Success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure.
There is a place where four things meet. Most people have never been asked to name it out loud.
There is a Japanese word, ikigai, a reason for being, and it has been pictured as four circles. Tap any one of them.
Miss one and you feel it. Love it and be good at it, but the world does not need it, and it stays a hobby. The world needs it and it pays, but you do not love it, and it hollows you out.
All four together is not a compromise between them. It is the only place where the work and the person are the same thing.
Passion is what you have endless energy to do.
Purpose is that energy aimed at the people it was made for.
Passion is real, and it matters, and it is not the finish line. Purpose is how you add more value to a person's life than anybody else can. Passion is about you. Purpose is about them, and it is the only version that lasts.
The work is turning the first into the second.
How anything actually gets done. Seven moves, in order. Most stalled work is stuck on one of them, and it is usually not the one you think.
Clarity is power. It is energy, it is fuel.
Purpose is power.
Decision is power.
Numbers are power.
Flexibility is power.
Bliss is power.
Testimony is power.
What business are you in? Now the harder version. What business are you really in?
What business should you be in?
It is not enough to work in your business. You have to work on your business. And you have to work on your future business, which does not exist yet and will not build itself while you are busy.
Peter Drucker said it plainly: all of business is innovation and marketing.
You do not have a money problem. You have a message problem.
If your story is not making people click, if your message is not leading to transactions, you have not got hold of it yet. Get your message right and the people come to you.
Part of the trouble is that business owners get addicted to their own ideas and their own products, instead of committed to what the client actually needs.
We are not selling you on us. We are selling you on yourself.
Sales is about transactions, and transactions are about commitment. The greatest commitment a person can make is a commitment to themselves. There are dimensions of reality only accessible on the other side of a deeper commitment — and the greater the commitment, the greater the result.
All of life is sales, and the hardest sales job you will ever do is selling yourself to yourself.
Everybody talks about vision. Vision is not enough.
Picture the grocery store from your house. Picture every turn you would make to drive there. You can see it perfectly. Now sit in the car, put a blindfold on, and drive there.
Vision is the destination. Optics is the road.
Optimize before you maximize.
Optimizing is the most painful part of the journey. It is where you find every place the vessels that are supposed to hold water are actually leaking — the removal of inefficiency, and there is no way to do it without looking straight at what is not working.
Which is exactly why people would rather maximize first. It feels better. It is also the expensive mistake.
A customer is a one time transaction. A client is a relationship.
Add more value than anybody else can and you will not just have satisfied customers. You will have raving fans.
But for somebody to become your biggest fan, they first have to believe, to the core of who they are, that you are theirs — that you believe in them more than they believe in themselves.
There are eight billion people on this planet and most of the suffering is unnecessary. It continues because we never made the commitment to ourselves that would have changed something.