8 Mindset Traits That Magically Combine To Turbocharge Personal Growth | The Growth Booth #31

Welcome to Episode Number 31 of TheGrowthBooth, where today I am talking about eight mindset traits that magically combine to turbocharge personal growth. When I started The Growth Booth, one of the things that I hoped that I would be able to do would be to dive into a lot of this kind of thing because I feel like this is one of the big things that really separates the people that succeed in life and in online business, and really in whatever they put their minds to and those that don't.

Being able to understand the types of characteristics, types of traits that have been proven to work in other people, and then being able to apply them yourself, a lot of it comes down to being able to go beyond where you are currently. Everyone at a certain point in time is in a certain mindset and a certain place in their business. And if you want to grow, then inevitably you're going to have to go beyond where you are.

One of the most inspiring things about people with the right mindset is that they know that they've got it in themselves to go beyond where they are today.  This takes a certain amount of courage; it takes a certain amount of willingness to withstand judgment and go and do new things that they haven't done before. That is what can bring out the best version of yourself when you do that.

There are eight traits that I've seen that when combined together, can really help you move along this path, and I'm going to work through them now. Then I'll finish this episode up with a folktale, which I think captures a lot of this idea, especially around leadership, and ties some of this together.

First and foremost, the first point I've got is a determination to succeed.  You must have that desire and that willingness to really outwork anyone else. That's grit, I guess you could say. I know that when I started building my online business, it was around 2005, and even a couple of years after that, when I was starting to really see some traction, I was getting up at 4:00 A.M. in the morning and getting a couple of hours working before going to my day job. I look back now and I think, “Oh, wow, I was getting up at 3:30 or 04:00 A.M.” Every single morning. But I did it because I had this burning desire, this determination to succeed.

Nowadays, I don't have to get up at 3:30 in the morning. I don't have to get up. I can work whenever I want to work. I don't have a day job that I have to go to as well. But back then, I did have a day job, and it was one of the only ways that I could squeeze a few hours of work in each day was by getting up really early. It was completely exhausting. I can remember getting to the afternoon in my day job and sometimes literally falling asleep at my desk, but I didn't care because I had that determination to succeed. I had that grit, and nothing was going to stop me. I think this is the trait that you'll see if you look closely over and over again in entrepreneurs.

The next one that I've got there is a willingness to delight customers. I think it's really important. There's an old quote from Maya Angelou that says, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” I think there's a lot of truth to that. This is something that I come back to a lot when I think about customer service and the customer service that I want to provide in our different businesses. There's a lot to be said for building that relationship with customers because when I look at our customer base, I can see that some of our customers are people that are buying from us over and over again.

For example, we sell different physical products, as I've spoken about on the show in the past, and one of the brands has consumable products. By this I mean it's a product that people will buy over and over and over again. And therefore, in a business like that, it's incredibly important that customers are absolutely delighted with the product. But also, in the educational space where we've got people who are Blueprint Academy members, I've spoken about Blueprint Academy on the show sometimes, and we've got some people who have been with us in the Blueprint Academy getting value from that for eight or nine years now. These people that are paying $1,000 a month (which is the price for Blueprint Academy at the moment) these people need to be delighted on a regular basis to make sure and just to see over and over again that the investment is worth it. That's really what it really comes down to, I think.

People never really have a problem paying money for something. What they have a problem with is paying money and not feeling like they get the value from it.  It's not oftentimes people think, “Well, no one's going to buy this, the price tag is too high,” but that's not normally the case. It's the expectation of what they're going to get in return for the money that they pay. A good example I can give you of this is let's say, for example, there was a high-end, beautiful home for sale in a really desirable area, and you could snap it up for $10,000 and you knew that the real market value was in the millions of dollars. $10,000 wouldn't seem like a high price tag, $10,000 would seem like an absolute bargain, but if you were offered to buy a cell phone like an iPhone for $10,000, you would say that's incredibly expensive because the iPhone doesn't cost $10,000. It's all relative to what you're getting.

I think delighting your customers definitely comes back to providing more value or enough value to satisfy what they are paying and going beyond the norm. Taking a customer and turning them into an absolute raving fan. That's the second point there.

The third point is a willingness to put time and focus into what you're doing. You'll see that some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world don't have ten different projects going at once. They normally have one project and they have got this laser focus on that, thinking about it and working on it every second of the day that they're consciously aware. This is one of the reasons, and I've got a number of different businesses and this is one of the reasons that we like to put CEOs in place because we want to make sure that if I'm not able to be focused on that business 100% every waking hour. I want them to be thinking about it the first time when they wake up in the morning. I want all of the energy and all of their focus to be able to go into that, because you may have heard me talking about in the past how your thoughts lead to your behaviors and your behaviors lead to your results.

What is important here is that you are constantly thinking, constantly problem-solving, and constantly coming up with new ideas about how you can move forward in your business. Thinking about the business is the first step there. A willingness to really put all time, energy, and focus into what you're doing will help you get ahead in your business.

The fourth point that I've got is that external factors don't always matter. Some people have an easier journey than others, there's no doubt about that. It's no secret that most people don't get it right the first time. I know I failed over and over again before. I sort of cracked the code with some of my projects and I continue to fail. And others haven't quite cracked code yet. This is par for the course. This is just part of what you need to go through.

However, external factors are such things that you can't control. The stock market, for example, I can't control if that's going to go up or down, but I can still control what I do about it. I'm not going to spend time worrying about the stock market going down, but I can spend time thinking about how I want to invest my money and how I want to use it in the stock market. There are always factors that you can control and factors that you can't control. The ones that you can't control don't really matter because you can't control them anyway. It's not going to matter at all. They might still matter, but they're not worth stressing out about. It's better to spend your time and energy focusing on things that you can control. If you're using that stock market example, if the stock market was in a cycle where it was going down a lot, losing value, and if you were in that world, then you would probably be thinking about it, reading about it, learning all the time about different things and different ways to approach them, and to make sure that you come out on the right-hand side of the crash or whatever happens.

This is also tied into what I said in point number three, a willingness to put time and focus into what you're doing. A lot of these points are all interconnected and I think like many things in life, it's when you combine these ingredients that you really see the synergies at play here and really can see the wins.

The fifth point that I've got is really about scaling. It's projecting yourself through others as you grow your business. You're going to get to a point in your business where you're probably going to think: ‘I wish I could multiply myself, I wish there were two of me, so I could do more of this and more of that’. The reality is that you can multiply yourself when you hire really good talent and not just multiply yourself, but you can sort of upgrade yourself as well because you can hire people who are even better than you.

As your business grows, I think it's really important to start thinking about how you can project your values onto other people and have other people running many of your operations for you. That's just a necessity really when you are growing a business.

The sixth point here is resilience. And the test here, the way that I like to think about it, it's not if you're going to fail, it's not if you're going to find the right team, it's not if you're going to do things well in your business. The test is how often, how many times are you willing to test different things out, experiment with different things, learn to fail, and keep getting up over and over again. 

In many ways, this is similar to number one, having that grit and that determination, because when you have that resilience, when you keep getting up off the canvas, after you've been knocked down over and over again, that's when you're going to put yourself in a position to succeed, it's by going the extra mile, by doing the things that other people are not prepared to do so that you can achieve the rewards that other people cannot achieve.

If you compare yourself tomorrow with yourself today, one of the things that can make all the difference is when you are in a frame of mind where you are willing to do things tomorrow to get new results tomorrow that you don't have today. It's not just comparing yourself with other people and other businesses, it's also comparing yourself personally with where you were in the past to where you want to be in the future.

Now, the 7th point that I've got there is surrounding yourself with people who are better than you. This is often referred to as a success circle. You may have heard the idea of you becoming the average of your five closest, you become the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. I believe this to be absolutely the case. I think it's really important that you think about who is a good influence on you, who brings the best out of you and also be aware of people who are toxic in your life.

Toxic people can show up in different ways. They may just be people that just poo-poo your ideas, they don't like your ideas and they bring you down or they think that's-never-going-to-work kind of a thing.  You need to be surrounded by people who not only have your best interests at heart, because sometimes the people that have the best interests, your best interests at heart, will still tell you that you shouldn't do something which you know could be hugely positive for you.  I think to make sure that you are surrounding yourself with people who are going to help you move in the direction that you want to move, and a good way to do this is through masterminds.

This is one of the reasons why our Blueprint Academy Mastermind has been so effective for many people is because they are by default, surrounded by like minded entrepreneurs, and not just like-minded entrepreneurs, but an entire team of people who work with Steve Clayton, my business partner, and I.  You've got this automatic built-in infrastructure and there are lots of different Masterminds out there. Blueprint Academy is just the one that I run. I'm not saying that you should necessarily do that, but I do think you should absolutely get involved with the Blueprint Academy.

The point that I’m trying to make here is if you can't naturally find people that bring out the best in you, you can always pay to find people that bring out the best in you, and coaching is a really good way to do that.

Now, the 8th point that I've got there is that people who I see having the most success are people that reinvest in their business and then go on to diversify assets. This is one of the ways that I think you can really protect yourself from downturns. I did mention earlier that one of the things that one of these success rates is having a real single focus. However, I do believe that once you get some of the time in your business, it is good to diversify. Sometimes you can maintain a single focus while still diversifying in the way that you can do that.

For example, adding another brand if you've got an e-commerce business or another store if you've got a drop shipping business or something or potentially another traffic source. These are different diversification methods. It's not always a case of, “Okay, I'm going to diversify by going into a completely different business model.” You can diversify by staying within the business or the area that you are an expert in and reinvesting in it because you never know what's going to happen.

I remember when COVID hit one of our physical product brands in the travel space and the sales plummeted to about 25% of the annual revenue and 25% of the profits. And the reason for this was no, people weren't traveling anymore. But thankfully, that wasn't our only product line. We had other product lines and some of those other product lines kicked on and did really well throughout COVID and have continued to search for it. Thankfully, the one that's in the travel space has bounced back really nicely now as well. But if we didn't have that diversification, we may have been in quite a tough situation.  I think reinvesting your assets, reinvesting the money that you make into your business to make a much more solid and well-rounded business is a really smart thing to do.

Now the story that I wanted to finish with here today is the Stone Soup folktale, and I think it's a good illustration of ways that you can bring people together to ultimately achieve something which is greater than any individual could achieve. I think it's a good story about leadership. It goes along the lines of this and hopefully, I get this right.

Once upon a time, there was a wise old man, and he decided to go on a journey and he packed his bag, a small bag, and he said goodbye and he set off. He eventually came upon a small village and thought, “I'm going to stop here for the night.” And near the center of the village, he met a group of people. He introduced himself and said, “Hey, look, I'm a simple traveler just looking for a safe place to sleep and a hot meal,” and the villagers said to him, “Look, we'd be glad to give you a safe place to sleep, but we don't have very much food, crops haven't done well this year. There's not much to eat in the whole village. We're just barely getting by.”

The wise old man said, “You don't have to worry about feeding me. I've already got everything I need. In fact, I was thinking about making some stone soup to share with all of you.” They said, “Well, stone soup, what's that? What's that? We've never heard of stone soup before.”  The wise old man said, “It's wonderful. It's the best soup that I've ever tasted, and if you bring me a soup pot and water, I will make some of this for you.”

The villagers raced off to their homes. When they returned, one was carrying a large soup pot, another had wood for the fire, and another had water to get things going. Now, when the fire was going and the water was boiling, the man reached into a little pouch and carefully dropped the stone that he had in that pouch into the boiling water. The villagers watched eagerly, and the man slowly began to stir the pot, sniffing the aroma and licking his lips, and saying, “I really do love stone soup,” and he continued by saying, “Of course, stone soup with a little bit of cabbage. Now there's something really special.”

One of the villages jumped up and said, “I might be able to get some cabbage.” She went off and returned with the cabbage. And the old man said, “Wonderful,” and he added the cabbage to the pot. Then he said, “This reminds me of the time that I had stone soup with cabbage and a little bit of salted beef. It was unbelievably good.” Right at that moment, the village butcher spoke up and said, “I know where there's a bit of salted beef.” He went back to his butcher's shop and he got it.

When he returned, the wise old man added the beef to the soup pot and he continued to stir. And then the wise old man said, “Can you imagine what this soup would taste like if I had a little bit of onion and perhaps a few potatoes and a carrot or two and some mushrooms? This would be a meal fit for royalty.” And before he knew it, the soup pot was filled to the broom with vegetables of all kinds of carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, onions, the works. And not only that, but the village baker had turned up with some fresh bread and butter as well.

As the soup simmered slowly over the fire, the wonderful aroma began to waft throughout the town, and the villages began to relax. They began to talk together, sharing songs, stories, and jokes. And when finally done, the old man ladled it into the bowls. They all shared a delicious meal, and there was more than enough to feed the villages multiple times over. Afterward, they all declared that it was the best soup that they had ever had. And the mere of the village pulled the old man aside and he offered him a great sum of money for the recipe and most importantly, for the magical stone. But the old man refused to sell it. And the next morning he woke up early, packs his belongings, and as he was leaving the village, he passed a group of children who were playing by the side of the road. He handed the youngest one the silk pouch with the stone and he whispered, “It was not the stone that performed the magic, it was all of us together.”

Now, I think that the story is a great reminder that it can often take a combination of different people or different mindset qualities to be able to get to where you want to be. Leadership is important as well, but oftentimes you need different ingredients from different places and you need help from different people. When people are working in synergy on teams, when there's good leadership, that's when magic can really happen. But if you don't have that synergy and if you don't have that leadership, then oftentimes you'll be left wondering.

I think it's the combination of different mindset qualities, the ability to think bigger, the ability to strive for excellence, the ability to provide amazing customer service, the ability to provide amazing customer service, and a determination to succeed. Some people say that success takes an entire village. I really love that story and I think it really hammers home some important points about leadership and success in projects in general. And this is a topic that I want to talk about in future episodes. Not making soup, but making more successful businesses and many of the mindset, traits, and characteristics of the most successful people in the world and how we can employ them and use them in our own projects, whatever they may be.

I hope you found this episode enjoyable. Head over to TheGrowthBooth.com, navigate to Episode Number 31 and you'll be able to find show notes and lots of other goodies.  We'll even include the stone soup folktale in there for your enjoyment as well. Let's wrap up this episode. I look forward to seeing you again next week on Episode Number 32 of The Growth Booth. Bye for now.