The Crystal Ball Of Success

This is Julie, I hope you’re doing amazing today. A little beef to pick. So a lot of you know I run Create Your Laptop Life. It’s a membership community. It’s for service providers or course creators who want to live from their laptop and they get to join the group. They get to. You get weekly coaching for me, plus a bunch of training and all kinds of extra perks, so I run that.

If you’re ever interested in that, you can go to createyourlaptoplife.com to see what that’s all about.

I also have my Digital Insiders. These are my high-end mastermind people. It’s a small group. There’s about 50 of them and they are getting more one on one access to me. I also have an additional 600 people in the Two Comma Club coaching program, which I run with several other coaches that are hosted by ClickFunnels, so this is all to say that if you put all of those groups together, the 502 CCX, the thousand people in Create Your Laptop Life, the 50 people that are inside of my Insiders, plus all my digital marketing students as well.

I’ve talked to thousands of people and it’s funny. I can very, very quickly and easily figure out who’s going to be successful and who isn’t just based on a few things. So I figured you guys might want to know what that is because if you want to get started with a laptop life if you want to build a business, you want to build an online business, especially if you want to be successful. There are some things that you need to know before you get started.

Welcome to the create your laptop life podcast where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops. Wherever they are. We don’t have traditional nine to five jobs and we don’t want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneurial economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life.

The first and foremost thing that I think that much of the internet marketing community is responsible for is we’ve made it look way too easy. And I take beef with that. I feel like in my marketing I really want to kind of switch the narrative because right now it’s like, “it’s the easiest thing to do. Make thousands of dollars online in just a few days,” and just this perpetual, like, “look, I made a million in three months. Look, I made $30,000 my first month.”

Just this constant barrage of money, money, money, fast, fast, fast. And while there are people who do it does happen fast for them. There’s often some effect underneath going on. Maybe they’ve been preparing for a while. Maybe their mindset is right. Maybe they’re ready and willing to do whatever they have to do. You know, there’s like other pieces involved. It’s not just like that quick magic bullet.

So I can tell immediately if someone’s going to be successful based on how quickly they assume that they’re going to be profitable. So if I see someone come to me and they join any of my communities and they say to me, how fast am I going to make my money back? You’re not going to be successful. If that’s the first question you’re asking.

You’re just not. It’s not like how fast can I make my money back? Usually, if you’re asking that question, it means that you are in such a difficult financial position. You shouldn’t probably be buying whatever you’re buying and that’s because you need to figure out how to make money so that you can invest in the business and the skills that you want to grow long term.

I can give you a perfect example. 2014. I was running a business. It was not enough to support me so I could have done to one of two things. I could have gone and like found some guru selling a $10,000 program and ask them how fast am I going to make my money back. Right. But that probably wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. Instead, I got a part-time job. I actually became a full-time job at a college so that I could make money and pay the bills. And then I moonlighted my business and I used any extra money that I made from my business and I put it back into my business.

Okay. So there is no shame. There’s no harm, there’s no problem with working a part-time job, working a full-time job, doing whatever you need to do so that you can make an investment into what you want to be as part of your financial future.

So, you know, that’s not to say. I mean, there are plenty of stories of people who literally spend their last dime and they just, you know, put it all on the line and they’re like, alright, I’m doing this as it’s do or die, and then it works. Right? And then that’s the story that we herald. That’s the story that we are like, “look how amazing that was. They spent their last thousand dollars and it turned into 10 million.”

But for most people, when you want to grow a business, you need to see your business as a living, breathing investment. It’s like you wouldn’t have a baby and be like, all right, well before I get pregnant and have a baby, how long am I going to have to nurse this thing before I’m going to get my, my dues back? Like how long before I’m going to make my time back? Right? That’s not how you see it because you know that it’s an investment.

Same thing with marriage. When you get married, your first question out of your mouth isn’t, well, how soon am I going to feel amazing again? Like what’s in it for me, right? Because you know that anything worth doing, guys, anything worth doing, any sort of business investment that’s really legacy, that has long impact, that creates a financial wealth and freedom is a long game period. It just is.

Can you make money in 30 days on the Internet starting from zero? Yes, yes you can. Can you make $10,000? Maybe. Is it more realistic you’re going to make maybe a thousand or 2000 if you have zero skills and nothing but a computer and you know nothing. It’s most likely that first 30 days. If you follow the plan that I lay out and Create Your Laptop Life, maybe you’ll make $500 bucks. Maybe I’ll make a thousand. I’ve had people make $5,500, but the reality is that that’s still not your long-term legacy financial freedom business. You’ve got to go in it for the long game.

So if you’re about to buy something and you cannot afford it, unless you’re willing to go in at it like, “okay, this is an investment and it’s part of what I’m growing.” If you’re going in and saying, how fast am I going to make my money back away slowly and go get a part-time job so that you have the money to invest because businesses take money, they take money and they take time. So that’s one of the biggest things I can see about someone who’s ready to be successful or who’s going to be successful. They don’t ask that question.

The second thing that I see in people who make it are the people who are not afraid to fail. They’re willing to take imperfect action. They’re willing to do things that they don’t fully know how to do quite yet but are going to try anyway. They have no problems asking for help when they get stuck.

These are people who are not going to sit in the closet for six months writing up an elaborate business plan or people who are paralyzed for an entire year not afraid to do anything because they don’t feel like they have enough information yet.

The people who are successful know that the fastest way to success is to get the first failures out of the way so that failing fast, it’s a. it’s a real thing. You guys, it’s legit like you want to fail as fast as possible because those first failures, you’ll never have to do them again, so why not get them over with. At least that’s what I think.

The third thing that I see in people who are successful are people who attached themselves to people rather than theories, ideas, and products. If you see business as the process of attaching to people, you’ll be successful.

And what do I mean by that? Because in business it’s really just about people, whether they’re your customer people or whether they’re your colleague people, right? Because as a business owner, you need both. You need customers, but you also need colleagues. You need people who can refer you. You need people who you can collaborate with, future business partners. You need people who can support you in your launches. You need those kinds of people, but you also need students and clients and customers and all those people as well.

Business is the business of people. If you come into this space and you’re just like, oh, I’m going to build a membership site, or I’m going to build a course, or I’m going to do this, or I’m going to do that, and it’s all about what your going to do and what kind of container you’re going to be in. It’s a membership or it’s a course or you’re super attached to a specific product or a formula. Very rarely is what you’re attached to at the beginning. What you’re attached to at the end, what you think you’re going to do when you start is not what you end up doing as you go along.

And so if you attach yourself to people, those relationships pay dividends. Even if your course or your concept, your product changes again and again and again. So those are three things. Look at yourself critically and honestly as you’re working towards the business of your dream. Are you always asking how fast am I going to make my money back? Are you in that kind of mindset where you’re not seeing your business as a long-term investment, a longterm game that’s going to give you the impact and the legacy that you want?

Are you willing to fail fast? Are you willing to take imperfect action? Are you willing to not be good at something? I know there’s some guy I can’t remember. I don’t know if it’s Tony Robbins. Golden. I don’t know… of those big names. They say, most people are not willing to suck at something long enough to become good at it. Maybe it’s Myron Golden who says that, but it’s a great line.

Are you willing to suck at something for a long time in order to get good at it? So that’s the second thing. And the third thing is that business is people. Business equals humans. Whether they’re customers and clients or collaborators and colleagues and JVs, your number one investment in your time and your energy and your resources should be in the development and the relationship that you build with people more than anything else.

So you have those three things. It’s a very, very strong likelihood that you will succeed because skills are easy to come by. There’s always new products, new ideas, new opportunities, but those three characteristics are characteristics you need to take with you, no matter where you go or what you do. Thanks, guys. Appreciate you. Talk soon.