Here’s the other one, I get this all the time, this is the most common thing — my goal is $10 million per year. I don’t know where this came from. It was me, too. And when I spoke at Ed Dale‘s event about nine years ago, this was my goal.
I never reached 10 million a year. I know I could do it. If I actually started running ads, I could probably raise $10 million a year straightaway. But I don’t want what comes with that. In my mind, it’s not worth the price.
So I think there’s an obsession with status happening. There’s some weird stuff. You only have to log on to Instagram, you see a lot of these jets and cars and blings and apartments. And it all looks pretty amazing. But what they’re not showing you is their payroll, and their ad spend, and their offices. And it looks okay from the outside, but you’re seeing a heavily curated situation.
And I’m not saying you can’t want this or have this. If you want this, and it’s what you want, go for it. But I do think some people are a little bit misguided. They haven’t got their goals, they’ve got the goals that someone put there because they hadn’t sat down and thought about their goals.
So of course, it’s worth thinking about what success means to you. I’m okay to give up a few million bucks a year, if I can hold my baby daughter and go for a surf and just hang out with people I want.
We can also be intimidated by comparisons. Are we comparing ourselves to these people? Go and look at Jeff Bezos when he was sitting in his office, starting Amazon to do an online bookstore, you know, you would see a different version than the world’s wealthiest guy.
Let’s not look at all these amazing people and get intimidated. I get intimidated sometimes. I fall into that trap. I’ll see someone, Oh, that’s so much better than what I could do. I want to do that. Maybe an event like this, you think, Oh, I could never run an event like this. Well, I’ll tell you, absolutely, you can. I’ll give you my checklist. You could run an event like this. Regularly, I’m teaching people how to run an event like this. You can do it, but maybe not straightaway. Maybe you need to prepare for it so there will be some things involved, but let’s not get drawn into comparisons.
Instead, let’s benchmark yourself. Perhaps you can just journal, have a look at your own improvement. I certainly have learned a lot about this from my surfing. I track my surfs and I’m able to improve my top speeds and my longest rides and the maneuvers I can do. It’s been a real humbling experience to go through that beginner phase and to develop.
I benchmark my own business against my own business. In part of our businesses, we look at our own business performance from where we were before. And all I asked myself is am I happy with this? I wonder when it became so wrong to just be content. Maybe it’s okay to be content.
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