How often have you protested, “I don’t have time!” when friends or family ask you to do something?
Time slips so easily out of your hands you’ve probably said that on dozens of occasions. So how do you wake up early enough to get stuff done?
Well, it has nothing to do with the time or how early you wake up. You have the same amount of time as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Jack Ma: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. So what’s the difference between you and them?
It’s time management. I probably accomplish more in a day than most people complete in a month. People ask me all the time, “Dan, how do you get so much done? I don’t have time.”
The question you should be asking yourself is, “How can you devote your time to what’s important? How can you get yourself closer to your goals?” That’s what you want to focus on.
You will always have an endless number of tasks. I have so much to do every single day. So what do you focus on?
To find your focus, ask yourself: Is this moving me closer to my goals? Is it going to make me money? Is it going to benefit my family? Is it going to make me happier?
I believe busyness is a form of laziness. People get so busy doing so many things. But are you actually producing results?
You have to make choices that get you results every time you decide what to do. Rich people are busy too. I’m constantly focusing on tasks that I cannot delegate that are worthy of my time. So let me give you three simple tips to manage your day.
1. Be Ruthless About Your Outcome
Number one is you want to be absolutely ruthless about your outcome. When you think about it, most people have a lot to do. But they don’t think about what their tasks are going to produce. You need to ask yourself, “How will doing this task affect my life?”
The way it affects you depends on your goal. You want to be absolutely clear about your outcome because if you’re clear about your outcome, the way you get there might change. You might think of ways to do the task more effectively and efficiently. That’s why you need to be absolutely ruthless about your outcome.
For example, are you trying to increase your revenue? Maybe you want to get more customers but you need a faster way to get there. If you’re clear your goal is to increase your revenue, then the fastest way to achieve your goal is not to get more customers but to sell more to your existing customers. Or you could increase your price. You want to do what gets you to your goal faster.
2. Accomplish Six Tasks A Day
The second tip is you want to think about six things, six important, major items that you want to accomplish every single day. Not 10, not 20. Plan on what these items are the night before.
That means when you wake up, you will have six items that you want to cross off your list. Think about it. Six important items times five days a week, assuming you work five days a week. That’s 120 important things accomplished every single month that will move you closer to your goal.
3. Write Down What You Will Do
The third tip is don’t keep everything in your head. When your mind is cluttered, you have no clarity. Without clarity, you don’t have the ability to act. Clarity is power and power is the ability to take action. To get clarity, grab a pen and paper and write everything out.
If you want to use an application from your smartphone, that’s perfectly fine. I like paper and pen because that way is the easiest. So don’t keep everything in your head.
As a final word of advice, have you heard of the saying, “How do people eat a big elephant? One bite at a time.” That’s so wrong.
Here’s what you really want to do: bite off more than you can chew and then you chew like crazy. Got that?
So choose six things, write them down, and be ruthless about your outcome.
Like a horse competing against a race car, old methods are no match against the new.
Remember, back in the old days of traditional marketing, we had stuff you might not have heard of: the good old newspaper and fax machine. That’s what we used to do advertising and marketing before the internet came along and revolutionized how we do things.
Now we have what I call the three T’s, the reasons digital marketing is far superior than traditional marketing.
Reason #1: Targeting
With traditional marketing we had massive billboards like what you see in Vegas. They still have billboards, but it’s more like for brand awareness. The problem with the billboard is you can’t choose who you target with it. If someone sees it, great, if no one sees it, you don’t know.
But digital marketing, you can precisely target who you want to see your offer. You can choose.
For example, with Google AdWords, you can target the keywords that people are searching. You know the buyer’s intent, so when they search the keyword, they will find you and your message. Or with Facebook, you can also target exactly who you want, their interests, and the profile.
You can be very precise about who you want for your customers or for your offer. That you cannot do with traditional marketing. In the good old days with direct mail, we have a term called A Pile and B Pile, meaning that people sort their mail so that ads and flyers go in the trash can, or the B Pile.
The A Pile are all the personal letters, credit card statements, and bills. As a marketer, our first goal was not to get people to buy, but to make sure they didn’t throw away our stuff. We wanted our mail in their A Pile.
Now with digital marketing, you don’t need to do that anymore. You can put your offer, your products, your service, in front of exactly who you want, when you want, and where you want. You can choose the country, demographics, and psychographics.
It’s extremely powerful to know exactly who you’re marketing. And with advances in technology, we could almost look over a person’s shoulder to see what they’re reading.
Reason #2: Tracking
With direct mail in the old days, we would send out thousands of letters and we’d get so many order forms back. People sent back an order form or money order, or called a phone number to buy something we marketed in the mail. This method is so archaic now.
With digital marketing you can track exactly what happens. You can see the customer’s journey when they first saw this particular video, and then they opted-in to this particular offer, and then they didn’t buy, but they read email number four in your email sequence and finally bought your product.
You cannot do that with traditional marketing. You can do so much more with digital marketing, even update your marketing with the flip of a switch.
Reason #3: Tweaking
Back then, if I made a massive billboard and changed my mind about my message or offer, what did I have to do? I had to replace everything! I had to reprint everything! But with digital, if there’s an ad that I’m running that I don’t like, I can change it just like that.
I can also split test different ads at the same time. In marketing, we call it A/B testing. We can tweak different things. On my webpage, I can test different guarantees, different price points by running traffic to it. The results are immediate.
With traditional advertising, there’s a huge delay in terms of time, and that gap makes advertising very expensive and costly.
Digital marketing has so many advantages over traditional marketing. You can target, track, and tweak very quickly to get better results.
But there’s also a downside. The marketplace is getting more sophisticated so your competitors are doing the same thing as you. You could be running a large company and competing with a 17 year old kid living in a basement.
Digital marketing has many advantages, but it changes all the time. You have to do more to keep up the pace and have that leading edge. And they always say, if you’re not the lead dog, the view is always the same.
The one word that makes people millionaires and billionaires isn’t attitude, mindset or time. It’s something else that’s much more powerful. Let me tell you why.
If you had $86,400 in your bank account and someone stole $10 from you, would you throw away the remaining $86,390 and try to get the $10 back?
You’d probably forget about it and move on. Why? Because I want you to imagine the $86,400 represents a bank account called time. Every single day you have 86,400 seconds to deposit to your life, your time, but there’s one catch.
It carries over no balance. It means whatever you don’t invest, you don’t take out that day, it gets to zero. Now, what would you do? You would withdraw every single dollar every single day, wouldn’t you?
You’ve probably heard of the concept of return on investment, ROI, but here’s a more powerful concept and that is ROTI and that’s return on time invested.
You see, most people when they think about that one word that makes people millionaires and billionaires, very often the word that comes to mind is hustle. They think you have to work your face off. It’s the price of admission to get in the door to success. If you don’t hustle, you’re not in the game.
That One Word Isn’t Hustle!
When I was getting started, I was hustling because I also believed that was the key to success. I was living in a one bedroom apartment with my mom, working hard to pay the bills. But hustling didn’t make me into a millionaire. ROTI doesn’t come from hustling.
Instead, I want you to imagine lifting a big heavy stone with your own two hands. You try your best and it doesn’t even move… until you use a long pole as a lever. Suddenly, with the same manpower, you can lift that heavy stone. That’s leverage.
The definition of leverage is maximum productivity with minimum effort. Leverage is how you get your time back. It’s the one word that makes people rich.
There are many, many forms of leverage, but I’ll give you four today.
Money Leverage
Imagine you are buying a piece of real estate from the bank. You put a down payment and then you borrow the rest from the bank. It could be up to 90%. That’s money leverage.
You’re using the bank’s money to create more wealth and to build your business, or you want to buy some kind of new equipment for your company and you go to the bank or you go to an investor to borrow some money.
Marketing Leverage
The second kind is marketing leverage. Let’s say I’m running an ad on social media. I create a video ad that is run 24/7. Even though I am not there “marketing and selling,” my ad is working for me, being viewed by tens of thousands or even millions of people.
People Leverage
Another kind of leverage is people leverage. By hiring someone, delegating someone, or outsourcing to do your task, you can save time and money. You want to find someone who can handle certain tasks and whose hourly rate is lower than yours.
Technology Leverage
The fourth form of leverage is system leverage. For example, I use QuickBooks to manage my finances and do the bookkeeping. That’s system leverage. Another example is managing my email list. I’m using an email system that allows me to craft one message that goes out to two million people. That’s leveraging technology to grow.
There are many, many forms of leverage, not just money, people, marketing, and technology. I would challenge you to think about anyone who is a millionaire or billionaire – each one has highly utilized different forms of leverage.
That’s the one word that makes people millionaires and billionaires.
Mark is currently serving as Founder and CEO at Simpleology, a web application that doubles your productivity (and your free time) by simplifying your life.
Author of over a dozen books translated into 20+ languages. Several of which were #1 best-sellers. Including … The Irresistible Offer, Integration Marketing, The Worst Case Scenario Business Survival Guide, The Great Formula, and more.
Serial entrepreneur with 30+ startups under his belt. Widely recognized as the “father of online marketing” for his pioneering work in the early days of the Internet. His startups include Aesop (the first ebook publishing company), ROIbot (the first online ad-tracking company and first client-side SAAS), SearchHound (the 2nd pay-per-click search engine, years before Google), StartBlaze (first ever traffic exchange system, the 36th most visited site in the world 6 weeks after its release), Neurogizers, and more.
What do you do as an entrepreneur? Now, before you answer, consider this: how you answer will determine how much revenue your business makes.
So what exactly do you do as an entrepreneur?
If you say something like, “I own a plumbing business. I own a restaurant. I own a flower shop. I own a landscaping business,” then you’re a business owner. What you do is narrowly specific, very focused. In comparison, an entrepreneur makes money by execution and innovative ideas.
Successful entrepreneurs do many things to generate money and revenue. They start companies, grow companies, and sell companies. Someone like Richard Branson with the Virgin brand is in so many verticals: an airline, mobile phone, music, health, aerospace, etc. This is the strategy to getting rich.
The Strategy To Getting Rich
An entrepreneur will say, “I am working on this.” And six months later, their project will have evolved into something else, and two years later, they’re working on something else again. But they don’t have shiny object syndrome. They aren’t jumping from one thing to something entirely different.
They are working on many things within the same business. Here’s a perfect example.
Apple started off as a computer business. Then later on, it evolved into other types of businesses. Now they’re in music, mobile phones and apps. It’s an ecosystem! What business exactly is Apple in now?
You could say they have a business within a business. You might say they have multiple streams of income within a business, or you might say they have this vertical integration because they own different things.
That’s the difference between most small businesses and larger companies like Apple and Virgin. It’s how entrepreneurs really get rich. It is through innovative ideas, making things better and adding value.
Disney is another example. What business is Disney in? You can say it’s a theme park. But what about the Disney channel? You could also say Disney is in the licensing business and merchandising business. They’re not narrowly focused.
That’s how entrepreneurs really get rich. Now, what about your business? On a small scale, ask yourself how you can develop multiple streams of income within one business.
Then on a bigger scale, ask yourself how you can build a business within a business. How you can add two or three pillars within what you do to diversify within the business and innovate. That’s what makes you an entrepreneur.
