His Start - Overcoming Adversity
Here was somebody, started out, he grew up extremely poor. In order to reach the NFL, he would need to overcome adversity. His family basically didn’t even have quite enough to feed themselves. He got his breakfast and lunch at school, he was very underweight, etc. but he trained hard and he played football very hard. But he was very underweight. What happened was East Carolina was the only school looking at him. At the last minute, Wake Forest came in, liked him. Wake Forest came in, offered him a scholarship, and he was able to go. At Wake Forest he was able to gain the weight that he never had before. Why? Because of the training and the meal programs that they had.

Finally he was able to eat like a football player in training. He was able to put on the pounds, gain the weight, etc. What drove him so hard to do all of this? That dream of being able to get an NFL contract and of supporting his family, of overcoming adversity for his entire family. He had a “why” that was extremely strong and extremely driven. If you think back to one of the earlier episodes, that’s developing that overarching “why,” but you need more than that. How do you ensure goal success (this episode explains how to build your own drive to succeed)? He knew that if he did not succeed, he and his family would end up back in that situation. That image, that motivation is what kept on driving him to get into that contract where he’d be able to absorb and bring home the money to support his family.
Reaching His Big Goal
With the goals and with that drive, he exceeded and excelled. He was well-regarded across the nation, and was drafted number four by the Seattle Seahawks. That was in 2009. By 2

93 – Overcoming Adversity; Aaron Curry’s Plateau & Breakthrough

Leadership comes in styles for varied groups and purposes!

I want to talk about leadership. Often you hear and you see a lot of things for leadership training or how to be a leader, etc. Just like everything else, just like in business you have many alternatives. There are many different types of leaders that have been incredibly successful in life. What I want to do is go over some of the differences. I’m going to point you in the direction of a particular blog post that was done that really does a nice job of showing the differences with some examples. Now, I haven&#39;t done research and analyzed all the other research in this area. This episode is just to point out interesting leadership styles, done very well. For you, it is an opportunity to understand that there really can&#39;t be only one type of training and there are different styles that will appeal to different personalities. I was particularly impressed by research done by one individual.

This all started because I was getting a lot of information and hearing a lot of statements that I really had trouble believing. Remember, I’m always asking: “Why? How? What causes this?” questions of that sort. When it doesn’t make sense, I keep asking questions. I ran across this article as I was researching ideas on leadership. It’s by Suzanne Vickberg, PhD, so Dr. Vickberg. She’s a Social Personality Psychologist with very good training. She also has done a great deal of research, statistical and otherwise that gives her a very nice measurement and characteristics that are attributed to four different types of personalities that are leaders.

I’m not saying that there are exactly four types of leaders. What I’m saying is this is what she’s done is good and should be motivational. I’ve also seen examples in other studies and other research of seven, or five, or something, and people make up different categories. What I like is as an example, something to show you that yes, you can become a leader. You don’t necessarily have to be an outgoing, dynamic personality. You may be somebody who has a completely different set of characteristics. You may be that mathematician/engineer that could still be a leader.

Let me first go through an overview of some of these and what they are, and some of the examples that she gives. As I say, keep in mind there are many different types of leaders, so some of these would in a sense turn me off or may turn you off, others are people that you would follow.  Just like we have different personalities, we have different products that go to different people. The idea of how to be a leader is a really loose concept because there are different types. Think of it very much like niche marketing or marketing across the internet. You can pick your industry, you can pick your market, and you will have people follow or buy your products. That’s what you have, in a sense, in a leader. It doesn’t mean that everybody in the world is going to follo

92 – Leadership and Leadership Styles – Become one in Your Niche

I want to talk about getting business advice. Actually it could even be considered getting advice for life, life advice. Before I get into the episode I want to remind everybody that I’ve always said over and over again how you can learn from anybody and everything.

Be ready for Business Advice that questions and challenges!

I’ve given examples of how birds and other animals sometimes know how to raise their young better than we do. Why? Because they raise them to survive.

Taken that little intro in light, ignore the person, but I want to talk about how I am always asking: “Why?” I’m always wondering why something exists. “Why does it happen? Why did somebody do that?” Of course I saw everybody’s criticism in the comments when Trump’s cabinet went up and said they disagree with some of the things he says. A lot of people seem to be surprised. I don’t care whether you like him or not, this episode is not about politics, nor about anything Trump says or does. As a matter of fact that is the last time I need to mention him.

The idea was being surrounded by people that are going to tell you what they think and will be very happy to disagree with you, but you trust, like them, and have a good, strong feeling that they know what they’re talking about. It reminds me how important this is. Do you find yourself around people that agree with you? Stop for a minute. How are you ever going to learn? Add people to your circle that disagree, people with whom you can have reason discussions to better understand the cause and effect, the why something works or happens, why it should be done a different way than you thought. Then you can run your company better, perform better at work, or create a better company.

Just recently I explained to somebody what underlies the unemployment number. That understanding is in part crucial to your confidence in the future for your own investments and how the economy is going. The note I got back was a ridiculous rant telling me something political. I’m not interested in discussing politics, so if I recognize it as political, I stay away. Why? It’s a waste of my time.

Don’t get confused with what you do day to day. For example, Facebook posts, no matter what is said almost everybody seems to agree. Somebody can say the most outlandish things and everybody tells them how wonderful it is and they’re given compliments. If a friend is suffering, okay, maybe say all those lofty, nice, wonderful things. You’re going to visit somebody in the hospital, tell them how wonderful they look. But if somebody is about to open a crochet store in a major mall, do them a favor: Get them to evaluate the feasibility of that. Inside a company this is probably in general not a safe thing to do, so you may have to do the political thing and all the other things, but I’m going to relay a couple of stories that show you how important it is.

When I was at General Motors we’re all at a coffee machine one day an

91 – Get Business Advice – Easiest Way for Business Information

This episode is about feeling as the customer or to &#39;be the customer&#39;. This is apparently very difficult for people, but we all know and have wonderful experiences as a customer. How come we can’t reverse it and feel so well by being the customer that’s in front of us or around us to have them have the feeling that they want to do business with us? At the end, I’m going to give a few examples of some good companies and one person as well. You can&#39;t understand customer perception without actually thinking as if you are the customer, i.e. be the customer.

First, what do we do and how do we learn the technique, or better than a technique, the ability and the inner feeling to know what a customer feels like when they’re in our business or we’re talking to them? Yes, you can learn how to &#39;be the customer&#39; and understand customer perception (listen to Customer Perception, not Yours ). First, practice. Listen intently to what every person you are with says, whether it be a customer, a businessperson, or even your family. Try to go beyond understanding what the person says. You don’t want to just understand them. You imagine that that person is using your product or service. Imagine what they’re feeling like when you’re talking to them or one of your salespeople, or one of your technicians, support people, whoever is talking to them. How do they feel? Can you do it so well that it can be the culture in even a large company, let alone a small one? Most people even as an individual can’t attain this, but there are companies that do it overall and make most everybody feel good. You feel good just belonging or participating at that establishment.

It is important to “Pick up on buying signals.” is a phrase frequently told to people. Forget the buying signals, unless you’re strictly in sales. Even then you don’t need buying signals if you can imagine or picture the customer with the product. How you’re making their experience so that even you would feel good inside if you were on that other side of that transaction. Just focus on over-satisfying your customer, helping them internalize the feelings of the product. At the same time, this has to last so you have to truly maintain absolute integrity. Then you are building true trust. When you attain true trust, you will not lose them either as a customer or referral. Now, this doesn’t come easy. I’m sure of that, I know that. But at the same time, you can do it, if you can practice it. Practice it just by how you interact with other people in the supermarket, in line someplace, whatever you’re doing. Are the people around you positively influenced by how you act and what you do? That actually is great practice for how you treat your own customers and how you build your own company.
Any Size Company Can Develop the Culture to &#39;Be the Customer&#39;
Starbucks hire people who believe in the atmosphere to create a satisfying experience

Companies often have cu

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