The comfort zone sounds so obvious, but personal development is much more involved. If you want to grow, succeed or do anything new, you need to go outside it. The comfort zone is in a situation where a person is familiar, at ease and in control. Outside of the comfort zone there is increased anxiety and stress. So, the further out a person gets the greater the level of stress. The easiest definition I have found is from Wikipedia . The most comfortable place in usually not the best for learning or working. If a person repeatedly leaves the comfort zone and has a successful outcome, they will actually decrease the stress of being outside the zone next time. While that may sound so easy, why do so few really leave the comfort of their familiar surroundings. The very fact that so few venture out into new paths during their life, is interesting. The very reason this topic seems easy is that everyone thinks they understand it and do know it is crucial. If you ask people, most will say they do venture outside their comfort zone. So many say they go out of their comfort zone, then why do so many stay in home towns that have no future or jobs they dislike? Why do so many follow the same path as their parents or neighbors? It is the most comfortable of places. Success, by its very nature, means you have accomplished something. Therefore, success is always outside of the comfort zone. In order to have success, you need to do something new or different. Continual learning means that at least minimally, you constantly feel uncomfortable. Meanwhile, the further out the greater the stress, anxiety and fear which can hold you back. Repeated success outside the comfort zone will increase confidence. As you increase experience, confidence increases, and these new experiences become part of your larger comfort zone. Over time, you will grow accustomed to being uncomfortable and continually making progress. It all becomes easier. So, learning begets more learning. Success begets more success. The key is how to get to this point and to recognize the pitfalls and negative pressure from many around you. Going outside may appear crazy. On a humorous note, you might say that success is based you intentionally making yourself uncomfortable. You are intentionally outside your comfort zone. So, seemingly this is an almost masochistic behavior subjecting yourself to discomfort. Yet, this is a basic and key ingredient to success. So, if you truly are extremely successful, maybe you have to be a little crazy too. The concept of the comfort zone is a very useful psychological tool. You can only grow if you step outside your comfort zone. You must be willing to learn new things and skills through new experiences to grow and be successful. From time to time, you must re-assess and step out to new or revised goals. The process would only stop when you decide you don't want to go any further or want a break on the way your goals. With greater skills and knowledge opportunities will increase. When your knowledge increases, your ability and opportunities broaden. You will also find it easier to make educated guesses and other ideas that come to mind will also become better. You will be better at evaluation. It is very common to notice the success of so many immigrants. One of the reasons that many migrants succeed is that they are more willing to make additional trips far outside comfort zone. They already made some of the biggest changes, new country, new language and friends (see Immigrant Mentality). Moving to a new country is also a reason that many of the educated immigrants assimilate more and are not just be entirely surrounded by people from their previous country. While they do have friends from their country they are more likely to have a broader diversity than people born here. Why is it hard to leave your comfort zone? Inside your zone is where you find enjoyment and find expected outcom...

Life Unsettled

Comfort Zone – A guide to Personal Development

Why you should be looking at your future career as an ongoing process. You will have change, probably many times, a career is either planned or decided by others for you. Career Change and paths to new jobs or professions are confusing and don't always go where expected. Why now is one of the best times ever for career change and career development. It may last 2-4 years, but you’ll need every one of those years to make the most progress. Largely I am setting a framework for thinking about careers in this episode. It will be followed by more action-oriented episodes and hopefully ideas to motivate thoughts. You should always be planning on changing careers. On average people have 10-15 jobs during their lifetime. Some of these jobs are completely new careers. If you aren’t ready for a career change, it will happen by default. Now, sometimes that may be an unexpected promotion. Most often, if by default, you are in a situation that is less than you wanted. So, if you want to grow and progress over time, you don’t want to let a change affecting you to be a default change. That is, a new job where you might not have a good choice or at a time of desperation. Start your research and include social media to gain contacts, but be cautious of what you say. Think about it. You will see many changes, do you want to plan and figure out how to maximize the results, or even just see progress, or do you want to leave it to luck. Also, if others around you are working toward positive change, it may be like musical chairs and you were not ready when the music stopped. Yes, the music may stop because companies are not living as long as they did fifty years ago. Now for some great news. Record Opportunity for Career Advancement According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 7.6 million job openings and only about 6.5 million unemployed. This is a remarkable time in history. There is such a huge shortage that companies are more willing to train career changers and even are hiring felons that seem to have true potential. This will not last forever. It is a rare job market in history and caused by the strong growth in the economy and in both new and reinvigorated industries. Simultaneously, so many people left the work force by the end of 2016 that while unemployment appeared low, there was discouraged workers that gave up searching for good jobs. Companies that were looking for workers were trying to keep the hours below 30 per week to avoid large health care cost of the Affordable Care Act. Enough of that issue, we only are concerned with how to take advantage of today’s work environment and why we shouldn’t wait. Over the next few years, many people will be retraining for new jobs and many are already returning into the workforce. You need to look at both what skills you have and what additional ones you may need. You probably have transferable skills that while not exactly requested, enhance your appeal and others you get through part time school or work. In any case, it is not a time that anyone needs to feel stuck in their position or status in the marketplace. Both those that are returning as well as those are changing careers will make a transformation to target their skills and experience to new careers. It is truly a time you can breakthrough to completely new career paths. I say paths because as learn and gain experience more opportunities open up and you may shift your focus. The government will start increasing the H1 and other work visas to accommodate corporations who need employees with certain skills. It is important at the least to start thinking and researching new career paths now. The increase in work visas granted and others who return to the workforce finding new careers will lessen the opportunities. Most Interview Problems are Just Social Skills In spite of all these positive developments,

Career Change – Plan it or Take the Default

Goal setting for your personal growth is one of the most rewarding tasks people can do. Do you know what you want to be in five years? Do you know where you want to be in 3 - 5 years? Your goals should be distant at the start of your journey. You want to develop your own big picture of your future life. Success is personal. Are you on the correct path to reach your goal? Do you know what you want to accomplish this year, within 6 months and today? While some might feel they don’t like to set goals, it is important for everything from health and family to wealth. This encompasses all factors for personal growth. A goal should be thought of as similar to a map and directions to some long destination. The wrong decisions lead to wrong or unfavorable direction and can make the trip much longer or even impossible. You want your GPS to be accurate. Goal setting process Your goals are your personal goals. If you have a business or career you may be trying to use it for the wealth and financial freedom you desire or just something that makes you happy. However, all of these are the means to an end in your own personal goals. They should be measurable goals, but I argue against smart goals. Smart goals are good and important for short term accomplishment. Do not use or set them until you have long term goals and a plan in place. In the longer term, you need to allow flexibility. As you learn and gain experience revision is often useful and sometimes necessary. Big Goals and Life Change can Take Time If you are after some big personal goals over the next 5 – 10 years, you are working toward something that you don’t already know well. That is, if as you work towards it, you will find attributes of the new career or business that you may not like or just don’t want to do. That is, just like you had ideas and dreams of a future career in high school, college and later, you changed your mind. Either your likes and dislikes changed, or your understanding of the career changed. Decide a reasonable time frame for your goals. In some careers, 5 years is more appropriate while other careers may only take 6 - 9 months. Choose according to the career or goals you are setting, either 5, 7 or 10 years. Anything shorter than 5 probably indicates you are aiming too low for a real life change. This complete change might include a new career, getting out of debt, i.e. debt free, owning a home in a location you want to be. Let's say you use 5 years for your goal endpoint and you have a big picture of what you want your life to look like. Review your likes and dislikes. This should be a list just like a list of pros and cons for something you might decide to do. Big Goals are the Ultimate Satisfaction The ultimate objective or long term goal if a true breakthrough, will not be easy. You will almost certainly need to develop new skills and become familiar with new technology. If you didn't need new skills, you could step into the new career almost immediately. I'll get more into that in the episode on comfort zone and how to do it. The steps for a goal will have many very satisfying parts. You may go through a series of positions or promotions that give you knowledge, experience and credibility. If planned well, your financial position and wealth will greatly improve. A goal that is broken down in small pieces also will be easier to accomplish. However, if an end or final goal is easy, the competition will probably be extremely high. Competition will also be the highest for the most glamorous goals. There are some things you do not like to do but will be necessary to achieve your goals. If you are aware of them up front, you can understand the importance and weigh them as part of overcoming obstacles. Some of the most attractive are the hardest businesses as the competition is much higher. Owning a business, think of a restaurant, people imagine greeting people or being a chef.

Goal Setting for Personal Growth and Development

Welcome to another episode of Life Unsettled New Path, Better Future. You've all heard things like, "Everybody makes mistakes. Learning from mistakes. Don't worry about your mistakes. It's just part of the process of growing and learning." I'm going to as usual disagree with many of the gurus out there that tell you to just continue to make mistakes as you progress. This episode is extremely important but maybe a little bit more complex. As I understand the general logic that people have, you learn from your mistakes so you should expect them and you just keep on making them as part of the learning process. The more mistakes you make, the better off you are because you learn from those. Well that sounds good, but what are some of the keys to making those mistakes and why and what circumstances is that a bad idea? First of course the good. Yes, by not worrying too much about mistakes and realizing you can correct them and learn from them, you have less fear, less hesitation. You move forward and take on new things and do new things. That's really, really important, and that's where most of the stress or emphasis is. But that's also just in part. It is good in many situations, but when is it bad and how do you learn? Well when do you have to make a mistake? The idea is that first there's two types of learning. One is from actually making mistake, another is actually looking, researching, understanding, thinking through something logically. You have the two differences. I refer to one as wisdom and one as knowledge. Knowledge is something that you can acquire, somebody can pass it on to you. Wisdom is something for some reason you just can't logically deduce it. It's why over thousands of years we tend to make as human beings some of the same mistakes over and over again. I have a chapter in my book, "The Mechanics for Breakthrough Success", on that. You can find it on Amazon.  Hopefully when they refer to mistakes, they are referring to wisdom, because otherwise you should be able to get it and learn from somebody else, something logically and then make progress a lot faster. That's going to be a key thing and that is the speed and time. If they're referring to wisdom, what's wrong with learning from other people's mistakes instead of just your own? I have an episode there where we learn from other's mistakes, OPM. That's not other people's money. It's learning from other people's mistakes. That is when you see something else, observe it, think of the why, think of what happened, learn from that. Or if you have somebody who's a mentor or somebody that you truly trust in certain situations, in those situations should you take their idea over your own? One could say they already have the wisdom that you don't. So if you disagree, should you take your own idea or somebody else's? I've explained that in another place where I actually was in that situation. As I thought it through, here was this some respected person. He was a professor at Hofstra University. He had an idea. He couldn't really convince me or logically explain to me why his idea was better. Nor could I explain to him why my idea was better. So which one should I take? Well it turns out that almost everybody will take their own idea. What's wrong with that? Well, it makes think like the two of us staking our ideas like a game on it. Now imagine the Las Vegas odds makers are taking the bets and laying down the odds. What do you think is going to be the biggest odds on favorite? He will be of course. So why don't I take his? Either way I'll learn, but I might be on the right path. And it becomes even more important to be on the right path if it is time dependent. What do I mean by that? What happens if you only get one shot? What if it's going into an interview? What if it's going to present something? Or what if it's for your retirement? You only have one opportunity to live your life for your retirement. So why should I care?

106 – Everybody makes mistakes Learn from mistakes

Today I'm talking about sales, sales process and the sales environment and the business environment. Do we all think of it in certain ways as we've always experienced walking into stores, online even, walking into a car dealership? Things are changing very rapidly now and in the near future. I want to go over a couple of the things that are changing, and have changed, recently. Really to my entire surprise is how fast those changes are about to take place. Now, it's important, of course, that we understand and adapt to the changes that are already taking place. The changes that are in the near future are even more awesome. The average consumer today researches his information to make a purchase. Over 50% of them do this before they even have any interaction with any sales associate. Now, think of that. That's a whole lot of difference between what it was in the past, but it also means that the sales associate has a very different purpose today than in the past. In a couple of years, it's expected to be over 80%. Are you ready? The biggest thing this means is that the salespeople really need to be interacting with potential consumers before they ever become the consumer for your product or your company. That is, doing things on social media. In fact, even if it's not the exact same customer, the understanding and what's going on plus the idea that they may be captured within the sales research process, along with that more mobile devices today are used than desktops, and it's expected to be 80% in the very near future. 93% of people doing research on mobile make a purchase. Think of that in terms of how important it is then to be on mobile, given it's the dominant search criteria today, and that 93% of those people are going to make a purchase after doing that research. How do you become aware of their search and use it? First, how do you make sure that everything you have, your web site and everything else, is mobile-friendly? It's a lot different than just making slight changes in the size and positioning of the interface. Now, one key point to make is what should you do if you have sales associates, particularly if you're in a store? You've got a store or storefront. For your sales associate, one of the best things you can do, make sure they have mobile devices with them. They can facilitate. Help the customer do research. Obviously, if you hand the customer something to do research with and talk to them about it, you have a much better chance of making that sale in your store than a competitor, providing you have a good story or a good store. Now, with all the information, cloud-based and now we see artificial intelligence being used. Yes, today, artificial intelligence is already being used in many of the apps that you have on your phone. What does that mean? It means they're adapting to your decisions and your process, the way you click and the things you do, such as your location. Yet, with all the data that's being gathered right now, and tons of information and data being gathered, from everything that you visit, everything that you click, the searches you do, et cetera. How far will it go? Today, companies are using approximately 12% of that data so far. This is a huge set of business opportunities. Now, you might think they are using so little because the data's so overwhelming, but it's not that. Some of the things that basically the technology is catching up with the data, but it's catching up incredibly fast. I went just this past couple of days, to the Digital Summit in Philadelphia, and it was amazing, some of the things that were discussed there. They also had one of the sponsors was IBM's Watson, and it was interesting to see that and how it's related and how it's actually being used by individual companies. There were a whole bunch of other companies there too, to help and facilitate everything from marketing to social media. Now, sales is going to be very, very personal,

105 – Sales Process Changing at Hyper Speed

The future marketing like everything else today is impacted by technology. Most people today have no idea how much information on them is changing marketing to them. In the future marketing, companies will use AI. VR and augmented reality to build marketing for them specifically based on what they do and did. Today, we’re going to continue from a previous episode where we talk more about what was going on with sales and the sales process. Let's talk a little bit more now about the technology and the future that’s coming up as well as what is existing today and what we have to look for. Now, to carry on a little bit from last week, we talked about social media, sort of the final part, the final cut. With social media, you can, today, build relationships and build relationship with people who are influencers in your area or your field, as well as people who may potentially be influencers within the sales process of your business, of your product, but relationships can’t be abused. There are some approaches that are really weird and they reek of the time when people thought that they could do it with business cards. There was actually even some car dealer or something or a used car salesman. He used to talk about and teach people how to just buy tons of business cards and leave them all over the place. Throw them places, et cetera, and it’s almost like we have some of those people out there. As you’ll notice in social media whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, you go and make a contact and somebody sends you back an immediate message saying, “Oh, here’s what I do and here’s what I’m selling. Are you interested?” Well, that’s today considered very obnoxious. It's annoying and while it might work once in a while and will cause stories to be told about how I did this. Some will say I generated sales without thinking. It’s the without thinking part that really is troublesome because it’s not going to build a good business. What will build a business today, and future marketing? Of course, more and more so, it’s customer service. Customer service now is always on. Think of not just like your instant TV but it’s always on. Customers have access today to more information from other customers, as well as ratings, et cetera, some of it false. You have to monitor things for that reason. It’s why you often hear that buyers are right now considered to be 65%, two-thirds of the way through the sales process because of research before they even reach out to the sales person in your company or any of the company for your product or competitive product. That number is expected and will probably grow easily to 85 plus percent. How do you get ready? That tells us two things. Sales is rapidly removing the salesperson. What is it replaced by? Customer service, information, the things that make your company and your product more attractive and how comfortable that person is. Get back to building that relationship with existing, as well as potential customers. Today, you can already geotarget to such an extent. You are, say, a real estate agent in a particular area, you don’t need to blast in advertisement into the newspaper. A car dealer doesn’t have to blast an advertisement into the newspaper. They can actually target people who are interested in cars and thinking about buying a car based on social media characteristics that already exist within their very targeted market area. Technology is changing even more and those changes are going to accelerate quite a few things. Before I talk about what they will accelerate, keep in mind why you need to be interested in this tech that’s coming out. Don’t say, “Well, I’m having trouble keeping up,” because quite frankly, this technological change that’s occurring gives you or your competitors the opportunity to substantially increase market share, become closer to the customer, and possibly step in front of you in the line of information that the customer’s seeking. Now,

104 – Future Marketing – Customer Sourced

Today is the episode on marketing today. Marketing, I'm gonna break it all down into two parts. Originally I thought this was going be one piece, but it turns out that it's just too big. And one of the things, and reason that I want to separate it is, there's not just what's going on today. As I've mentioned many times, technology is moving just so fast that we really have to plan, or at least be aware, of what's happening towards the future. So, we will be taking a look at a second part next week, and this week we're talking about what's going on today, what you can do. Now, marketing is different than it has been years ago, not in the sense that the customer has changed at all, not at all. However, everybody is able to focus so much better, and refine their marketing to such a degree, because of all the information available today, and the new ways of marketing that are available today. So you have to really know your customer better, and that's where, really, marketing today starts, and begins very much with customer service, customer satisfaction, and learning from those experiences and those customers. This will all give you the ideas, of course, on how to attract many new customers and expand your market greatly, but the idea is to first understand them well through those means. Now, that means leveraging your community, networking with the customers, whether you have groups or information or whatever, run competitions. That is, if there's any way you can put together some sort of competition, or experience, or something that the customer can have with your product or with you, that can be a great way to both build loyalty and gain information. Starting off today, YouTube, webinars, et cetera, you don't want to waste time, or other people's time, but you see so much about how you can turn around and learn just about anything on YouTube today, or eHow, et cetera. So one of the ideas is, of course, to put some out on your own. Yes, there may be others out there. Can you do it better? Can you do it well? Can you do it in such a way to demonstrate your product and how to use it; not selling at all, just engaging with the customer so that you become an authority. If you become an authority, or at least thought of as an authority, particularly if you're in a local area, you become more attractive. If you're worldwide, it's the same thing. So the idea is to give it away for free; that is a free class, free seminar related to your product, doing a demo. You could be a local hardware store. Recently, interestingly, and that's why I mention it, I was asked how could they survive. They were talking about, you know, there's Lowe's and Home Depot, and how are they gonna survive. Well, first of all, keep in mind, they probably can't survive on price. So what do they do? They have to have other dimensions; know and understand your customer well, maybe you can survive or do better, or at least lengthen your lifespan, by turning around and being more informative. That is, teaching, more involvement with the customer, more involvement with the person walking through your store. Now, also look at who's coming in, or who is arriving as a customer, who's been thinking about you. Learn from other businesses; what are they doing? Competitive analysis, again, is a great way to learn a great deal. What do they do, what do they present, how are they doing? Just because they advertise a certain way it doesn't mean that it's working, but it does give you some ideas. It does not have to be your industry, for some things. For example, when I was doing a lot of work with the automotive industry, what I used to keep, really files and files of, are the top advertisements for major hotels and luxury items. Why? Because what they were selling was style, luxury, et cetera. So that gave me some great insights and ideas also, that you just relate over to another industry. Today the big thing of course is using videos to market your busin...

103 – Marketing Today; Social Media and Customer Focus

The second episode of eight in comprehensive business strategy, target marketing, in the overview of building or expanding a strong business. This episode addresses the following topics and questions. Who are your customers and targeting your prospects? Use the attributes of your product or service and describe well what it will do for them They only care about the benefit to them Watch and survey with customer satisfaction to either learn possible expansions or to at least find who they are and what they like and don’t like. It is the customers' perspective that is crucial, not yours or your friends. What do they do? Where do they live? How do they use your product or service? They may id something that you didn’t think was in your marketing. In an earlier episode, I discussed how to increase the probability of success in business. Does the picture you had of customers before you started match your real customers Why do they buy your product? Why from you? What excites them? What is valuable to them in your product? If you can answer and reexamine these questions you wil be ready to market you product and will later be ready for expansion and growth!

102 – Target Marketing & Build Customer Loyalty

So now is the first step in looking at business strategy, your product line strategy. What is your product line strategy or business line strategy? How are you going to expand your product line over time? Now this doesn't matter whether you're just starting out, whether you're about to start, or you've been going for a little while. Even at the very beginning as you're planning your business, you say you only have one product or one service. It doesn't matter. You have to think of expansion in the future and start it from the beginning, and I'll explain why right now. There's an old adage in business; grow or die. I heard that for the first time from my accountant many, many years ago, 25 or so years ago. It really is true. But, let's take a look at how you might grow. If you're going to grow, most likely you're going to have to either expand your products and that could be to related products, or it could be variations of versions of the current product you have. Now why do I say related products? A lot of products are complimentary in that you buy one, and you will probably have a large percentage of people who buy another. It reminds me of two different scenarios. One was when we studied early about complimentary products if you ever noticed in the ads in supermarket magazines, you'll see things like a sale on bacon or there might be a sale on eggs. Why is there a sale on one and not the other? Because the one draws you in but then you will buy the other more than likely. The same thing with peanut butter and jelly. A lot of different things go together, i.e. complementary. I saw a commercial oh probably about 10 years ago that really made a point that I had been trying to make so many times and had made, but it was a lengthy thing. Now I could just point to the commercial. You might remember it but if not, I'll replay the idea. There was a guy who worked in the store. This is a supermarket. He's over in the vegetable area, and he picks up a bag of those little bitty carrots and he says loudly, "Why are we selling these carrots?" Now all of a sudden a voice from overhead comes loudly and says, "Because the same people who buy those carrots are the ones who buy those expensive cheeses that we have in the cheese section." Now another story was I went to a supermarket and they had ... it was a relatively small supermarket, but it was the one that was close ... nearby to us. They stopped selling whole milk. Now I went up to them and said, "What are you doing this for? How come you seem to have run out?" They said, "No, no we don't sell that anymore. There's not enough people buying it." I had to teach them a little bit of economics. You guessed it. I said, "Well, the problem is if you don't have whole milk and I want it, it is considered a staple, not just in my house but in many other homes. Even those few people who want to buy whole milk, if you don't have it, we have to go to another store. Now, are we going to come here and then go to another store just for milk or are we just going to go there and buy everything?" Needless to say, within two weeks they had reengaged and had started selling whole milk again. Now this is just a quick lesson in how products are related. Now let's get back to your business. As I said, you have to plan ahead of time right at the beginning to sell more products and services to your existing customers but also to perform market segmentation analysis to understand what your customers want and how you might sell variations of products or other related products to them. Start by focusing on the products that you're about to sell or the product that you're about to sell or service or are doing right now and understand much more about your customer and that will not only decrease the marketing efforts but it will open doors to give you an idea of what other products might be related or relatable. Now how do you do this? Well of course you target your new customer market or mar...

101 – Product Line Strategy, Service Strategy

Business strategy is often overlooked in small businesses. Too often a small business while a way to pick up some extra money or to gain financial freedom, neglects a comprehensive business strategy. There are over 40 million people in the United States with side gigs. Now, these don’t even include people that have separated from there job and set up their own business. I wonder how many of those 40 million would be able to have a complete business if they looked a more closely at strategy. There are an additional 500,000 people per month starting new businesses. This episode is meant to touch on the eight points that everyone, regardless of the size of their business, should be familiar. The detail and motivation of each is contained in the audio of the episode. However, here is a brief overview of what they mean. Listen to the episode to understand why it’s important to anyone and any business. The eight categories are: 1. Product line - this not only includes what you’re selling now, but what you might want to sell in the future. 2. Targeting your market – while current trends and recommendations say concentrate on one person as you target your product or service, you may have to at least be aware of more segments. 3. Marketing - while much has changed because of technology today, much has also stayed the same. 4. Sales - there are diverse sales methods today because of online skills and techniques. However, each of these tend to attract different types of people and must be used differently. 5. Distribution – whether you have a product or service, distribution channels have expanded and your market potential depends on your distribution method and size of your channel. 6. Production - how is your product or service created? With today’s technology, however it is done, will probably be changed within the next couple of years 7. Labor - this is not only about the people you have, but how efficiently and how well skilled they are. It concerns the training. If you are one man shop with a limited time, then you need better time management, no matter how good you think you are. 8. Finance - probably the most important was saved for last. I’ve been told by my former accountant and read that 70% a business failures are caused by financial mismanagement. So, while it may be boring for some, this is a crucial area for any business. There are a wealth of opportunities to start businesses today. However, you not only want to own a business you want to increase the probability of a successful entrepreneurial venture with sound ongoing business strategy. Now, as I said this episode is to help understand the motivation and the reasoning why each of these is important to everyone in business. Over the next several episodes, each of these Will be gone into greater depth. This episode was motivated by several questions I received and the observation of so many failures for lack of understanding of business strategy and for ignoring one or more of these areas. You certainly don't have to be an expert in all these business strategy fields. That would be ludicrous as you would never get to do your business. But, you must understand an overview and be able to evaluate what kinds of advice you are getting and from whom.

100 – Business Strategy Comprehensive View

Startups, whether you’re expanding a business, starting a new business, there’s so many opportunities out there, probably more than there ever. I keep on hearing people saying that they’re looking or they’re trying to think of something to do as a startup. Don’t think necessarily of just what you’re doing. Instead, think of problems that you, your neighbors, or other people that you see have. Solving a problem is what makes a business. I want to give you a ton of examples here just really to generate thoughts, generate ideas, and start thinking about things. Some of them are very simple, some of them are a little bit harder in the sense that you have to make something or do something with it. If you have an expertise, yes, you can teach it online now. This is just taking advantage of the technology along with your knowledge. Remember what I’ve said in earlier episodes: Master what you know. Gain your authority by being the expert; not just by being recognized, but by being solidly known that you are an expert. How many times have you heard: “Oh, there’s no new ideas”? I keep on hearing that from people, I don’t know whether they want to fund things or what they’re doing, or they want to just convince you to have their help to do it, but there are ideas every day. Sometimes when you’re watching TV and looking at the advertisements, look and see: “Wow, I never thought of that. Gee, that’s interesting.” Example, this weird thing that climbs stairs. It’s basically three wheels that rolls and rotates, and it gives you the ability to climb up the stairs more easily with whatever you’re dragging behind you, a package, etc., some heavy weight. It greatly reduces the ability. Somebody thought that up. Even dash cams. What were they? They were nothing more – we already had cameras, phones, and everything. Somebody took that camera and the recording capability and put it up as a dash cam. Simple things like: Do you like crawling along the floor and wiping the baseboards? Somebody said: “Okay, I’m going to put a funny-looking cloth on a stick,” and it’s actually sort of a sponge, but it’s something that very simply you can walk along the area and clean your baseboards around your house without ever bending down. You may remember, maybe about a year or so ago, I mentioned that there was somebody with cerebral palsy that interviewed me for her podcast, and she was the first woman or first person that had an exoskeleton, that is that support around the body to help her walk, and she was the first one this is a little over a year ago. Now they are taking AI (artificial intelligence) to modify the way that the brain is thinking that the person will walk or wants to walk because of how we learn to walk in the first place when we’re younger, it basically takes, responds, and helps and adjusts to your behavior. Somebody came up with a problem, kids don’t like to carry around or they don’t have with them their bike helmet, they leave it behind, they do whatever. So what did they do? They created a folding bike helmet, and therefore it easily fits into someone’s backpack or anything that the kid has. They don’t have to have it under their arm. Solar panels have been ugly. A lot of people won’t buy them or don’t want anything to do with them because they really make the outside of the house, at least in my opinion and a lot of others that I hear about, ugly. Somebody has modified the solar panels so that they fit much like an ordinary roof and you don’t see them, you don’t notice that they’re there. These are all examples of there was a problem that somebody just solved. Isn’t that what inventions are all about? Some of them can be very simple, and you can get funded by GoFundMe or the Kickstarter campaigns, and find out ways to take your business and your creativity to the business world. Example: This is the time, and what would you think about it? You think about right now this is the time for allergies; everybody is s...

99 – Startups Unlimited Opportunities with New Technology

Let’s talk about branding and positioning your strategy. I truly mean your strategy. This can be your business or yourself. If you’re dating, you must have a brand to position yourself. You must be appealing to someone else. It doesn’t matter what you’re talking about. This is crucial. I’m going to get to products very quickly and very soon, but first I want to talk a little bit about the positioning, and the scope and breadth of a brand or a strategy. If you have it too narrow a scope, you may have difficulty broadening your appeal. We’re always hearing about find your niche. Find your niche. If you define it so narrow you will not be able to branch out very easily. You’ll have to create a new brand or a different brand, it becomes very, very difficult. However, if you can position it in such a way that it implies something more even though you’re selling. Can it easily adapt to something more, that can be very different? It depends on how you position it, how you sell it. What you do with that brand as you’re marketing it, as you’re selling it. Even Big Brands make Branding Mistakes or Over Reach Look at some of the big brands that really stand out. As soon as you mention them you immediately know what they are and what they stand for. Colgate, Heinz, Harley Davidson, Xerox. All of them have very strong brands, and you know what it means as soon as you hear the name. Wasn’t always that way. Yes, Colgate always was toothpaste, but they decided they had something else and they actually introduced lasagna. Can you imagine Colgate lasagna? Just the thought of it doesn’t seem realistic. Harley Davidson came out with a cologne. Maybe that might work for some limited group of people who like the smell of Harleys, but for most people cologne and Harley Davidson just don’t match very well. Heinz came out with another sauce. They were so good with the Heinz-57, the Heinz Ketchup, they came out with a green sauce. The green sauce for Heinz was at first attractive to a bunch of little kids. The kids thought it cool or fun, but they of course aren’t going to be the ones that are going to stay interested in something like that for a long period of time. It wouldn’t matter what the flavor and other things were. It just was not consistent with their brand image. It’s not appealing. Branding even relates to your own image You may have a very good product, but if the image of your company or your own image is very different… Relating to yourself, think in terms of social media. I’ve helped and guided several people and companies on social media habits, etc. I’ve tried to help others, but they just know better for themselves. What happens? Something like 30% of people are rejected in job interviews because of their social media content. They have branded themselves with social media. I have some people who I know who would like to expand and up-level their careers, but they’re so infatuated with the responses they get from their friends, they think: “Wow, that’s neat, that’s cool,” or whatever they say today. It fits into a narrative that may not mesh with places they’re trying to get into. While you’re branding your product or yourself you have to maintain that capability. You have to be able to have it so that you can transfer and move yourself, make progress. Success necessitates Product Positioning Regardless of the Product Success is usually includes moving from one place to the next with a different group of people. You can’t eliminate or become a distraction. On the other hand, you could have a bad product and there are ways to actually increase and develop good sales strategy even with a bad product. How do you do this? You match it. I did this with Chrysler. If you remember the Chrysler Advantage campaign, they had horrible cars at the same. As a matter of fact, when I brought this campaign idea to them, they said: “We don’t have any advantages. We don’t have anything.” At that time they were in the depths of depravi...

98 – Branding, Position your Business and Self

Best to listen to the 8 minute episode. In the meantime though, how is hiring of employees as well as contractors and advisors influencing customer satisfaction. Why do some companies have great customer satisfaction and others seem to be never able to attain it? I go through some of the thoughts and observations from wondering about this topic. Comparison of Companies I first noticed some of the great attitudes between companies and others where the customer experience is not so good. It raised many questions and I discuss those in the episode and then my conversations both about the hiring and training practices. Those around you and Others When you have some bad employees they infect your organization. Training doesn't help that may be attitudes people have carried for years. Remember your income determined by those close to you from the earlier episode (click here for more detail and understanding). Training or Hiring Correctly You might not be able to train good attitudes with the wrong people. How do you hire properly to raise customer satisfaction? Hiring employees is more important than trying the wrong employees. I discussed this topic with some good companies and found some interesting information. It seems rather clear that you should hire people with certain attitudes and experiences. In fact, it may be better to hire people without skills that can be taught but the desire.

97 – Hiring Employees, Contractors, Advisors

Let’s talk about short term goals versus long-term goals and the accompanied planning. I know that sounds dry, but: What do you think about it? You see people changing their minds all the time and doing things. It is imperative that you have those long term goals and dreams. Imagine that you have your life’s goal or your business goals for the longer term, and by the longer term then you’re able to turn around and see what you can do in the short term. That is whatever you’re doing, as long as it’s within those broader, wider, long-term parameters, you can continue on. You might change, technology might change. Be careful as most systems that use SMART goals (see Smart Goals - Really? Get Real!), almost always forget the long term. It's alright only if your a minor worker and not involved in any strategic planning. Without a Vision on the Long Term, You Miss Opportunity Remember in 1986 and ’87 I said a lot, in both speeches and on radio, that we were about to go through a technological revolution that was going to make the Industrial Revolution look small. People thought that was crazy, absolutely crazy. In ’96 when Microsoft first got into the internet, etc. and I started going around, we were talking about how that was going to disrupt and hurt the bigger companies while everybody was trying to say: “No, no, no. They’ll drown out the small companies.” You have to take a look at how technology is affecting it and looking towards that longer term. I’ve heard recently people thought about some of the things, and the slowdown in many ways of certain areas of technology: “What are we doing? How much more can we do?” Let me say, we’re just starting. It is incredible what’s happening and what’s about to happen. Some of it is actually quite dangerous, but that’s for another time or for your questions. Watson was a Long Term Goal with Short Term Goals and Projects So often we get bad examples of people really screwing up one way or the other, but here’s a great example of something that IBM did starting out with what you see now on TV: Watson. You see these little ads where Watson is out by an airplane or something, and they’re asking questions or asking Watson what do or what they should do. When that all started, think way back to 1997 when Watson first beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion (details at Wikipedia). Sure, that was a demo. They certainly didn’t get any money or weren’t expecting to make any money off of that. Even a few years later when Watson played Jeopardy against two others and won “a lot of money,” really, the money wasn’t there, it really didn’t do anything. It might have even been donated to charity, I don’t know, but that’s not important. They started to realize what they could do with artificial intelligence and decision-making. Keep in mind this started well before ’97. They built it and started to play with it, and started to do things. It wasn’t until 2014 that IBM was actually able to (and did) create a business unit around Watson. Think of it: 2011, they won Jeopardy. They also started to look at clinical treatment in 2011 because of the massive amount of technical details and data within the cancer oncology area. Actually in 2013, ’16 and ’17 they signed different agreements with different places, including Sloan Kettering, for oncology diagnostics. They created a chatterbot for children’s toys so that the children would have better interactions with their toys, better conversation. As I say, it wasn’t until 2014 that they actually created the business unit, and that’s when it took off. The first real business use was about 2011, and here we are in 2017, only six years. Keep in mind that I don’t expect you to create a new computer, world’s renowned computer operator or something, but I do say: If you’re looking at something business-wise, six years isn’t very much time, and look at what IBM is doing in the six years since they built it.

96 – Short Term Goals vs Long Term Goals

“Statistics and Bias - Which one of these are better for you, nutrition?” This may start out sounding a little bland, but I want to blow your socks off. It is also not about politics except as an example. You need to be aware because biased statistics has you following bad medicine; eating the wrong things and making bad decisions for your business or life. I may be talking about biased statistics, statistical bias, etc., but what are we really talking about? We’re talking about the information you get and hear about every single day from the media, from teachers, from other people. If you’ve ever seen some of those movies or listen to some of the songs from the 60s, one of the big themes was: Question Authority. Question Authority Question authority is important for lots of different reasons, but what causes bias? Some of it is biased in the sample the way they choose people. Who do they choose to ask about a certain question? Some of it is actually that they don’t know any better, but many times what people are doing is they’re trying to influence you and give you some reason to believe in what they believe. Now, they may be thinking that they’re doing well, but they’re giving you bad information to base your decision on and trying to convince you or tell you what is the case. I’m going to give you a lot of different examples of this, a lot of background, and a lot of things for you to think about, some of which you probably believe – but they’ve been proven wrong or certainly have not been proven that you should listen to them. It’s one of my favorite topics anyway, but it came up because I was sitting there watching some things on TV, and they were talking about the popularity of Trump. I don’t really care whether you like him or dislike him. I’m trying to talk about the statistics. Both sides might do it, all kinds of people, I don’t really care about that. What I care about is you getting good information. Politics only as a Statistics Bias Example The reason I’m talking about it is not because of Trump or politics, but because if you’re doing a business, starting up a business, or trying to grow your business. You have to be able to discern and listen to true authority (how to establish authority), and understand a little bit about what may happen in statistics. People might be doing to convince you, convince you of their product, their company, or whatever. For example, what should you be investing in? What should you be joining or starting up? There are different reasons that people have. Some of it is just bad information; they don’t know any better, they’ve just never really understood statistics enough to know what’s good or bad. I’ll give you an example of that, too, when I go into some of this. First of all, what about that political example? Just recently Rasmussen and John McLaughlin of the McLaughlin Group came out, and they both have Trump’s favorability ratings at about 50%, and John McLaughlin was being interviewed because it differs so much from some of the results that you’re hearing about from the others. They are the Quinnipiac, Gallup, and Pew polls, which all had Trump down in the 30s someplace, low 30s to low 40. What was the difference? This has got to be not ignorance but actually deliberate because it is so bad—in the Quinnipiac poll only 23% of the sample were Republicans, Gallup – 26%, and then in the Pew poll they sampled 51% Democrat. Now, in the last election only a few months ago the people that identified and voted as Republicans were 33%. They should have been polling something that was a reasonable sample of people who had voted or likely voters. You can only wonder whether this was deliberate in order to tell a story, and to sell their samples and to sell their polling. Again, forget about Trump and all that other stuff. First thing, though, this was pointed out and then in the case of Fox News they continued to talk about the polls as if they were legitima...

95 – Statistics Bias, Fake News, Question Authority

Life Unsettled gives economic, business and personal advice toward breakthrough success via insights with motivation and inspirational stories in episodes. Discover how you can catapult your career, business or personal success. Be inspired to create multiple income streams and positive outlook for now and new perspectives on retirement. Thomas speaks from experience and knowledge as a PhD in Mathematical and Statistical Economics, built several companies. Discussions include marketing, customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, social media, outsourcing, automation, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, podcasting and what it takes to be a success.

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