Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Believe in Me

One of my most influential mentors, Gerry Cramer, asked me once what I attribute my success to. And that’s a fair question. I had been learning about the online business world for years, and I hadn’t seen anything really come of it at all. What changed so dramatically in my life that I started to see my first $100 day? $1000 day? $10,000 day? 

How did I make such a dramatic shift in my success levels? And to that, I can only say one thing. I truly believed  that I could do it. I really put all my belief in myself that I could get it done. I had tons of haters and naysayers around me who were trying to take me down. They told me I couldn’t do it, that this was wasting my time, that they knew better. I’m so glad that I chose to believe in myself first above all else. Because I held on to that self-belief, I started to see change happen. Maybe it was because I was down to my last (borrowed) $500 to make this all work out. 

Maybe it was because I couldn’t stand going to one more flooring gig. But all of a sudden, my mind just shifted into a powerful belief that I was able to do it. I won’t lie. It was those first small wins that really showed me that I was onto something. It was those moments when I had small payments of $10 keep coming in that helped my self-belief.That helped, but it wasn’t what made the difference in my life.The difference came when I stopped dabbling and started believing. This wasn’t going to be something that I made work because I was doing it part-time, using just part of my efforts when I felt like it. 

I was sailing full speed ahead, burning my boats once I landed, and putting everything I had into this. I HAD to succeed, and I just KNEW that I would. I remember when I was very young that I knew I was going to be a millionaire. I would tell my mom all the time. I’m going to be a millionaire one day. I’m going to make a ton of money one day. I’m going to be incredibly rich. That self-belief started when I was very young, but for some reason, I left it behind when I started working my 9-to-5 job.I realised that I was going to go nowhere unless I started believing in myself again. 

I needed to find a reason to succeed, and it started with when I knew that I would.In her book Mindset, Carol Dweck talks about this attitude. There are two people. You have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. The successful people in life are the ones who have a growth mindset, knowing that they have to become more in order to succeed. People with a fixed mindset believe that they are who they are, and nothing will change that. I had a friend of mine go to India. He told me that they have a saying there that really tugged at my heart. Basically, people say that “It’s been written on my forehead”, implying that who are born is what you’ll be for the rest of your life. 

It’s this self-limiting belief that they are who they that keeps them from trying to achieve more in life. It’s a sad way to live. But before you feel too bad for those people, the truth is that a huge percentage of the population believe the same thing. They have a fixed mindset, that they are who they are. A lot of it comes from what you’re told when you’re young. Kids who get told that they’re average end up believing that they are average, never going to amount to much. They believe that the answer to all their life’s problems is somewhere out there. Where? 

I don’t know. *Points vaguely* Out there somewhere.But I think that Dweck also says something interesting in her book about the fixed mindset. You can change it. You can change who are you are. 

And that change doesn’t come from somewhere else. Nobody holds the resource to make you different. You ARE the resource. I don’t know if you got that because it’s HUGE when you understand it. If you’re like me, buying book after book, course after course, you probably are suffering from that fixed mindset, the belief that you are who you are and someone else can fix you. But when you understand that you are the resource, that you have the power already in you to make things happen, to actively pursue growth, that’s the life-altering self-belief that will transform your everyday into something extraordinary.If I started a business and came to you saying that I was expecting to fail, you would think I’m crazy. 

Unfortunately, many of you are suffering from thinking this way. 

You start whatever plan you have with a mindset that you expect to see it crash and burn. When Warren Buffett was in university, he approached his lifelong mentor who was a professor at the university. This man, Benjamin Graham, helped shape Buffett into one of the richest men on the planet today. Why did Graham spend hours upon hours of his life working with this man, who had no experience, no capital, no plan to make money?

Because Buffett believed that he would succeed. Buffett started out with nothing already knowing he would be a billionaire. Get that? 

He didn’t start working with Graham to learn to invest HOPING that he would make money. That’s essentially planning for failure. 

He started out KNOWING that he would be a billionaire. Could you do what Buffett did to make the same money? Sure. But not many people have enough self-belief to know without a shadow of a doubt that they would become billionaires. 

That’s a whole new level. The real power of self-belief is that those who understand it grasp this very powerful concept. They don’t let the outside world affect what they believe. They let their beliefs affect the outside world.Most of grow up believing the world is one way. Steve Jobs wasn’t that guy. He believed that life was, well, moldable. You could shape it to what you wanted it to be.And his indomitable will made things happen that others thought impossible. 

He became known for hating phrases like “it can’t be done” or “I don’t have enough time”. 

Those he waved away like flies. He imposed his will on the world and the world changed. You might think that Jobs’ best achievement was the smartphone, but that was just one-third of it. 

He also introduced personal computing to the world as well as changed the way we think about retail stores. This was only possible because he didn’t let the outside world, even the so-called “experts” tell him otherwise. He believed that his thoughts could change the world.So he did. Now go and do the same.

If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. — Vincent van Gogh


Jose Amoros

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