Steps To Supercharge Your Success

I get a lot of questions from people in their 40s and 50s who are concerned that they have made some wrong choices and are now doomed to live out lives without meaning, purpose and profits. If you see the early years of your education and career as times of learning and testing and clarification you can then move into the most enjoyable and productive season of your life – regardless of how old you are today.

It’s never too late to have a new beginning. Now, that doesn’t matter if you’re 18 or 58 or 88. It’s never too late to have a new beginning. It’s fun to have a new beginning. All new beginnings are hopeful. They give us new energy. So maybe you just need to create a new beginning for yourself, no matter what age you are.

Episode #912 July 21, 2023

Questions:

I am 54 years old and still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.

You can make a living in anything you’re passionate about if you’re creative and if you are willing to do things other people are not doing.

I hear people say, well, I don’t know what my passion is, and they’re waiting to have that passion just explode on them. Well, passion is more developed than it is discovered. The sequence here is:

1. Follow your curiosity
2. Develop your proficiency, become really good at doing something
3. In doing that, then you develop a passion for what you’re doing.
4. And from that, then you can see a clear purpose.
5. Then you can make a promise to the world and enjoy the profits that you get in delivering value.

Brian Tracy talks about how people become millionaires.

1. They set clear goals.
2. They’re open to continuous learning.
3. They’re willing to take risks.

If you are doing those things, you can start with where you are at 54 years old, but take that fresh look inward.

If you’re thinking your life is in neutral and you’re just not moving forward — you’re just existing, not thriving, not prospering, not growing — it’s not too late if you get clear again on where you are.

I’m making money doing what I don’t love and what I do love isn’t making any money. Which should I quit?

What you do has to blend your passion, talent, and money. So if you have passion and talent but no money, you don’t have a business or a career. You have a hobby.

I used to talk to a lot of guys in Nashville who were really good in music, and they really had a passion for it, but they weren’t making any money at it. It was just a hobby.

If you have money but no passion, you’re going to burn out. There’s got to be a way to work that together. If you have a nonprofit or a cause that you really are passionate about, that you care about, there ought to be a way for that itself to generate income. I think about back when my son Jared was in Rwanda. He wanted to help these ladies who had every disadvantage you can imagine in a culture where their husbands had been killed. Most of them were widows because of the genocide that had happened there a few years prior to that. They were discarded by society.

The easiest thing to do, the most logical thing, is to come back to the United States, tell people their sad stories, and get donors to give you money to take back and give them money. But when you think about it, does that really resolve the issue? How are you helping those people, if that is what you’re doing? You’re simply raising money from outside sources to give them money so they can pay their rent and have food on the table. But it’s a band-aid situation. What are they going to do next month? They’re going to be standing there with their hands out again.

So Jared helped the ladies make jewelry. They would get discarded calendars, catalogs, newspapers, and paper products, and then they would create from those this beautiful jewelry. He had designers come over from the Rhode Island School of Design, and they would design high-end jewelry. These ladies would create it. And then the jewelry was sold at runway shows in Miami, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, and places like that. From that, the ladies were paid more than what a school teacher was paid in that culture. And the funding from that totally funded the entire project without having to ask for donations.

I think that no matter what it is you want to do, you can figure out ways to create income and often engage those very people that you want to serve so that they have a sense of pride, a sense of engagement, a sense of growing their self-confidence in doing that. There may be courses that could be developed that could be sold or just information or books that are written about what’s going on, but different ways to leverage the content so that there’s money being generated. But the bottom line is, you do have to be responsible for providing for your family. You can’t spend all your time in an organization, even if it’s a worthy cause. If you are ignoring the responsibility to provide for your family, you’re going to build resentment in the areas where it matters most. That is too high a price to pay.

I am a 53-year-old college dropout who left school for all the right reasons at 20 years old to help my mom and siblings.

We have a process to go through to help you with that. Now, at 53 years old, you have a wealth of life experience to guide you. If you’re 18 years old and you’re wondering about what to major in college — what to do for the rest of your life, that’s pretty hard to really know because you haven’t had enough life experience to really know and clarify things about yourself.

At 53, you do. One of the most valuable parts of those early years of even a working career is to help you understand what it is you don’t want to do. So finishing your degree a little later on, graduating at 38 years old to start with should mean that you have more information about what it is you really want to do.

What are your strongest skills and abilities? What kind of personality do you have? Are you outgoing and social? Are you more comfortable not being the center of attention? Do you work well with other people or do you prefer working alone? What are areas aside from work that you really enjoy? What are those skills that you not only have refined, but that you really enjoy doing? How do you relate to other people? What kind of environments you’re most comfortable in? How do you manage, persuade, and sell? And then what are those recurring dreams that you have.

Get my free resource to help you develop your own personal mission statement that will take you through these questions at 48days.com/mission.

My business is making significant money but I’m embarrassed about the work I do.

If you are good in business, if you’ve been able to have your own franchise and you’ve been able to do okay financially with that, then I’m confident you could choose to take on another business.

However, I think you could rethink this when you rethink the service you’re providing to people. I would think that your customers love you because of this valuable service that you provide.

This reminds me of Joe Polish. He was a young guy who figured out how to make money cleaning. But Joe realized that he was good at marketing his cleaning. He started teaching other carpet cleaners how to fill their schedules. So he took the information, the knowledge that he had, rather than just continuing to clean. He took his intellectual capital, so to speak, his knowledge, and turned it into courses that he could then teach other carpet cleaners how to fill their schedules.

Those courses created far more income for him than the cleaning itself actually did. He’s now the founder of Genius Network, one of the highest-level groups for entrepreneurs. He’s still known as a carpet cleaner. Everybody knows that’s the business that he grew, and that’s the foundation for everything that he does today because he understands marketing principles.

Tom Fatjo is another person that comes to mind. Tom was an accountant who lived in a closed community where some of the other homeowners were complaining about their trash services. Tom decided to create his own trash service. He started what became BFI, the second-largest trash collection company in the world a few years ago. He sold that business to Allied Waste for $7.3 billion. He went on to buy restaurant chains and sports clubs and all kinds of things because he had so much money.

Did he have to hang his head in shame because he was in a trash collection business? No, I don’t think so.

Quotation

[click_to_tweet tweet=”“It’s never too late to have a new beginning” – Dan Miller @48daysteam” quote=”“It’s never too late to have a new beginning” – Dan Miller”]

Resources:

FREE Webinar: Hold Fast To Your Dreams on July 27th – 48days.com/webinar

Dream Incubator Intensives during the month of August – 48days.com/intensives, including:

• Build a Strategic Plan for Your Business (perfect for you if your dream is to start or grow a business) led by the Dean of Business in our 48 Days Eagles Community Greg Gray
• Upgrade Your Visibility and Grow Your Coaching Business (great for our coaches and aspiring coaches) led by our Dean of Coaching in the Eagles Community Jevonnah Ellison.
• Learn How To Navigate Change (a must if you’re wanting to gain a sense of control and uncover blind spots that result in missed opportunities) led by our 48 Days Eagles Dean of Mindset Marianne Renner
• Learn How To Get Your First $48K As a Speaker (perfect for you if your dream is to become a speaker) led by Jen McDonough, our Eagles Dean of Speaking.

Join us in Sarasota, FL, for our Will It Fly Event, August 10-12th – 48days.com/fly

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