It is easy to get fed up. Especially when you know you could be doing better for yourself. Keep in mind, you are the only one who can make your dreams come true. If you wake up in the morning and don’t like what you see in the mirror, or think that improvement can be made, only you can implement those improvements. Begin forming a plan right then and there.

But the worl… They said I can’t…. I don’t know…. Im too…

These are all excuse phrases, and they are bullshit. They are excuses you are using to yourself to be lazy and avoid facing a challenge, mostly due to your fear of failure. The second you hear yourself having to justify to yourself your motives, it is time to look deep within yourself to figure out why you are making those justifications, and don’t worry, we all do it, its human and it is natural.

Learn to fail with grace

Failure is such a negative term, I have a goal this week to come up with a new word for failure. It isn’t a bad thing, and the word failure denotes a negative connotation. I prefer to think of failures as life lessons.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The key is to make a different outcome every time. If something doesn’t quite work out the way you expect, figure out why, adjust your approach, and do it again, persistence will pay off.

Harness support, let resistance fuel you
The main reason behind this blog post today is because I had a day of feeling just beat up. Nothing seemed to work out for me the way it normally would. We all have bad days, however, today I allowed the things around me bring me down until a good friend of mine, business partner, and fellow lifestyle designer Matthew Savage said to me:

Phil trust me your worth $10k an hour. Your a really smart guy, with ambition, don’t let the corporate slave master get you down. Soon you will be shedding that pittance of what they think your worth for what you feel you truly are. Think big, you will have it, life is a fucking game, we think to little and listing to those that have nothing. Why no listen to others that have freedom, have the life we want, they are smart. That is why I liked Tims book so much I can respect and listen to that guy cause he knows what his time is worth, he lives the life I want.

After he said this to me, I realized one of my strongest assets are those who support my fundamental shift in life, fellow lifestyle designers seeking to achieve the same goals. Another great support to me is my wife Amanda Roberts whom is always behind me regardless of my mood, or my crazy wild dreams and ambitions.

However, I have those who are very close to me, who think I am INSANE. These people are still good friends, and even family, and I use their negativity as fuel.

Talk to me about it!

I want to discuss with others what you want to achieve and how you plan on achieving it. Please share your story, feel free to join my mailing list. Let’s help one another grow stronger and grow better. Let us have some conversations not just about me, but about you as well!

Here is the problem, the majority of us are self destructive. Something comes down the pipe that sets us back, an unexpected bill, or shortage of money, or rejection from something we really want, when it doesn’t work, we shut down and become negative. It is the easiest thing to do right? Wrong.

Start becoming creative. Focus on the goals, write them down, ask yourself today what you are doing to get to that goal, if your sulking, your not achieving any goals, your more likely thinking of reasons why you won’t accomplish what you want.

It was easy for me 5 years ago when I was homeless to think that the situation I had gotten myself into was never going to end, however, after some friends had given me some tough love, and a sift kick in the ass, I learned that the only person who can change the outcome of the path I was on was me. This sounds lame right? You’ve heard this before? I know. I had too. The point is, 6 years later, I worked my self back into a high paying job, and am now looking to move into my own self sustained income generating business again.

Am I afraid of failure? No, the biggest thing I have learned over the past 6-7 years is that failure is temporary, as can be success, however, failure has done nothing but teach me some of the most valuable lessons in life. I can self destruct today and do nothing, or I can kick ass and live life on my own terms. Every day I am one step closer to that, because every day my single biggest motivation is to use my lessons that I have learned through some of the largest failings anyone can go through to leverage myself into a life of luxury and freedom, and it is working. It isn’t costing me millions in investments, or days of sleepless work to balance it all, it is requiring me to not self destruct, to determine where I want to be, and settle for no less.

One of the greatest assets you can have, is an ability to lead.

When I talk about being a leader, I am referring to a leader who possesses that ability to influence from any part of the line. Some one who has mastered the art (and leadership is nothing short of an art) of leadership learns to influence the direction of a project, or organisation from the middle and from the back, it shouldn’t matter.

I spent the majority of my career working for Fortune 50 companies. As an employee or contractor for one of these businesses, unless you are a major stock holder, there is no such thing as leading from the front of the line. Even the management and leadership have very little ability to truly lead. The ones who succeed are the ones who learn how to influence the right people to help them change the direction of the flow of money.

I am going to drastically switch directions of this blog, my goal is to show you how to be a leader, to help you become a leader, to work with you one on one with your challenges as a leader. This is an important part of lifestyle design, one of the most important parts of lifestyle design, learning to march to the beat of a different drummer, and using that to influence those around you to think the way you want them to think.

I can’t tell you how much it annoys me when people can’t be decisive. I think it probably rubs us all the wrong way.

Be the decisive one, if people don’t like your idea, force them to give you a better idea. When you challenge people, they respect you more, you can do this with out being seen as being pushy, or over dominating. For example:

John and Molly are trying to decide where to eat, Molly asks John what he wants for dinner and he says it doesn’t matter to him that it was up to her, Molly can’t make up her mind either. Both are stuck in a cyclical conversation of indecisiveness until they both decide not to go out to eat and starve to death.

This particular conversation is a minimal example of how indecisiveness can be dangerous, this is how that conversation should have gone. Molly will be the decisive alpha in the conversation.

John and Molly are trying to decide where to eat. Molly asks John what he feels like for dinner, and he replies that it does not matter to him (this is a lie). Molly suggests that she would like to go to a japanese steak house and get sushi.

Again, a simplistic example. However, being indecisive in business situations can be detrimental to a business. In a lot of cases executives and business owners get stuck in “over analyzing” a situation. Time to market can be extremely important. When I launch a product, I launch that product with all of the advertising options I can, however, I test each advertising option against the other (split testing, and A/B testing). After as little as 24 hours I can begin to see what is working and what isn’t working, normally I begin to take out what isn’t working in as little as 48 hours (sometimes a little sooner). As I take things out (ad placements, keywords, ad wording) I add new stuff in to test.

The key is I was decisive about launching my product, I did allow a bunch of analytics tell me how I should launch my product. I allowed live analytics coming in to show me in real time what does and does not work. It will change from product to product, and from medium to medium.

When I was working for a Top 50 IT firm, I saw management indecisiveness cost them lots of money. Don’t let this happen to you, be the decisive one, people will respect you more, and you will make more money by doing so, you can’t learn, if you don’t make mistakes.

To quote Carrie Wilkerson from The Barefoot Executive - Are you making excuses or being motivated by REASONS?

In January I am planning on taking my family to Vail in Colorado for the entire month. During this month I will be teaching my boys to skii, and just spending quality time with my family. My work during this time will be limited to 4 hours a week. How can I achieve this?

I realized a long time ago that finding a process for everything was the easiest way to keep myself from every having to do it. For every new project I put together, once I have I realized how that project produces an income stream for me, I break that project into pieces. Each piece has a dependency on another part of the process in order to create the overall system that produces that particular income stream for me. Once a piece of the process is completed, it is passed on to the next outsourced resource to complete their piece, this allows me to break my business down into multiple small pieces handled by different people. By doing this, I keep control of my intellectual property, and also minimize mistakes, because each outsourced resource is specially trained in order to complete one small piece of the overall puzzle that makes up my income.

There is a process to everything you do, soon we will discuss how to break each piece down into systems, and how to identify, train and utilize outsourced resources to complete your tasks, making you money, while YOU ski in Vail for a month.

I just got an account with ping.fm, they are in beta test right now, sign up for my newsletter and I might share with you the beta code if they let me!

ping.fm is a MUST for social networking, it allows you to update all of your social networks (i.e. twitter, myspace, facebook) from one central place. There are plugins for ping.fm for both Wordpress and Drupal and both seem to work very well.

I have to give a big kudos to Sean over at ping.fm for this application, it is truly one of the greatest new applications I have used, and certainly makes my life MUCH easier!

Once you learn to ignore and overcome the fear of rejection, you need to start communicating. By communicating I don’t mean selling, I mean be direct. To get anything you want in life, you must ask for it, and ask for it directly. I have gotten to the point in my life where I almost find it funny to see the reaction on peoples faces when I ask them for off the wall things. However, I have found that being direct, I get what I want 99% of the time.

This theory also stands true when you are upset about something. No problems are ever resolved by “holding it in”, you also aren’t saving the people around you from any heartache. In most cases, you are spending time scripting it, and scripted conversations are ill prepared conversations, it never goes the way you scripted it in your head. The easiest way to confront someone is directly. Be honest, and be direct.

Remember this though, you get more bee’s with honey than you do with vinegar.

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My MS AdCenter ads seem to be doing fairly well. Through out most of the day my CTR was higher than what I had experienced on Google Adwords, but I noticed the amount of impressions was much lower on very short keywords. It is too early to tell what my conversion rate is, and it is very early to tell how my split testing is working. I noticed that I am still paying more per click than I really would like.

Yahoo, I can’t honestly tell yet. My Ads sat in Editorial Review for close to 48 hours, now that they are approved, and everything seems active, I have no impressions. I am going to give it another 24 hours, and then contact Yahoo’s technical support team (who has been GREAT in the past) and see if I can’t get this sorted out.

Today was the launch date for Cuil a new search engine that is developed with 33 million dollars in venture capital backing. Its aim is google, and rivals google in the privacy sector however, has a new unique layout for it’s searches. Unfortunately it was down most of the day due, likely due to traffic from the hype surrounding the new search engine.