How i choose to be a millionaire Part 1

. mentalities

Mindsets are just a set of beliefs and a philosophy of life that guides their actions. Adopting the correct beliefs and "inner game" is absolutely mandatory to really make it big. This section contains a collection of mindset you should consider adopting when you are working on IM.

Working very well and is not what you should aim for

On rare occasions I have family dinner, my parents always tend to ask me how I'm working hard and a bit like making an assessment of my success based on my response. The fact is that most people do and they are wrong. Promote hard work was a way for the company to succeed "fair" in the eyes of the people. If you put energy, then for sure you will do well!

Well, this is simply not the case, if you can do more in less time, this is when you will really become successful. As a result of this belief, I see a lot of "false busy" people around me. Busy to make themselves feel important and successful. But when you look at the results, there is nothing impressive there.

This is the first thing I want to assert, stop being "fake busy". Work less and produce more.

If you look at people like Joel Gascoigne, they really understand this principle and actively work to work less. This is paradoxical, but it is the key to true productivity.

Validate everything you're investing time in

The most inefficient way to work is to work on the wrong thing. As we know, in marketing, a lot of things are uncertain and unpredictable. That's why most of your time should really be spent validating hypotheses.

For example, for this guide too, wrote a nice reply to a topic of productivity that gave me a lot of pms and reactions. This then validated the assumption that people needed an IM more in depth guide and probably will not go unnoticed and help my personal brand for good measure.

Configuring basic to validate what you think is true is actually very simple experiments. For example, if you are about to participate in an SEO campaign a bit expensive for a legitimate site, why not just buy ads on adwords for a week and see what you get out of those keywords you found gold?

Certainly it costs some money, but if these keywords and their pages are so good that you will surely make your money back. And if they are not, well, you just saved the cost of an expensive SEO campaign.

This is the second mentality I want to accomplish: test everything you are intending to invest their valuable time and resources.

When working on validating assumptions instead of going straight for large workpieces, you will also be able to evolve much faster, making errors more quickly and eventually find what works faster. This is true efficiency.

Working in small batches

Another lean startup mentality is to work in small batches. It may feel inefficient at first, because doing lots of great work you could technically go faster ... if anything goes wrong. One thing you have to understand is that things go wrong and until you know your process perfectly, you should run it in the most linear fashion, in order to detect problems and correct them.

This is the third mindset that you should be taking: work on a small scale, in a simplified way, until you've found all the obstacles of your process.

Once you have corrected the problems, nothing prevents you from going crazy scale.

Pivot points / Persevere

No matter how hard you try to get a project work, sometimes, their performances are sub par with what you could achieve. In order to deal with it and do not persevere in the wrong direction, you should set up a date every six weeks for a project, where you choose or keep it as is or modify some of its core purpose to try to reach a market better fit.

Fourth mindset to enforce: September pivot points ahead in time and make assessments big project to see if you are going in the right direction.

This essentially prevents you from wasting time with ideals subprojects. Feel free to change the pivot / persevere points for up to 12 weeks, depending on the nature of the project.

If you want to know more about the last three principles that I strongly recommend you grab a copy of the Lean Startup by Eric Ries.

Specialize in one thing, outsource the rest

Considering how diverse the world is gone, it is virtually impossible to be still "ok" to everything. Even when it comes to internet marketing, between increased social cohesion, paid traffic, media buying, SEO, content marketing, affiliate traffic, product creation etc, you just can not be good at all of them .

But I have good news for you. To be successful you simply need to be good at one of them and get to the top 10% of the population to a skill.

We'll give a personal example, again. Do not just focus on SEO, I focused on the white hat link building (and a bit of technical SEO). I focused hard on it and, as a consequence, my guest post service is literally close to making 7 figures a year serving the biggest brands out there!

The reason I tell you to get to the top 10% of any skill is because the top 10% of any population tends to 3-5x earn more than the top 50%. Actual revenue comes when you are near the top. If you can never reach the top 5% up to 1%, you will literally 10-20x earn more than the top 50%.

Here are some interesting data on top earners.

Never multi task

Multitasking is a myth, is simply changing from one task to another very quickly and you divide your focus between them, resulting in lower quality work preventing him from reaching the top 10% of its category.

In order to prevent me from multi tasking, often limit my browser window to 4 tabs. More than that and I have to close some.


II. Environment

The environment and conditions in which you work are a big deal in terms of what you're going to output. Set some time aside to set the right kind of environment can have a drastic effect on what output and income.

I do not believe there is a special work environment, which was ideal, there are only definition I like to work on the site.

However, I would try to gather the following things from my desktop:
silence
Low distraction
Relatively easy access to food and beverages
Makes you feel good when you get there
Separated from other living spaces

For my part, I am the type of person who likes to move around and work from anywhere. My setup is fairly simple: a MacBook Pro 15 inch retina. It is light, powerful and makes me feel good when I wear it. But a large workstation can satisfy you as well.

music

Many of us listen to music while working, but it is not good and bad work music. As a general rule I'd say avoid anything with letters. They make you focus away from what you are doing and slow down your work (more on that here)

One thing to consider also is that the music goes your job. If you want to get the job done faster, just put higher BPM music in your ears and you will find yourself writing faster, think faster, do it faster.

As a personal preference, I suggest most of the episodes of State of trance by Armin Van Buuren.

Here is your Spotify profile.

Notices to burst

With things like Twitter, Facebook, free text messages, and instant messaging clients, who literally get distracted every 30 seconds, which is most likely the biggest obstacle to getting the job done these days.

There is no magic solution to this other than turn everything off. If you're lucky enough to be working on OSX, then use the options of full applications to cut from screen all these things. That's what I did to write this guide so far and I'm less than 1 hour because I cut all kinds of distraction. This is a war you will have to fight with yourself, but for the entire period of focused work, simply cut everything.

e-mail system

Email is a major source of distraction for an internet marketer. You're probably signed up for a fair few newsletters, business sites or products simply put it on a purchased list automatically. On top of that you have clients, people asking for advice and this common mother birthday poking you every 5 minutes. The solution to this is to change the configuration of the inbox for emails only update at the end of each hour.

I personally use Apple Mail to:



Another thing I suggest you do is adopt a methodology to process your e-mail address so that your email does not become a time sucker.

I personally love the methodology of zero inbox. Here are the basic principles:
Only process your inbox at times throughout the day
If it takes less than two minutes to process to do it now, then file, otherwise put it in the correct folder.

Then treat every email the same with the same set of possibilities:
Delete - nothing fancy here.
Delegate - send it to the right person and put it in a special folder to catch up with him later.
Reply - if it takes less than two minutes, just do it now.
Postpone - if responding takes more than two minutes, put it in a special folder and set some time aside for it later.
The - a new task is added to your list of tasks, then the e-mail can be filed.