#16: An Unconventional Framework For Success (4 Steps Explained)

Welcome to Episode 16 of The Growth Booth, where today I'm talking about an unconventional framework for success and the four elements that contribute to that framework.

I think the first thing that is really important for you to be aware of is that success is something that anyone can attain and success does leave clues. If we can look at the clues of people that have come before us and really dissect them and put them under the microscope, then we can see a path that we can replicate and use to get better results ourselves. I think success is predictable. Absolutely. If you follow a simple, fairly simple framework, which is what we'll discuss here today, I think anyone can have success, a huge business success, and by virtue of having that huge business success, can then go on to make huge amounts of money, more money than you know what to do with, and their background doesn't matter.

Success isn't some dark art or some cryptic code. As long as you follow and implement things that other people have done who have come before you, then you can expect to get the same kinds of results. Now, to share a story, just to sort of get us started here and to give you a bit more context about where I come from. I come from a very middle-class background and very much a middle-class mindset. I have working-class parents. I didn't really have any business mentors as I was growing up.

I was shown plenty of grit, determination, focus, and effort. I got part of the framework that I'm going to be sharing with you here today given to me. But there were plenty of elements of it that I had no clue about. Growing up, I remember seeing wealthy people, seeing successful businessmen, and just being curious about how it is that they did what they did. I remember when I was ten, my family traveled to the UK from New Zealand, which is a long flight for a ten-year-old. But I poked my head in the second floor, the first-class floor of the Boeing 747r, and saw this whole other world up there.

For my ten-year-old eyes, I was like, "Wow, okay, there's another way of doing this." I remember my parents working so hard so that we could go on a vacation every single year. But seeing them having to really put in that extra effort where other people seem to be able to do things without necessarily as much effort.

I think as I got older, I gravitated towards books and stories of success. Property investment was a big one. There was plenty that I could read about the local success stories. Growing up in New Zealand, I was able to uncover a bunch of books from local businessmen, and I would just absorb these things. When I was 18 years old, I left home to study, and my world expanded a little bit. I met new people from new backgrounds. I saw more wealth.

Over the next few years, I read dozens, maybe hundreds even, of different books all around success, investment, wealth generation, property, and pretty much everything that you can imagine that falls into that world. In 2005, I took my first steps to building my first online business. I think that was a huge step for me because up until then, I'd done a lot of reading, I've done a lot of research, but I hadn't really decided that I was actually going to implement on a lot of this stuff, and finally, I was able to do that.

I took my first steps to building my first online business and fast forward 20 years, more or less, to where we are today. I'm fortunate to now be running a number of multi-million-dollar businesses. I've spoken about some of these on this show, and I will speak about others in the coming episodes as well. I've been fortunate as well to have been able to build up my own property empire, which now spans three different continents, including a prime farmland in New Zealand. I've got high-end luxury condos in Manhattan. I've got student accommodation, I've got executive accommodation, and much, much more.

I've also been able to build a large stock portfolio and a net worth well into the eight figures now. I'm grateful for all of these things, but the point is, when I look back at the past 20 years that it's taken me to get here, I can see clearly now a set of common characteristics that have enabled me to reach this point.

But these aren't my own secrets. Success leaves clues, and having built relationships with over 50 different self-made millionaires over the past ten or 20 years, I've seen over and over again the same traits, the same characteristics appearing. When the global pandemic hit in 2020, something that I did to occupy some of my time was I took my first attempt at taking all of these characteristics and putting them into one system, which I called the Prosperity Puzzle. You can see more about this by going to www.prosperitypuzzle.com.

Now, this course has sold over 42,000 copies. In fact, I checked in today and it was something like 42,650 copies and has been huge. It's faster past my expectations. As I said, you can find out more about that by going to Prosperitypuzzle.com. In fact, if you want to find out what the course is all about, then you can also invest in the course there as well.

Now, in this episode of The Growth Booth though, what I want to do is to give you a bit of a brain dump about what the core system entails and to share a lot of what I see as the common characteristics that we see to success in the hope that you'll be able to take just a handful of them, build them into your life, and see better results from anything that you put your minds to.

For the Success Framework, there are four elements, but it's really three steps if you like, and then sort of an overarching or underlying core component beneath it all.

Now the first step is to what I call to decide on your destination. We then move into creating a game plan, and then we get to the execution phase. Each one of these three phases has got lots of little ingredients that go into them, and I cover them in a lot of detail at ProsperityPuzzle.com, but I'm going to be diving into some of the core ideas here today for you anyway.

Part number one is to decide on your destination, and your destination is really a mixture of your vision and your goals, and both of these complement one another. Starting with your vision, this is really a picture in your mind of what you want every part of your life to look like. When some people are planning out their vision, they think just about business or just about financial goals. But in my mind, it needs to be much more about that. It needs to be all-encompassing.

For me, what's important is I am a parent, I'm a husband, I'm a friend, I'm a business owner, I'm a health and fitness enthusiast, I'm an investor, and I've got a vision that captures all of this. My vision is really about having lifestyle freedom and making memorable moments. They're only a handful of words, but for me, they mean so much more than that because it trickles down to all of these different things.

I think going back to the three parts of the success framework here, the first is to decide on your destination and we do that. We start to do that by becoming aware of visions and goals and really what you want your life to be like. I think a big part of that is also awareness, because unless you are aware of something being possible, then you've got no way of being able to imagine that you could do it yourself.

For example, before the four-minute mile was run, no one was running four-minute miles. But within a year of the four-minute mile being run, a whole bunch of people had run a four-minute mile. It had become possible. All of a sudden, the same thing happened with space travel. The same thing happened with climbing Mount Everest. Once upon a time, it was seen as Mission Impossible. Now we've got dozens of people scaling Everest almost every single day or swimming the English Channel. The list of examples here goes on and on and on.

In the business world, you can see that almost anything is possible. One thing that I talk a lot about is looking at things through a longer lens. Looking at different projects through a longer time frame. When you do that, I think it enables you to think so much bigger about whatever it is that you might want to achieve and allows you to really go beyond what you would otherwise have imagined was possible for you.

I think awareness is a big one, and just being aware of what's possible, you don't know what you don't know. Educating yourself and studying carefully what other people have been able to achieve, I think it'd be a big help here. You can build your vision, and in fact, there are a lot of different ways that you can do this. But something that I found really good is to first think about in terms of business. Think about how much money do you need? Think about physically and geographically. Where do you want to be running your business from? How will your success or your business make you feel?

When you combine these three things and you can think about them in the present tense, then I like to close my eyes and do this. When you close your eyes and do this, you can have a vision that almost comes to life. Your mind can't actually tell the difference between what is reality and what is fiction. This is a very powerful exercise. One example I can give you here is if you just imagine for a moment that you put a lemon, a big, juicy lemon into your mouth and you bite into it, then you can almost start imagining my mouth is salivating just sharing that example with you. 

But how that triggers something to happen inside of you, there are lots of different things that you can do to make your vision really come to life. I remember many years ago I built what was called a dream board, and this was a collage of different photographs that represented what I wanted to get to and what I wanted to achieve.

I think another thing that you can do is take a test drive of your dream lifestyle. If you want to live in a luxury apartment building, for example, then go and check them out, see what they look like, see what they like on the inside, see how they sort of go into them so you can vividly understand and then imagine and then have that in the forefront of your mind. Once you can do that, I think it makes it so much better to be able to so much easier, I should say, to be able to come up with a vision, a strong, very vivid vision in your mind. This is something that you should keep at the forefront of your mind and obviously should be aligned with the types of goals that you're setting for yourself as well. This is a long way of starting to get into one of the components of the destination piece of the puzzle. 

There are other things to be aware of here as well, and things like abundance versus scarcity. This is a big one. This is something that I see, a characteristic that I see come up. Everyone that's successful is that they have this abundance mentality. It's not a scarcity mentality where things are hard to come by. It's an abundance mentality where there is plenty for everyone.

Another one that we talk about in the prosperity puzzle is Steve's soccer strategy. This is basically an idea that Steve Clayton, my business partner, came up with where what we try to do is get the ball in the middle in front of the goal as often as we can. That puts us in a position to be able to score, that puts us in a position to be able to win, and there are lots of different ways that we can do that.

One example that we've shared is how must be seven or eight years ago now, we opened an office in China and by virtue of opening that office in China, it led to a whole chain reaction of other events that followed. Essentially it helped our business enormously. Things that we could not have imagined previously, but they happened because we got that ball in the middle, we got that ball in front of the goal and a flow-on effect happened. Thinking bigger before you can have it, you need to be able to imagine it.

I remember way back in about 2005, or maybe it was even 2006, 2007, I had this objective in my mind of owning outright 20 properties by the year 2020. It was an easy one for me to remember 20 properties by 2020. Because I allowed myself to think bigger and because I allowed myself to think over a longer time frame, remember when I was thinking about that goal? I probably had maybe 13,14 years to actually achieve it. I was able to achieve it in a much faster time. I did it well before 2020 and have since gone on to probably more than double what that goal was.

I think another core attribute or characteristic of highly successful people is they have this directional focus. Success and prosperity in any project take time and a 1% change in direction can make a huge difference to the destination. But if you've got that directional focus and you keep course-correcting, you can make sure you stay on track and actually get to where you want to be. 

Now inside the Prosperity Puzzle, we go into a whole range of these ideas in much, much more detail. But just for the sake of time here, I want to give you an idea around a few of them and I'll move on to the second part of the puzzle here, which is a game plan. Just to jog your memory, first, we've got Destination. That's the first part of the puzzle here. The second is a Game Plan and the third is Execution. 

I've given you a few ideas about the importance of coming up with a good destination. Part two is to build your game plan. This is where you really ask yourself what do you need to do to achieve your goals? Obviously, you need to understand what your goals are. You need to start with the end in mind. This is why you start off with a vision and goals in the first place. Then you want to tie your goals back to your daily actions and the insanity check. Will your plan or the plan that you're building get you to where you want to be? If it's not going to get you to where you want to be, then you need to change it. I think people tend to do an okay job of planning, but they either get stuck here or they don't move on to execution, which is the third part of the puzzle, which I'll talk about shortly.

If we look at the toolbox, the range of strategies and ideas and concepts that you can use to help you in the second part of this, one of them is to find a recipe. A recipe is really something that someone who has come before you, who has achieved what you want to achieve, has put together. I remember that when I first started investing in property, I hired a property coach. That property coach was someone who lived in Auckland, New Zealand, which is where I was at the time. They guided me through my first property deal, and they saved me tens of thousands of dollars on my first deal. I think I paid them a few hundred dollars for the coaching. It was amazing. But they were one of these dominoes that fell down in this big sort of chain reaction if you like.

These days there's so much information on the Web, you can find a recipe for almost anything, a blueprint for almost anything. Mentors, as I say, are fantastic as well. We've got the BlueprintAcademy.com, and you can find out more by going to www.theblueprintacademy.com. That's our online business mentoring program, where we provide one on one coaching, handholding support, and access to our infrastructure and team to help people grow an online business much faster. That's an example of coaching, but you can get coaching or get a mentor for whatever it is that you're trying to achieve in life, and it will drastically reduce the time it takes to achieve your goal, at least it's been my experience. I think it's important to flesh out a critical path. 

So, what are your tasks this week or even today? And are they aligned with what you're going to be doing next week and the following week and the following week to get you to where you want to get to? The way that I like to do this is to think about a long-term goal, which might be ten or 15 years, and that's closely linked to the vision that we were discussing at the start of this episode. Then take that long-term goal and turn it into a one to two-year goal. If you want to get to wherever it is in ten or 15 years, then where do you need to be in one or two years? They should be in alignment. And then based on that, where do you need to be in three months? And then based on that, where do you need or what do you need to be doing on a daily basis today, tomorrow, and next week?

I think this is a very systematic way to look at this because it allows you to get that alignment and make sure you're really eradicating fluff or the things that are just not important to moving the needle and getting you closer to your goal. One of the things I learned very early on was that there really is a mass of money and an equation, if you like that results or that tells you how much money you're going to make. I call this the dollar equation. This is when you multiply the number of leads or prospects or the people that are seeing your offer by the conversion rate, by the dollar that you make per customer, and then multiply that by the average number of transactions.

An example here that I've given in the past is if you imagine you set up a lemonade stand on the corner, the number of leads that you've got is the number of people that come past your lemonade stand each day in a given period of time. This might be 100%. Your conversion rate is the percentage of those leads that actually buy. Let's say you've got a 10% conversion rate. That means you'll have ten customers from the 100 people that came past your lemonade stand. Then you've got how many dollars per customer? Let's say that you're making one dollar per customer for the little glass of lemonade that would give you $10. Then what is the average number of transactions? In this case, it might be one. However, if you've got that lemonade stand there permanently, you might start getting multiple return customers, in which case the average number of transactions will be different.

But this, in a nutshell, is what we call the dollar equation or the math of money. There are four different levers that you can adjust or pull or push to modify what the end result is going to be. The universal rule that this really, I should say what this is a universal rule for the amount of income that you can make from a project. 

Something that's quite interesting is if you double two of the factors. If you double the number of leads or the number of prospects that walk past, eliminate standard, and if you double the conversion rate, the revenue actually quadruples. If you double all four of the factors, so you're doubling the amount of traffic or leads or prospects that come past the stand, you double the conversion rate, you double the dollars per customer, and you double the number of transactions. Then that multiplies the revenue by a factor of 16, which is huge compared to what we had initially.

This is something that I'm constantly thinking about when I'm putting my own businesses under the microscope, sticking to how can I use these levers? How can I use the dollar equation? How can I use the math of money to be able to make more money from my business and have a more successful business with happier customers?

A couple of principles to share with you here that sort of slot into the second part of the prosperity puzzle to prioritize. Getting used to saying no more regularly, more often than you say yes, be aware of impact theory, if you solve a big problem that could result in a massive win or alternatively you could solve a small problem for many people. They are the two ways that you can make huge amounts of money. Normally it's by solving a small problem for many people or a very big problem for a small number of people and money like speed. Get things done quickly. Progress is more important than perfection.

We've spoken a little bit about the destination, we've spoken about the game plan. What I want to shift to now is execution. This is like your in-game performance. Without execution, you cannot succeed. Visualization is pointless without execution. If you just execute but don't have a game plan or if you don't know your destination, then you're going to get some outcome but you're probably not going to get the outcome that you want.

Execution is the completion of your weekly tasks. It's executing, it's doing, it's taking the action that's required. But what's important here is that you are efficient and effective and that's really essential. There are a few different rituals that I like to include at this point of the plan here and the first is to make sure that you start your day right as soon as you open your eyes in the morning. What's the first thing that you do? What can you do to kick your day off in the right way? 

There are different habits. I've got a gratitude ritual which I go through where I think of three things that I'm grateful for. Three wins from the previous day and three things that I'm looking forward to today and that just get me out of bed in the right frame of mind. But then there's more you can build on from that. What's the first thing that you do when you turn your computer on? How do you ensure that you're operating with maximum focus and attention? How do you stay on track and what do you do if you get off track? There are lots of tools and principles that determine how effective I should say your execution is. 

Now one of the biggest things that you can do is get help and I'm able to get 480 hours of work done every single day regardless of whether or not I show up to work. That's because I've got a team of 60 people. Now it's not just about the hours that I can get done, it's about the expertise as well. Because there are some people there that do things that I simply do not know how to do. There are experts, there are specialists that enable me to do things that I otherwise couldn't do. One example of this is we've got a couple of software companies, software startups. One of them is called Netblaze.com, where we help small businesses with their marketing. That's a software tool that is incredibly sophisticated with lots of artificial intelligence and different bits and pieces built into it. I was able to imagine it, but I had no way of developing it without having the talent that we've been able to hire in that team. That's just one example of how hiring talent is not just about getting more hours done, it's about enabling you to get new things done that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

I think it's really important to prepare for the unpredictable. One way that I do this is by using something called buffer blocks, and we'll talk more about these in a future episode of The Growth Booth. But this is basically a way that you can prepare for the miscellaneous tasks and prepare for the unpredictable and make sure those things that you haven't planned for don't derail what you're trying to do.

KPIs are really important as well, and what's measured is managed, but it's really important that you're measuring the right thing. For an affiliate website, as an example, I would probably measure the traffic and I would do that by source. I would measure the conversion rate and I'd also do that by source. I would measure the lifetime value of each customer and maybe the subscriber open rate. These things would vary depending on the type of affiliate marketing that I was doing, but that I am doing. This is an example anyway of the types of KPIs that you need to be building into your business, and not just your business, but your life as well. Because KPIs are something that you can use in lots of different areas of your life, not just business to-do lists are important, but I think what's even more important is that the items that are on them are aligned with the other items or the other objectives that you've got over the coming weeks and months. 

If you don't have that alignment, then you could be working really hard. But all that hard work is pulling you more and more off course. I think some smart planning needs to be done there to make sure that you really are making sure that everything you're doing on a daily basis is what needs to be done and getting you closer and closer to reaching your objectives.

There are lots more tools that we talk about for time management and execution and just making sure that you get things done. Like, for example, accountability is a big one, having an accountability partner. If you don't have an accountability partner, what can you do to replicate the feeling of having one? This is the kind of thing that we get into in the Prosperity Puzzle, and there are lots of principles that sort of fall into the execution part of this as well. What I've done in the Prosperity Puzzle is for each piece of the puzzle, I've divided up a set of principles and a toolbox of tools that you can use. We've touched on a few of these, but there's no way I can do it justice in just one episode here. Head over to Prosperitypuzzle.com to find out more.

To give you an example of some of the execution principles that we use and talk about inside the Prosperity puzzle, things like getting 1% better each day and aiming for that incremental improvement, make sure you say no to things that you don't need to be doing.

Eliminating those distractions from your life, being aware that projects don't always progress in a linear fashion, and sometimes you're going to hit dips where you see a dry spell of results, and that's completely normal. Realizing that trial and error is not the best way to learn, trial and error is fine to learn from, but no one said it has to be your error and your trial and error. You can learn from other people who have come before you, eliminating the unhealthy, getting used to being uncomfortable, and really reframing your outlook to make sure that you don't have that negativity breeding more negativity in your life and getting into that upward cycle of positivity in different ways that you can do that.

There's the destination, that's step number one. There's the game plan, that's step number two. And then there's the execution. There's a whole bunch of strategies and ideas underneath each one of them. But beneath all of this, there's the core. The core is what I think of as an overarching set of beliefs and habits that impact all areas of your life.

One of them is your response mechanism. What I talk about with the response mechanism is that you need to accept that sometimes shit happens. Sometimes things don't go according to plan. Sometimes you do get a curveball. Sometimes life is unfair, but that's okay. You need to refocus your goals and push on tomorrow.

Another one of the core principles I talk about is being when you're off, when you've got that downtime, make sure you really are switched off. Not enough downtime can lead to burnout and a whole bunch of other issues that are detrimental to your success. You really need to make sure that you schedule downtime into your calendar. 

Self-belief is so important. Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. That's what Henry Ford said. I think this is just so true, and unfortunately, a lot of people underestimate what they're capable of, especially. One of the reasons for this is that people are looking at things for a very short period of time, a very short lens. Expanding that lens and expanding your mind to be aware that you don't need to know everything yourself. You can hire super smart people who can enable you to do lots of wonderful things.

The conscious mind makes up about 10% of the activity in your brain, and the subconscious mind makes up 90%. Being aware of this and thinking about ways and tools that you can use to really get that subconscious mind working for you and aligned with your conscious mind. Affirmations are a way that you can tap into your subconscious mind. But there's a certain way that you should really do the affirmations. We'll talk about this in another episode. 

I think it's important also to be aware of this idea of you only live once versus delayed gratification and being aware that Rome wasn't built in a day, but they were laying bricks every single hour. Good things take time, and having that perseverance is really important.

Also having a success circle, people that you can learn from, not just through listening to them, but through osmosis, through being around them. Then we get into a whole bunch of other elements to success as well. More related to your physical wellbeing. You need to get a certain amount of sleep every single night. You need to make sure that your body is operating with the right kind of fuel. You need to make sure that you've got some kind of exercise happening in your life, not just for the sake of exercise, but because your body performs in a different way when you've got that exercise happening in your life. We dive into a lot more detail around what that is. By the way, exercise could just be going out for a brisk walk. It doesn't have to be anything too crazy.

Look, there's a lot more that I will be sharing with you about all of this and the episodes to come. I've got a lot of this all mapped out where we can dive into a lot more detail. But for today, I want to really give you a brain dump just to kick things off here and to make you aware of the Prosperity Puzzle.

You can find out more by going to www.prosperitypuzzle.com in terms of mentoring. We offer that at the Blueprint Academy, www.blueprintacademy.com. I think it is full to capacity right now, but there is a waiting list here, so you can always get your name on that waiting list. We will reach out to you as soon as spots are open, and we do regularly reach out. Definitely put your name on the waiting list.

We want to wrap this episode up right now, but thank you for tuning in here. Hopefully, you've got a nugget of wisdom out of this one, and make sure you tune in to the next episode because in the next episode, Episode Number 17, we're going to be talking about outsourcing and I'm going to be sharing the exact system that I used to hire people and the framework that I used to when I really think about building a business and playing the game of business and winning at the game of business and a lot of this has to do with talent, leveraging talent teams and tools, and outsourcing is a big part of this, so we'll talk all about that and so much more in the next episode of The Growth Booth.

p.s. To access the full Prosperity Puzzle course and unlock all the essential keys to success go to https://prosperitypuzzle.com/