07 TPE Part I - Chapter 2-converted

Beliefs play a crucial role in achieving success. They are not just confident statements or commitments, but the inner emotions and unswayable knowledge of what we know to be true. Limiting beliefs can hinder progress, while enabling beliefs align our beliefs, focus, and actions to achieve our desires. Changing beliefs is hard, but necessary for entrepreneurial success. David Tierman's story illustrates how he overcame failure and transformed his business by thinking creatively and boldly. Limiting beliefs create walls that block progress, but they can be overcome by believing in the power of marketing, leveraging inexperience, starting early, and pursuing ideas that others deem impossible. Chapter 2. A little peace and quiet in your mind. My music will go on forever. Maybe it's a fool who say that. But when me know facts, me can say facts. My music will go on forever. Bob Marley. A belief is a thought behind the thought. Profound. A belief is not simply something said with confidence, although that is part of it. A belief is not something repeatedly stated, although that can influence it. A belief is not something you commit to do, albeit it helps. A belief is what your inner emotion is telling you. A belief is the inner unswayable knowledge of what you know to be true. It's that constant, ever-present conversation that is going on in your head. Here is the problem. You are constantly lying to yourself through your words and thoughts, and sometimes you even temporarily persuade yourself, but it doesn't last for long. Until you start recognizing and managing that inner, indescribable emotion, you're not going to make sustained progress. A classic example is someone who is trying to lose weight. You know the people I'm talking about. They go on a quick fix diet, lose lots of weight, only to gain it back plus some months later. They fail at their goal of long-term weight loss because of limiting beliefs, fleeting focus, and sporadic and depleting actions. Without a foundation of enabling beliefs, focus will not be sustained nor action be accomplished. For people to lose weight, they must believe not only that they can drop the pounds, but also that they will drop the pounds. They need to visually know that a healthy body involves a lifelong lifestyle change and believe they must live that way. Weight loss is more about what goes on in your head than anything else. Actually, any accomplishment is more about your belief than anything else. Just because you believe something doesn't mean it is actually true. You might think so. Others may not. Who's right? Neither and both. See, it doesn't matter if there is even a real truth. What matters is what you believe the truth to be. We are hardwired to behave in absolute consistency with our own beliefs. Our emotions act like an invisible GPS system that moves us toward our beliefs every time without fail. I believe I should be a millionaire, you say. But I am not. So your idea is stupid and you're dead wrong. After I stick my tongue out at you, I explain that you have already achieved your belief. You should be a millionaire, but you aren't because you believe only that you should be and don't believe that you are. Your inevitable response is, okay, I believe I am a millionaire and I am still not. And my response is, liar! You don't really believe that you are. Therefore, you aren't. Your final comment is, of course I don't believe it because I am not. And because you don't believe it, you aren't. Until you believe something to be absolutely true, just as you believe the sky to be blue and the sun makes light, you won't be able to realize it. Sorry, but that's how it works. It's time you start being extremely cognizant of your beliefs and using them to achieve your desires. This is not about lying to yourself. That simply doesn't work. It is about aligning all your belief, focus, and action to be consistent with your desires. When you do this, your beliefs will manifest into money, success, and whatever else you desire. The bad news is that changing beliefs is hard, but this is the foundational component to entrepreneurial success. And without supportive beliefs, you will not achieve any degree of success. Here's the good news. Beliefs can be changed. To establish a new belief, you will need to have congruency between your gut and your head. To get there, you first need to understand the two types of beliefs that exist, limiting and enabling. Then you need to decide in your head what your new belief is. Finally, you need to allow your gut to adjust, accept, and commit to the new belief. Every toilet paper entrepreneur knows that if you want success, you have to get your beliefs in check. You have to know that you will succeed regardless of the challenge in front of you. A consistent enabling frame of mind and the guts to get it done will make all the difference. A mismatching of mind and gut will stop you dead in your tracks. How to blow your last $20 on booze and still make millions. A few months after arriving from England in search of the American dream, David Tierman was down to his last $20. Just as his former boss predicted, his business idea, selling antiques to Americans via living room parties, had failed. You probably think you know what David did next. You're thinking this is a story about how he took $20 and turned it into millions. Wrong! David and his business partner blew their last $20 at a bar. They are from England after all. What the hell, right? Might as well have a little fun while you're going down at the ship. But the next morning, hungover, David realized he had experienced his worst nightmare, total failure, and it wasn't so bad. Nobody died, the earth didn't open up and swallow him whole. So he decided to try again. Over the next few months, David changed his business model, targeting retail stores that needed antiques for merchandise displays. Even though he knew nothing about his industry and had a tough competitor that dominated the market, he found a way to get his first few clients. Unlike his competitor, David stored his inventory in a garage, recruiting his friends to help him deliver the merchandise. Without a fat bankroll, he built his business using sweat and ingenuity. David had to think outside the box, which turned out to be exactly what his clients wanted. He realized retailers were using his antiques for differentiation and that he was not in the antique business, but the brand identity business. This realization would make him millions. David leveraged his success by transforming his company from London Antique, a visual merchandising company, to Propaganda, a branding company that sold antiques and a wide range of items retailers needed for branding. It was a huge step, but David wasn't afraid of failure. And when Paula's Ralph Lauren came calling, looking for a new branding company, David took the leap. Did he know how Propaganda would meet the demand? No. Did he worry about it? Not so much. So what if he failed? Within just a few years, David's company, Propaganda, landed other huge clients such as Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Nike. After years of thinking creatively and boldly, David had become a branding expert. He later sold his multi-million dollar company and formed World Famous, a company that helps people and companies develop a brand identity, one of the most valuable assets a business has. David took chances in part because he wasn't afraid of failure. He no longer believed failure was the worst thing that could happen to him. He'd been there and done that, and he knew better. David Tierman is a toilet paper entrepreneur. The Wall of Limiting Beliefs. Business is all about departing from your current plateau, point A, with the intent of getting to your next achievement, point B. Maybe you want to start selling your first service offering. Currently your sales are zero. That's it. That's point A. You want to have your sales at four hundred thousand by the end of the year. That's B. If you have limiting beliefs, they will establish a wall. The wall will block your progress and may even cause you to take other directions that might make things worse. For this example, let's assume you have limiting beliefs that include, one, you have no money and without it can't market your product. Two, you've never done this before, so the competition will easily beat you. Three, you're too young to be respected by the business community. Four, no one has ever been able to grow sales that fast in your industry. It just can't be done. Now let's look at each of these beliefs and how they can derail entrepreneurial dreams. One, you can't market products without money. I've seen people squash great ideas for products simply because they think they don't have enough money to market them. Or worse, they put less time and money into making a great product in order to reserve funds for marketing, which results in a mediocre product backed by inadequate marketing, a sure prescription for disaster. If a product is great, it will market itself. Believe that your marketing can be done for free or cheaply. It can. As the product sells, cash will become available to further push sales. Two, the competition will beat your inexperienced ass. Again, a belief like this almost always results in inaction. Even worse, people spend time and money trying to gain an education and examine how the competition operates. But instead of gaining an upper hand, all they have is knowledge of how the competition did it 10 or 20 years ago. Schools are always behind, and if you rely on traditional education alone, you'll always be behind too. Believe that inexperience is an asset, allowing you to think outside the box in ways your competition can't even imagine. Three, no one will take you seriously. Believing you're too young to get respect from the business community can be paralyzing, so you wait for the perfect time to start, which never, ever comes. The proof is in the pudding. The earlier you start, the faster you will gain experience, and the faster you will succeed. Besides, the internet allows you to act like a big business, even if you're conducting business in your underwear. You're never too young to become an entrepreneur. You don't even need a driver's license to launch your first company. Four, your idea is impossible because it's never been done. So many people are trapped by the belief that something can't be done just because no one else has done it before. Again, the immediate result is inaction, and the end result is watching someone else achieve your impossible idea. Every invention, every business, every great idea had to have a first time. If no one has ever done what you want to do, be excited. You have the advantage because you will be the first to pull it off. Do you see how, before you even got started, your limiting beliefs have built a wall so high and so strong your progress from A is immediately blocked and pushes you in a new direction. It is impossible to achieve B. I call these limiting beliefs the wall. The wall is insurmountable. It is more powerful than any physical barrier could ever be. There is no method of knocking it down or destroying it other than to vanquish the wall by creating a channel of enabling beliefs. But wait a minute. If I believe that I need money to start a company and then I get money, that will clearly knock down the wall. I can destroy the wall without changing my beliefs. Not true. Access to money has not knocked down the wall. It has actually made the wall bigger and stronger. You have not changed your belief that you can't start a business without money. You actually proved to yourself that you needed money. The wall of can't start without money is made temporarily irrelevant since you have money for now. But the belief is still there, larger than ever. The next time you are in a situation that you believe requires money that you don't have, your limiting belief will stop you in your tracks. Navigating around your limiting beliefs doesn't knock the wall down. It makes it higher. Envy this. Envy. Until recently, I didn't appreciate how damaging envy was to my own progress. And as my envy of others diminished, my own entrepreneurial progress picked up with even more momentum. I used to see successful people who clearly were ahead of me and I would acknowledge their success outwardly. Inside though, I was telling myself that they were probably unhappy pricks and that they were silver-spooned and undeserving of what they had. A million other thoughts would have crossed my mind, mentally knocking people down well below me, which made me feel good, at least for a while. But the next time I saw a successful person, my envy would be even greater and I would repeat the process. Then I had an epiphany. When I envy someone, I am just building more limiting beliefs. I'm actually increasing the size of the wall that I'm putting in front of my own success. When we envy someone else, what we are saying is that they have achieved something that we should have, but we didn't or can't, so screw them. They have something that no one deserves, so they can go eat crap. Either way, we are saying we can't have what the other person has. That is a huge limiting belief. Envy of others builds an insurmountable wall to our own success. Instead of envy, truly applaud those people. Aspire to be like them in the aspect that you formerly envied. Thank them for having blazed the path before you and making your path to success much easier. Ask them how they did what they did. You may be surprised at how much they will help you. You must confront limiting beliefs head-on and change them. That is the only way to dissolve the wall. You must convert the beliefs that block new beliefs that help you. Beliefs that create the channel. The channel of enabling beliefs. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to train your mind and your heart to have enabling beliefs. Just as when you have an off day and come back harder and stronger the next day, your enabling beliefs have created a path that moves you forward toward your goals even though things went awry. I call this belief conduit the channel. What if we change our beliefs from the previous example? Let's create the new belief set. One, you have no money, which enables you to focus your ingenuity and your energy to market your product better than any competitor. Two, you've never done this before allowing you to come up with outside the box unheard of ideas that will destroy your competition. Three, you are young and professional which commands huge respect in the business community. Four, no one has discovered a fast growth method in your industry and so your innovative talent will accelerate your growth and put you well in front of the pack. By revising the belief that built the wall, you not only remove the limitations, you actually create the channel. Through the channel, your momentum is pushed forward. Even if you get bumped off track, your enabling beliefs keep you moving forward. Here are my best tips for creating a channel of enabling beliefs. Realize nothing's impossible. When you say and believe something is impossible, you set up a giant roadblock to success. Today, if I told you that teleporting is possible, you would laugh at me. If I told you flight was possible, you would say, of course it is. Any moron knows that. But the same statement about flight made in the 1800s made people laugh and say, impossible! Right here, right now, state something that is impossible. There's always a way and you need to seek it out. I can't wait until the first teleporter is invented so I can say, I told you so, nothing's impossible. Ask better questions. We've all heard the statement, there's no such thing as a stupid question. Wrong! I'm here to tell you there are stupid questions and they are everywhere. People asking the same lame-ass questions over and over. One of my favorites is, how do I get an investor to give me money? As if investors are like mom and dad and they want me to help them come up with a convincing story that will get them a new car or whatever else they feel entitled to having. Stop asking stupid questions. Ask a better question. Be the first to ask, how would I show an investor a 200% assured return on her money? Or, how could I show an investor how we can both come out as winners? Better questions get better answers. Watch someone else doing it. So many times if we just opened our eyes, we would see that someone else is already doing what we thought impossible. We just need to apply it to ourselves. The Wright brothers just needed to look at a bird to see the possibility of flight. Then they asked a great question. How can we use what we know from a bird to make a contraption that will allow people to fly? If someone or something else is already doing it, it sure ain't impossible. Ask how. I once thought photographic memory was something a few weirdos were born with, but was impossible for the common folks such as myself to learn. I even saw a demo in which a guy memorized a detailed list of 50 things in order. I thought he was a freak. Then I asked him how he does it, and he actually told me. Man, it was easy once I understood it. I tried it, and holy smokes, now I can memorize a useless list of 50 things. I'm now the freak. Move over, Criss Angel. I'm now the mind freak. Mind freak! Do it yourself. Until you prove something to yourself, you will never believe it. Sometimes the proof is in the pudding. Challenge yourself, and try something that is contrary to your limiting beliefs. Don't try it to prove yourself right. Instead, try it with the absolute commitment to prove yourself wrong. When you actually achieve it, you have achieved a new enabling belief. Being wrong never felt so right. Take baby steps. If you need to make a 180 degree change in your beliefs, you have to start changing one degree at a time. Put the majority of your energy into making the first little change. Once it is accomplished, congratulate yourself for being one degree closer, and then go for the next one. Don't try to tackle everything at once. Address it in one small baby step at a time. TPEs know their millions are made by grabbing the first 100, and then the next. View the glass as half full. When faced with any situation, you need to focus on finding only the benefits. In some situations, there may be very few benefits and many, many problems. Focusing on problems will yield nothing. You need to exploit the benefits that you can find, even if they are few and far between. Even if your glass has only one drop of milk in it, there is still something to drink. Or, if just one sheet hangs from the roll you can still wipe, you get the picture. Write and research. Often, many people say they know something, and when you ask them how they know it, they respond, I just know. It is an easy, lazy way to build the wall of limiting beliefs. When you have a belief that is preventing strong progress, write it down. Then research the hell out of it. The information you find will often destroy your belief and get you into the channel of strong momentum. When it's over, move on. The French toast incident. Just because something happened in the past doesn't mean it will happen again. What I'm about to share with you is corny but embarrassingly true. Until I was 18 years old, I avoided eating French toast like the plague. I knew that French toast would make me sick because at the age of six, I ate French toast and got horribly sick minutes later. I threw up for days. I mean, it was a vom fest. Putting one and one together, I knew that French toast was the culprit. I vowed in that moment never to eat it again. Then it happened. At age 18, I was placed in the horrible position of either starving to death or eating the only thing left, French fucking toast. With a quivering lip and 10 gallons of old Aunt Jemima, I dug in. It was delicious. Surprise! No puking. Years later, my mother told me that when I was six and puked for days, I had the flu. It wasn't the French toast after all. So just because it happened once before doesn't mean it will happen again. Don't let 12 years go by without eating French toast. When it comes to entrepreneurial success, you have to know that it is absolutely, unquestionably, hugely important to defeat or change your limiting beliefs. Only once you have the channel of enabling beliefs can you even begin to march forward and build your desires. Getting past day one. Knocking down your wall and building your channel is big, powerful stuff. But how do you hold fast your beliefs past the first inspiring day? The truth is you'll have to work on building your channel daily in order to make it stick. Here are a few tips to help you maintain your TPE mindset. Go with your gut, not your logic. Your beliefs are your core emotional responses. They are not based on logic. In other words, your beliefs are the thoughts behind your thoughts. If you are saying out loud, I will succeed, but your gut is saying, you can't because you suck, your gut will win out and you will suck. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this. We all achieve what we believe deep down inside. This ain't hocus pocus. This is the science of how humans operate. Be very mindful of the thoughts behind your thoughts, your gut. Join the right mob. Changing your beliefs doesn't typically happen with a snap of the fingers. But one very effective method for changing your beliefs is to identify the people already achieving what you want and entrench yourself in their group. If you measure the common traits of your five closest acquaintances, you are equal to that. Choose the people you hang out with based upon what you want to be. Absorb everything you can from them and learn at every opportunity. Take them out to dinner, attend network events with them, and just plain old spend time with them. And here's my belief about staying grounded in your beliefs as you launch your business. Share your thoughts. You wouldn't believe how many people approach me saying they have the next billion dollar idea, but are afraid to share with me or anyone else in fear of the idea being stolen. Ultimately, the thoughts fade away and another inspired moment is lost. Share your ideas with trusted individuals. Just don't give away your secret ingredients if you can avoid it. Sharing your ideas strengthens your beliefs in them, and soon you'll be acting on that strength to support your ideas. Know that responses to your ideas are free and often worth about that much. But if you share your thoughts with been there, done that, the collective feedback may be invaluable. As you share your ideas, your belief will grow and people will start holding you accountable. The upward spiral begins. Ignore or adore. Don't ignore the naysayers if they are your prospective clients or trusted individuals who have already tried what you plan to do. Do ignore them if they're just trying to stand in your way or speaking from a vantage point of ignorance. The best feedback is from people who have already done what you are doing. I can't tell you how many people have told me not to start a business and that entrepreneurialism is assured failure. Of course, none of these naysayers has any experience to back up those opinions. When I speak with successful entrepreneurs, their response is the polar opposite. They freely share the path that they have already blazed in launching a company. Always adore the people who have been there and done that, and the others are to be ignored. Grow a pair. That's right, damn it. At some point, every business will have a dark day, month, or God forbid, an entire year. You're going to struggle for a while. Even the big guys struggled. Gary Erickson, the founder of Clif Bar, maker of an organic energy and nutritious foods, had to live in a garage, work a day job, and stay up all night making product. Early entrepreneurial success is defined by surviving, not thriving. Set out with beliefs, focus, and actions to grow rapidly and strongly, knowing that initially it is all about just getting up off the ground. Seriously, grow a pair. The worst thing is to never even try in the first place. Sadly, most people don't. Most people sit on the sidelines and let opportunity after opportunity go by. What a damn shame it would be to have your last words be, I never tried. Listen up, tiger. You may fail and you may suck, but you will only know if you try. Gary didn't give up when his equipment kept breaking down due to the thickness of his Clif Bar mixture. He overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles to launch what is now one of the most successful and revered American health food companies. Early entrepreneurial success is often defined by survival, but my bet is that once you get started, you will naturally get your feet under you and not just survive, but thrive. So find that footing. Start a confident walk and then run a winning entrepreneurial marathon. Worst case, you don't learn, don't grow, and you fail. Don't worry, another toilet paper entrepreneur who did succeed will have a job waiting for you. The greatest failure is to have never tried at all. Seriously, grow a pair. Go for it. Mission I'm possible. Many people say something is impossible because it hasn't been done before. I'm going to get a little Anthony Robbins on you right now. If you look at the word impossible, it can actually be split into two words, I'm and possible. From now on, whenever someone says something is impossible, hear the word as I'm possible, as in I'm possible and will achieve whatever I believe. Before the Wright Brothers, people thought it was impossible to fly, and it was. Then the plane was invented, and now flight is possible. If the Wright Brothers had listened to the people who said it was impossible for humans to fly, we might not have planes today. Progress often involves beating the odds and doing the impossible. Today, we look at flight and know that, of course, it's possible. It's a no-brainer. The reason you and I believe that is that when we were born, flight already existed. It's all we know. For many people, the internet is the same way. Of course, it is possible. It exists. It works. It's great. If you rewind history to before Al Gore invented the net, the thought of instantaneously exchanging a letter with anyone anywhere in the world was crazy. Today, you are mocked for using postal mail instead of email. Even email is getting stale. It is the new snail mail. IMing is the way to go. All things are impossible before they exist. What's impossible today? Seek out people saying something is impossible. They're often venting in frustration. TPEs know that behind every frustration is a new product or service, and behind every impossibility, there is a goldmine of business opportunities. Is it impossible to get good food at your college? Is it impossible to get through security at the airport? Is it impossible to teleport? Is it impossible to whatever? Make whatever is impossible today your business. Make it possible. Take action now. Before you move on to the next chapter, take half an hour to complete the following three exercises. Otherwise, it's all concept and no application. You need to know your beliefs backwards and forwards. They are the foundation of your success. One, expose your wall. Make a list of all your limiting beliefs, no matter how silly they sound. If you're stumped, use your list of excuses at a jumping-off place. Two, see your channel. Write down your enabling beliefs, those certainties that help you take chances and ponder greatness. Stumped again? Think about your accomplishments. How did you get there? What did you know for sure that helped you achieve? Three, knock down your wall. Build up your channel. This is really just the beginning, because you will continue to uncover both limiting and enabling beliefs as you go through life. For now, debunk those beliefs with affirmative statements and make a plan to act on your enabling beliefs, new and old.