I wanted to take some time today to talk about finding inspiration. What I mean is, finding people, organizations or initiatives that you look at and think: “Wow! how cool would it be to do that”. Most of the time, all it takes is a bit of fresh thinking and some inspiration to get your own creative juices flowing.
Those of you who know anything about NLP will confirm that problems only exist inside your own head. Some may go so far as to say that all possible solutions to every problem exist outside of your head and all around us. That means, if you can free yourself by changing your mindset you can find a new way forward. One of the best ways to do that is to look at what others are doing that inspires you.
If you are trying to be the best you can be in your field, look at those who lead the way. If you are a product house, look at Apple. If you are in banking in the UK, look at Metro Bank or John Lewis. Oftentimes it makes a lot of sense to put the industry you are operating in to one side and look at the whole marketplace. After all, your customers are comparing you not just to your competitors, but to every other (type of) businesses they interact with.
So where did my inspiration come from? As I mentioned in an earlier post, Trish and her 10,000 steps a day challenge certainly gave me a lot of inspiration close to home. However, the thing that really did it for me was, in fact, a podcast I listen to.
Every month, Trish and I join in on a property mastermind call with half a dozen people we know. We share a resource that we think the group might find useful. One particular month, I remember very clearly one of the guys suggested we check out John Lee Dumas’ (JLD) amazing podcast: Entrepreneur on Fire – or EOFire for short.
Oh my! I have never looked back. Please go check out that podcast if you are in the least bit interested to know how really successful people tick. The genius for me in JLD’s format is that he sticks to the same set of questions whilst interviewing hundreds of different Entrepreneurs and Business Owners. So my focus is not on him, but rather on the content that’s being shared by those he interviews.
But that’s not the best of it. You see, the EOFire podcast is broadcast 365 days a year! So JLD records a bunch of interviews at a time and has his content mapped out for weeks if not months ahead. And the thing is, now that he’s notched up over 1000 episodes (seriously), he’s also getting pretty darned good at it and it really shows. Now this is a guy who generates six figures a month from his podcast and associated revenue streams – that’s right – he turned over almost $350,000 in July alone!
So you see, THAT’s where my inspiration came from. It may not happen just yet, but I aspire to that level of greatness and notoriety by sharing what I love and live for.
I hope you’ll take me up on that recommendation and check out the EOFire podcast, and I hope you’ll join in the discussion and share your thoughts about what I’ve shared today over on Twitter – just use the hashtag: #CHA30DayChallenge – and tell us (in JLD’s words…) what gets you fired up?
More tomorrow friends!
p.s. don’t forget to put your email address in the box to the right of the blog if you want to be kept updated when I put these posts out 🙂
Footnote: I noticed after using the 30Days30Ways hashtag that it’s used for any number of other things on Twitter already. Call that a rookie error. So I’d love you to join in the discussion, but to do so – we will need to use #CHA30DayChallenge instead.
