The Abundant Agent

243 years ago. These words were penned, signed in an act of rebellion, and then mailed to King George III.

"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

What is often missed is that the end of the declaration, those who signed it agreed to this:

"For the support of this declaration with a firm reliance on divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor."

As we celebrate freedom and the independence, let's not forget to, to consider how we are spending our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to protect those inalienable rights for others.

How is your business structured to help you spend your life, your fortune, and your sacred honor to protect the inalienable rights of others--of customers and clients, of bosses and subordinates, of contractors and vendors, maybe...

Tomorrow, those of us here in the United States get a great opportunity to celebrate independence and to celebrate freedom. I love working with entrepreneurs and small business owners as coaching clients. And when I get to speak and teach workshops to those folks, I love it because, like me, they really love freedom. They love that they get to be free to own their own business, to create their business the way they want it to be.

What I find is that many of them have become slaves to their business. Many of them have become servants of their telephone and email. The reality is, and I want to use a phrase that we commonly use in a different context, "freedom isn't free." What I mean by that is when it comes to freedom, life, freedom in our business, it requires us to be disciplined--to create a plan, and then execute on that plan in a consistent way to create discipline that forms habits around systems that get us to our goals. 

What systems do you have in place that you need to...

Well apparently I got a few of you fired up yesterday when I said something crazy, which is that goals don't work. I'm not alone in this. James Clear says the same thing in the book atomic habits. He says, "I've found that goals are good for planning. Your progress and systems are good for actually making progress."

I've come to define goals this way. Goals are a temporary place holder for a thought experiment. You see, a goal is simply there to help you think backwards. The actions you need to take today.

Scott Adams goes even further on this. He says, goals are for losers because you see, if you look high performers and low performers both have goals, but higher performers have systems. They don't worry too much about the goals and they focus on the systems that actually get them there. He says, you don't need goals.


What you actually need are simple systems that improve your odds. So today as we're again, continuing on this path of revisiting our goals for 2019 we visited and our...

It's July 1st and this is an important day in the life cycle of a business owner or business leader. That is, it's the first day of Q3. It's the first day of the second half of the year. It's important to take stock of how your year is going. Actually dust off that business plan you worked on last fall or early winter and find out how are you doing compared to how you thought you would be doing by this time of year.

Now what many folks do is they get a little too fixated on a what are called the lag measures. The actual results of the business-- maybe, revenues or units closed or even profit. What we also want to do though is to review how are we doing on the lead measures? How are we doing on the plan that we created when we wrote that business plan. The business plan wasn't just about what results would we get but what activities we would take and we needed to compare our goal versus our actual as it relates to the results, but we also want to compare our goal versus actual...

Action cures fear. Inaction breeds terror. This was said by Douglas Horton.

So many of us wait around to feel motivated before we get into action, when in fact, action will cause motivation. The fear, the anxiety we feel will actually start to go away as we get into the right action on them. 

Sometimes we feel like we have to take massive action toward a goal. Not True! We simply need to take some action--Micro-actions moving toward our goal.  As we do that, the fear, the anxiety will begin to go away.

One of two things will happen when you take action. First, you'll move toward your goal and that's great. It gives you great information that you should do more of that activity. Or it won't work, it won't move you towards your goal. Either way, you're going to feel great that you did something. Now take a new action and move toward your goal.

We often get paralyzed waiting for motivation to show up. Instead, let's take action and let the action create...

There's an amazing scene in the old movie Back to the Future that I think perfectly depicts, one of the challenges that we face everyday with our productivity.

I don't know if you remember this scene, but it's during the Under the Sea Dance, and Marty's up on stage playing guitar.  He's looking at a photo of him and his siblings in the distant future that are being impacted by what's happening right at that moment.   And because different choices are being made, his brother and his sister start to disappear from the photo and, in fact, he starts to disappear. You'll remember his hand fades and disappears as it looks like maybe his parents aren't gonna get together.

When you think about the goals that you have about the legacy that you're trying to leave, what I want you to do is I want you to think about that picture that you have of the future. Then like a good time traveler, reverse engineer back to today and make choices that move you toward that picture and...