The Winning Difference

Do you ever feel like you’ve gone as far as you can with what you now know? Maybe your business is struggling at best, and you can’t seem to push past some unseen barrier to the level of success that you desire.

Yet all around you there are successful ventures.

Could it be time to learn something new? Could it be time to implement changes that would allow you to practice new and different things to take you to a new level of success?

It is insanity to think that if you just keep doing what you’ve been doing only harder that you’re going to achiever better or different results. Yet that is what most people do day after day.

High achievers, those that always seem to win at whatever they do, have a commitment to ongoing personal and professional development.  The basic difference, the winning edge, is that high achievers view themselves as “works in progress.” Rather than becoming too attached with the way that they’ve always done things, these winners seem to stay on top of every wind of change and use it to their advantage.

I just read a great article by Brian Tracy which inspired this blog post. He says in this article

Earl Nightingale said many years ago that one hour per day of study in your chosen field is  all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.

Wow! Amazing, a “national authority,” but what a commitment, one hour per day.

I don’t know if that is such a hard choice if I really believe that. One hour a day is a pretty insignificant trade off for the outcome. I’ve been reading this article over and over, the more I read it the more excited I am getting about this comment

One hour per day of study will put at the top of your field…In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.

Want to know what excites me the most about this statement? Most people don’t believe it. Doesn’t it have to boil down to the bottom line – they don’t believe it can happen to them? I think it has to be belief, because if the average person would read this statement and act on it the results would be phenomenal! It’s amazing but true, most people would not set aside 1 hour of their day to study their chosen field in order to be a national authority and one of the best people in the world at what they do. So…what’s so exciting about that? If I choose to act on this statement, it gives me the winning edge in my field and reduces or all but eliminates my competition.

The method of study recommended by Brian Tracy in this article is to read for one hour a day from books recommended by those who are already successful in your field. He explains that 1 hour a day would probably average out to one book a week, and 50 books per year…Keep going…50 books over the next 10 years would be 500 books in your chosen field. That’s a lot of books, that’s a long commitment, but where would you be if you read 500 books in 10 years? You’d be

…one of the best educated, smartest, most capable and highest paid people in your field.

What if you don’t make that level of commitment over the next 10 years? What if you just let life happen, where do you think you’ll be in 10 years?

I’ve heard and read that the top earners in this country invest a percentage of their annual income back into their own personal and professional development – some say 3% annually, some say 5% – but the point is that the top producers of income invest in their development on purpose.

One of the reasons I opened The Small Business Guru Membership Website is to give committed small business owners the opportunity to educate themselves in the core competencies to becoming a Master Small Business Owner. The Small Business Guru is a website committed to creating an environment for building on current knowledge and growing beyond where you might be today. There are competencies that are vital to your success. It is important to master these competencies to secure a place of success. There is so much information for small business owners, I believe, there is only one main reason for not being able to achieve success in your small business. The main obstacle to most small business people’s success is their lack of committment to continue learning foundational basics insure their success.

This is a subject that I am very passionate about. I could go on forever, but I’ll save that for another post. In the future I want to discuss the dicipline of becoming a “master” at something. It is more about consistency than lots of hard work.

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