Monday, June 30, 2008

Grandma's Secret Ingredient for Apple Pie - Consistency

That's right!
The consistancy of your endevoirs will effect the final results of your goals. The right amount can result in the best results anybody could hope for. Now I understand that some of you may feel that all I am doing is simply stating obvious facts. I often feel that way also, however I feel it is important to reiterate the basics. These core fundamentals I believe are absolutely necessary. Yes, that's obvious.

Yet why is it when we look around and we look at ourselves, these core fundamentals are lacking? I want everyone to go to the store, and buy a cake mix. Add all the ingredients, DON"T MIX IT, bake it, then eat. Delicious? Why not? There was obviously no consistancy, nothing was the way it was suppose to be, and well, like some lives, everything was blindly thrown together and expected to work.

I think some do not understand exactly what consistancy is and do not have any idea what is needed to achieve optimum consistancy. The first thing you absolutely need are tools. These tools allow you to perform actions necessary to enable a cycle of events. How can anyone do anything without tools?

Now the second thing I believe is a part of consistancy is action. Yes, everything requires action and this should be obvious. However, this isn't as simple as you may think. Gathering up the strength and the motivation to make that phone call, to knock on that door, and to execute your actions is possibly the most difficult. The deeper you dig, the fears you encounter, the natural human "laiziness" to overcome, well this rabbit hole just gets deeper. Just go and do it, creat action, and assess later.

Third, repetition. Performing your actions only once and moving on, isn't going to cut it. Yes, I know, you knew that. Well why do people then quit on there New Years Resolution? The are definetly doing something for a bit, but no repetition. A habit is not establish, and failure instead of success sets in. Set a habit, and stick to it.. Motivate yourself and stay with it. Eventually whe success sets in and you are reaping the fruits of your labors, we can talk about outsourcing these habits to free your time for more activities.

Now my fourth part of consistency is this, reassess and critique. Make sure what you are doing is effective and worthy of your time. No matter what, you are important, and wasting your time is definitely not important. If something isn't working, change it. If you can improve the process, by all means, improve! This will fine tune your consistency, and over time your consistency of your business will be perfected, eventually to a point of being on an auto pilot.

So here is the big punch. Becoming an investor is about leaving the habits of a 40 hour, back breaking work week. When you look at the consistency of your business, and you are putting in huge amounts of active time, and you call you self an investor, then we need to reassess your consistency. Nothing is wrong with running your own business, but be sure you are doing what you want to do, not what you dug yourself into.

JP