4 Steps To Turbo-Charge Your Results (Reverse Engineering Success Patterns) | The Growth Booth #37

Welcome to Episode Number 37 of The Growth Booth. If you're watching the video version of this, which you can find either on TheGrowthBooth.com, or on YouTube by searching for The Growth Booth, you'll notice a couple of things that are a little bit different about this episode.

Firstly, you'll get a small glimpse at my new office. I don't have a black backdrop behind me anymore. I've actually got a real office behind me, which is nice. You get a small glimpse of that and you'll see more of that in the future when we're doing video only versus what I'm doing here today, which is sharing slides with you. That's the other thing that's a little bit different about this podcast here today is that if you want to watch the video version of it, then you're going to see some slides as well, and what we're going to be talking about is how to get there from here. What I mean by that is how to get to where you want to get to in the future from where you are today. You're getting a condensed, sort of boiled-down version of a presentation that I've recently given at our Blueprint Academy Mastermind event. I'll share a link to The Blueprint Academy in the show notes at TheGrowthBooth.com, where you can find out more.

This is, like I said, a condensed version of the presentation that I gave to our Blueprint Academy members. I think it's a good thing to come back to once in a while just to sort of evaluate where you're at and think about how you can get to where you want to be. I think there are four key steps that you can find – we're going to talk about what I think they are in this workshop.

You don't have to be watching the video version of this to be able to get good value out of it. You can get plenty of value just by listening. However, if you do want to watch the video version, then you'll be able to get the slides that I'm sharing as well. We'll make sure that we share those with you over at TheGrowthBooth.com on the show notes page, which is Episode Number 37.

Diving into this right now, let's talk about how to get there from here. What this is really all about is it's about change. It's about growth, it's about mindset. It's about cause and effect. I'm going to try to sprinkle in a few personal examples along the way as we get into this material. But I think that believing who you are has a much bigger impact on your growth than anything else out there. It's really important to have a very firm belief in who you are. I'll talk more about what that means, at least what I mean by that as we get into this.

I think it's been shown over and over again that most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. That's a quote from Bill Gates. I've certainly seen this unfold in my own life. I think when you're thinking about your goals and where you want to get to, if you're looking at it through a slightly longer lens, it doesn't have to be that long, it could be five years, 10 years, as opposed to just one, make sure you're not underestimating yourself. Make sure you're giving yourself a big enough goal to go after. Now, there are timespans I think that shape our lives, and it's different for everyone, but I know that for me, you know childhood from the age of zero through two, through 18. This was a point where as I was going through my schooling years, there was one year in that schooling period of zero to I think I was 11 years old, when I lived in the UK, that was definitely a defining moment in my life. I then had this sort of period of years of essentially a young adult, and these are my own definitions, don't stick to these, but in that 18- to the 21-year-old range for me, that was leaving home at 18 years old, traveling to the United States on my own at 20, finishing university, got a job, and then ultimately shifted to Argentina at 22 years of age and earned my first dollar online in 2005. In my early 20s, buying my first property, learning Spanish, establishing a side hustle business, then ultimately, years later, having kids and these examples of moments that have shaped my life.

There have been different motivators along the journey. At times, it's been about survival. You know, when I was first getting started with my online business, I needed to make money to be able to survive to be able to stay in Argentina. If I didn't start making money from where my online business went back in 2005. I was going to have to go back to New Zealand and get a traditional job at other points in time. There's been a point to prove, you know, people said that it wouldn't work, that I wouldn't be able to do it, and I had added that as a motivator. Certainly autonomy, being able to make my own decisions. Being able to truly have that freedom status as well I think impacts everyone at some point, responsibility, legacy, and values.

When you really start thinking about these or at least have these types of things in the forefront of your mind, that helps you when you're pushing forward, and certainly helps you to think about the period that you're in and where you might ultimately want to get. I think your life can change a lot when you make focused and disciplined efforts over time. I think it is really good.

I think a good question to ask yourself is, what do you really want to be doing? I think if I look back at my career and building my online business, there are also points in time. The first couple of years was about hustling, it was about making enough money to survive. Beyond that, it was about getting comfortable and establishing a $100,000 per year income. It was about mastery, and years five and six of my online business and getting to make my first $1 million in the year, and years seven and eight, it was about really building beyond a $10 million net worth. Then in years 9+, it was mid-eight figures, and really about leaving a legacy.

I think if we look at these different stages, what I've been trying to do in the initial few minutes of this podcast is just give you an idea of what my journey has looked like and how I've gone from not having $1 to my name to having more money than I need, can really spend, and also more freedom than I ever imagined possible, which is a much more important metric, I think, for someone to measure.

There are four points to getting what you want, and I've seen these over and over again. It starts with point number one being to identify what you want your life to look like. The second point is to eliminate things that are incongruent with that and that basically means start saying no more often, to build a plan and to do this by working backward from what you want to get and then taking massive action now at this moment.

There's something else that's different about this episode here today. For this episode, for the first time ever, I'm going to be talking about The Mind Game. The Mind Game is something that you can take a look at by going to thegrowthbooth.com/mindgame. This is a course that I created with 66 videos that are dedicated to getting you to get your mind and your mindset congruent with the things that you're doing every single day to move your business forward. Sixty-six videos are all about mindset and all about moving you along this path of your thoughts leading to your behaviors and your behaviors leading to a result. If there's something that interests you, then go and check out The Mind Game course. You can invest in this, and The Mind Game is the sponsor of today's episode. We'll make sure that we share a link to that in today's show notes.

Now, in The Mind Game course, I talk in a lot more detail about some of the things that I'm going through here today – there are 66 lessons in there. So again, if this is something that really interests you, then I encourage you to go and check that out at TheGrowthBooth.com/mindgame and you'll find out what it's all about. There's a video on that page that goes into so much more detail.

Now, your thoughts lead to actions and your actions lead to your results. That's something that we've seen over and over again, not rocket science. Your thoughts, your actions, and your actions lead to your results. This is something we've seen over and over again; I've spoken about it a lot on this show. And it's not something new by any stretch of the imagination, but it's worth recapping here because it really forms the basis of what we're working through and these four steps.

Step number one, as I mentioned, was to identify what you want your life to look like and to think more about who you want to become than the materialistic things that you want to have because they will be the result of who you become. Whom you want to be should drive your decisions and your actions and you need to get clarity on what your real objectives are and who you really want to be. What does that look like? That's step number one.

There's a good book that I've read recently by Dr. Benjamin Hardy called Be Your Future Self Now, and some of the graphics that you're going to see in the next few slides if you're watching the video version are taken from that book. That's another book that we'll be recommending in the show notes for you to go and check out and grab, if you'd like what we're talking about here.

One of the graphics that I'm sharing with you that you can see in the video here, if you're watching the video version that basically says that, if you've got a small vision, then you're always going to get small results, even if you put tons of evidence. The results that you can get are limited by what your imagination is essential, that's why if you've got a huge vision, huge goals, huge objectives, and really just shooting for the stars, you're more likely to get closer to them than if you've just got a very, very small vision. I think it's always good to think big when you are pursuing things in business and that is tied in with step one here, which is identifying what you want your life to look like. The more detailed the vision you have, the easier it is going to be to realize. Do you have a fuzzy vision that you can't sort of make out or have you got something that you're imagining that you want in your life that's crystal clear? The clearer that vision is, the easier it's going to be to attain.

The other thing that I'll mention is that if you've got more than three priorities, then you don't have any. This comes from Jim Collins. A trap that we see a lot of people falling into is that they're focused on 34567 things at once, when if you want the best results possible, then you really need to drill down and focus on just a couple of things. I'll take a maximum of three. For me, those three things are family, business, and health, and well within each one of these three things, there are other little, obviously lots of little objectives and things as well. But these are the three main focuses, and it's not just about having three things to focus on or less. It's about finding simplicity.

For example, how many online businesses are you trying to build at the same time? If it's more than a couple, then it's probably too much. Would you have a better chance if you focus your efforts on just one or at the most two? Yeah, probably. Or if you had fewer focuses in general in your life, would that give you a better chance at actually achieving them? Yeah, I think it probably would. Be careful you don't fall into this trap of doing too much at one time, and part of this means that you need to say no to things more often than you say yes. For example, you want to be earning $1 million a year from a fun business that you work on maybe three days per week, that you can run from anywhere. This might be a business goal, and you might want to be in good health as well. And you might want to have an abundance of time to spend with your family. This could be a set of three goals that describe where you want to get to, and it can be hard to work out exactly what you want in your future.

It can be challenging to get clarity around this, and one hack that I've picked up in that book by Benjamin Hardy is that, imagine 10 years from now, what would yourself 10 years older say to the person you are today? Imagine that you are 10 years older right now and imagine that person is giving some advice to you today, what would that person be telling you? For me, my 10 years older self would be saying something like, “Hey, look, Aidan, your kids are going to be 15 years old and 13 years old. They're going to be out of their childhood, essentially. Make sure that you make the most of the opportunities that you've got with your kids here today because in 10 years’ time, they're not going to be little kids anymore.” That's why I think this gives a good perspective on how fast time can go by and what your real important focuses should be. I want to be someone who has plenty of time to be around my kids. I want to be someone who's healthy. I want to have been around the important people in my life. I want to build my investment pipelines and systems and structures that keep it simple. I want to eliminate stress and complexity. I want to be able to focus with deep work on different projects that I'm working on at any given time versus being scatterbrained all over. I want to understand what my limits are and really pursue what my passions are. Got a really strong idea of what I would like to be or who I would like to be in 10 years’ time, and it's building on who I am here today.

If you think about this from your future self’s perspective, you're sitting on an absolute goldmine. You're sitting on a goldmine of time because time has always taken away. One thing I think your 10-year-older self would say to yourself now is “Look, you're much younger now, and you could do many more things over the next few years. Don't squander that time. It's an absolute goldmine.”

What is your future self like? Something that you can do is get out a pen and paper and actually write this down. Write down who you want to become. Do you want to be someone near who is always present around your family? It might not be about kids, it could be about your parents or siblings or whoever. Do you want to be time-rich? Do you want to be an active participant in the community? Do you want to have a loving family? Do you want to be a role model? Do you want to have an outlook of abundance? That's going to be different for everyone. Start brainstorming this and really define what it means to fulfill that person whom you want to become. If it's being an ever-present mom or dad or child or sibling, it might mean things like never missing a soccer game, never missing a birthday party, it might mean accompanying, accompanying a parent to a medical appointment, and so on and so forth – being there and being present. I think you can get specific like this on every kind of goal or idea that you may have, and your future self will be more different than you can probably imagine. Again, if you look back at who you were 10 years ago, chances are you're probably quite different or had different things in your life going on than what you've got today. Again, don't underestimate just how much you're going to change in the future. That's step one.

Step two is to eliminate the incongruent, and that's saying no more often. What we're trying to do here is build laser focus into what you're doing and realize the cause-and-effect scenario where what you think about and act on each day is ultimately what you will achieve. It's time to start saying no to more projects so that you can focus on what you really want to achieve. Now, I've spoken about the 80/20 rule, and in the last episode of The Growth Booth with James Schramko, I spoke about the 64/4rule, where 4% of your effort can lead to 64% of your results. From a financial standpoint, if you make $1 million, 20% of the effort probably leads to about $800,000 of that, and 4% of your effort would lead to maybe $640,000 of that. It's an interesting thing to consider. How much do you really want to put yourself into something? Can you apply this 64/4 rule to get the absolute best sort of bang for your buck with that best equilibrium, that best balance between how much you're putting in and how much you're getting back?

This is what we call the value matrix. If you're watching the video of this episode, you'll be seeing the value matrix. Essentially, it's a look at how much input you're putting in and how much that is resulting in the output. Okay, so it's applying the 80/20 rule or 64/4 rule and having a look at the multiples and how they sort of work out there. We are kept from our goals, not by our obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. It's really important that when you are focusing on your goals, you are focusing on the goals that are most important, and not on goals that are going to pull you off in another direction. You need to seek that alignment.

If one of your goals is to be earning $1 million per year from a business that you can run from anywhere that only requires you to work three days per week, if this is one of your priorities, then how are you going to arrange your life so that you can prioritize this over everything else? Everything else other than, of course, you might have one or two other objectives which are equally as important, like for example, family and fitness in my case. Is your day, your week, your month arranged to really prioritize what's important, or are there lots of things happening that don't really need to be happening, things that you can eliminate from your life because they're not congruent with who you want to become?

I think when you look at the compounding effect of decisions, it becomes very apparent that if you get in an upward cycle over time, and time being the real multiplier here when it comes to compounding, it can make all the difference in the world with your mind making those positive little decisions and those positive little actions on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, versus the ones that are not congruent with your goals because these are the ones that add up big over time.

Moving on to step three, now we're talking about building a plan and working backward from what you want. If you've got a certain priority, then how are you going to arrange your life so that you can prioritize that over everything else? I think you can flip around the “Thoughts lead to behaviors, that behaviors lead to results,” and sort of realizing that your results come from your behaviors and your behaviors come from your thoughts. If we think this through, then we can really simplify. Can you simplify what you're doing?

Step three then is to build a plan, and you can do this by working backward from where you want to be or what you want to achieve. If there's something that is one of your priorities, how are you going to arrange your life so that that one thing can be prioritized over everything else other than things that might have equal importance, like for example, your family or your health?

I think one of the ways that's really, really important to consider here is to keep things simple. I like to ask myself, what would this look like in its simplest form? What can you remove from the list of requirements to get or to be able to achieve what you want to achieve in a simpler fashion? Think in terms of a minimum viable product, that's a term that we use in the software development world where we're creating a product for the first time. We think about what is the minimum viable product that we could get out on the market, and it's much more important to get that product out or to ship that product out, as Seth Godin likes to say, than to make something perfect, but never potentially actually get it out there. Perfection is not when there's nothing left to add, it's when there's nothing left to remove.

One way that you can get to where you want to get faster is by systematizing. By simplifying, by getting help. I often think about starting this podcast, one of the things that I had in my mind was, if I was going to do this, I needed to be able to do it in 30 minutes, or 60 minutes per week, otherwise, there's going to start really interfering with other things in my life. The way that I was able to achieve that was by leveraging teams and systems and focusing on working smart, syndicating content across all the different areas where there are podcasts as published: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google, blog, search, engine optimization, and so much more.

Another question that you can ask yourself is, how would such and such thing be done if you weren't there? For example, perhaps you do all of the accounting in your business and you check all the finances. If you weren't there, if you had to force yourself to stop doing that, how else could that be done? Is there someone that you could pull in? Is there a team that you could build or a software system or something that you could use to sort of remove that from your shoulders? This is a really good way to think about simplifying and really sort of making the most of systems in your life.

I also think it's really important to schedule so as to set time aside to do what needs to be done. If you're focusing on three things, then every week should revolve around these three things. Your calendar should reflect this. If you've got other things in your calendar that do not reflect these three areas that are important to you, then you can probably eliminate them. You want to spend the time on the things that are aligned with your future self. When you're not connected to your future self, you make stupid decisions in the present. That's why we always need to seek that alignment. Otherwise, you sort of end up sort of navigating all over the place almost aimlessly, whereas when you've got an alignment, where you've got a way of tracking your progress, that's how you can get to your destination in the most seamless way possible and really take that path of least resistance that we talked about. Every decision that you make, every action that you make, it's either going to be a cost or an investment to your future self.

Again, I think it's really important to understand whom you want to become and what that looks like, and then think about how the actions that you're taking on a day or a day-to-day basis will help you get there or hinder your progress.

To recap where we've gone so far, step 1 was to identify what you want your future life to look like. Step 2 was to eliminate things that are incongruent and to start saying no more often. Step 3 is to build a plan, and you can do this by working backward from what you want to ultimately achieve. Now, the fourth step is to take massive action. One thing I'll say here is you need to be thinking bigger, and you need to be thinking faster. I like to 5X my goal. If I've got an initial goal of, say, $500,000 business in five years, then I could 5x that by saying, “I want to have a $2.5 million business in five years,” or I could be saying, “I want to have a $500,000 business in one year.”

There are always different ways that you can speed things up – you can make the number bigger, you can make the time smaller.  I think just thinking bigger is really, really important, and anytime that you are embarking on a new project, ask yourself, “What would this look like if I was going to do it five times faster? 10 times faster? What would this look like if I only had one hour to invest in this?” and then set about putting the teams in place, the systems in place, simplifying and focusing your life to make or to allow yourself to achieve the kind of things that you want to achieve on a much, much faster way. I think it's important to keep your eyes on the prize and regularly course-correct so that you're not navigating all over the place aimlessly like what I mentioned before. Check if you're on track or not, and if you're not, then what needs to be changed? Do you have to change something in the actions that you're doing? Do you have to change your schedule? Do you have to start saying no to more things that you might be saying yes to currently?

The tactics might change, but if your vision is strong, then the objective will ultimately remain the same. It's really not that complicated to reverse-engineer what you want to sort of achieve in your life and what you would therefore need to do to get there. It's definitely not just chance that you are where you are right now in your life because of all the actions and all the decisions that you've taken. For better or worse, that's just the way it is, and a fuzzy or nonexistent vision means that the current of life sort of just pushes you along, and you just wind up where you wind up.

A focused and deliberate plan, on the other hand, means that you get to control your own destiny. Now, most human behavior is driven by short-term rewards or immediate battles. I think part of really achieving the life that you want to live in a longer-term and looking at it through a longer lens is not succumbing to these short-term rewards, not just getting stuck in these immediate battles, but rather, keeping your eyes on the prize in the future and making sure that what you're doing today is aligned with whom you want to be as your future self. You need a clear finish, you need a clear vision, and then the discipline to help guide you to it. It's not that complicated, but it doesn't mean that it's going to be easy, you still need to make sure that your actions are congruent with your vision, otherwise, you will not reach the vision that you want.

To finally sum up here, the four steps that I've mentioned in this episode have been to identify what you want your life to look like, eliminate things that are incongruent, and start saying no more often. Step three is then to build a plan by working backward from what you want to figure out what you need to do to actually get what you want, and then step four is to take massive action. I'm a big believer that anyone can succeed in life at work, anyone can achieve what they want to achieve. You do need to make sure that you've got an action plan, otherwise, you're going to take so much longer, and it's going to be more of a lottery.

You can stack the odds of success in your favor by making a plan and by following these four steps that we're talking about here today. I firmly believe that anyone can succeed at what they want to achieve in their life, but it makes it so much easier, so much faster, so much more streamlined, when you've got a systematic action plan to follow. That's really what these four steps that I've been discussing here today are all about.

Head over to The Growth Booth and navigate to Episode Number 37. You're going to be able to download the slide that I was sharing in this workshop here today just in case you will listen to the audio version of it. Make sure you also check out some of the previous episodes we've had on The Growth Booth. There's lots of good content here that is related to this. Make sure you also check out The Mind Game, which you can find out more about by going to TheGrowthBooth.com/mindgame. That's a wrap for this episode. I'll see you on the next episode of The Growth Booth. Thanks for listening.