Success Advice
5 Strategies For Improving How You Hustle
As the story goes, after Neil Patel got offstage from speaking to 2500 marketers at a large business conference, he was approached by a woman who essentially accused him of lying about his hustle.
“C’mon Neil. You know the best way to be successful is to be born to rich parents. Look at Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Chelsea Clinton. If you didn’t go to Harvard or Stanford, you’re locked out of the club.”
What this woman hadn’t heard from Neil’s speech, despite his best efforts to share his strategies for growing successful companies like Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, KISSMetrics, and most recently Quick Sprout was how he had hustled his way from being an amusement park bathroom attendant to successfully making over $20,000 a month as a teenager through consulting. Only to go into over $1 million in debt before 20 and re-launching into what his career is now as one of the most sought-after marketers alive.
Lucky for us, and for the woman who knocked the hustle, Neil Patel has teamed up with New York Times bestselling author Patrick Vlaskovits and successful entrepreneur Jonas Koffler on a new book called Hustle, all about finding success and fearlessly beating status quo systems.
In the book, they share dozens of strategies, stories, and experiments to try in improving how you hustle, and below I share just a few of my favorites:
1. Identifying and Escaping the “Cycle Of Suck”
As entrepreneurs, certain things are out of our control but can deprive us of the ability to succeed in our work if we don’t escape their influences. Perhaps you are working hard but not really getting anywhere.
Say you sell lower-priced items in your business, or do coaching and consulting on an hourly basis rather than charging more and working with less clients. Even better, say you discount heavily to earn new business. If you aren’t careful, you may work extremely hard to get customers that leave little room for profit, require lots of customer support and administrative work, and never provide you enough cash flow at once to grow the company.
Understanding the possible “Cycles of Suck” you’re threatened with in your industry, ecosystem, and lifestyle is crucial to hustling harder. Maybe your parents are pushing you towards a path of expensive college classes that are applicable towards the career that you wish to take, from which the debt will cripple your ability to make long-term decisions or take entrepreneurial-minded risks later on, forcing you into a corporate ladder climb that’s not fun nor fast.
Each of us are faced with possible “Cycles of Suck”, but if you identify them early you can make decisions to avoid them so your hustle is highly rewarded later on.
“Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th.” – Julie Andrews
2. Practicing Small Doses of Pain
When you work out, you’re actually breaking down your muscles so they can grow back stronger than before. We understand this principle already, and realize that putting ourselves through regimented pain doses at a small scale can lead to increased resiliency later on.
However, we don’t always do this to ourselves in business or in our lives outside the gym (if we go to the gym at all). If there’s someone who annoys us to our wit’s end, we don’t attempt to compliment them once per week until our relationship improves. We don’t make twenty sales calls each day to prospects that may be slightly out of reach for our company, yet could provide great feedback on our sales process and product or service we’re providing.
Overall, we rarely change our routines and habits because doing so would be uncomfortable and therefore painful, even if it could improve our help, grow revenue in our businesses, and strengthen our professional and personal relationships.
The authors of Hustle suggest picking one tiny habit that is small, “slightly annoying or odd”, and provides long-term benefit and implementing it in the next week. After that, repeat.
3. Take More Chances
Many of us, myself included, hustle on some projects for too long without sharing them with potential customers and/or the public. By doing this, we limit our chances of hitting a homerun in business because we are taking less “at bats”.
Imagine if one YouTube channel only posted videos once every four months, yet they were of movie quality. Imagine another channel that posted daily videos at a slightly less-produced quality that were still worth watching.
As Casey Neistat’s channel has shown us, the second example will win because there are more opportunities for that content creator to have a video go viral, and with each “at bat”, the creator is racking up new views, subscribers, and total watch time on videos overall. If we run more controlled experiments as entrepreneurs, we have better chances at succeeding.
4. Seal The Deal and Make It Real
There are a lot of us who work extremely hard, yet don’t progress as fast as we’d like because we don’t make things official. In sales, we build relationships but never ask for a client’s business, and when they do agree to work with us verbally, we hesitate in getting a signed contract and wire transfer from them.
The concept of sealing the deal and making it real is all about forcing those whom you interact with to transact with you. It takes away talking and replaces it with doing.
If you want to write a book, don’t talk about doing so for months, or wait for the right inspirational muse to come your way. Set your alarm for 4:30 am and write until 8 am for one week. Share your work with a friend who doubles as an accountability partner. Now you’ve written multiple chapters of your book!
“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.” – Michael Jordan
5. Reverse Engineer The Success You Seek
Depending on your goals, you may be able to reverse engineer the process it will take to get there in record time. In a two-step process, you can fact-check yourself from wasting time if there are pre-existing or interesting solutions to problems you’re looking to solve.
First, ask yourself, “Am I framing the problem correctly?” If you are waiting for a taxi at an airport, and there is a long line, the problem isn’t necessarily the wait time, but rather the need for a vehicle to transport you to your destination. You don’t therefore have to be attached to the solution of waiting in that taxi line.
Next, see if you can determine all potential solutions, including unconventional options. In the taxi example above, perhaps you can still wait in line and get a taxi still. Or, you can order from a ride-sharing service, skip the line somehow, walk towards another transportation source like buses or other taxi lines, etc. There are always multiple ways to solve a problem, and unconventional solutions may provide faster, easier, and higher return successes.
These are just a few of my favorite hustle-honing strategies from Neil, Patrick, and Jonas’ new book. Leave a comment with your own ideas for how to improve the way we hustle.
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How to Alter Your Business Approach With Technological Advancements
Keeping up with technological trends has become a challenge for almost every business owner.
Technology’s evolution has impacted everything, and business is no exception. Keeping up with technological trends has become a challenge for almost every business owner. Entrepreneurs unable to do so are being wiped out of the market.
There is no doubt that AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) have taken over the business world. These technological advancements are impacting decision-making, success percentages, and other entrepreneurial aspects.
Adapting to these developments is integral to business success. Let’s explore how you can accomplish these milestones.
Embed the strength of AI and ML.
AI has modified business operations in major ways. For instance, companies have employed bots for customer support. These bots go through an effective learning process via Machine Learning before being able to answer like humans.
Bots can also perform detailed data analytics and make business moves with high success percentages.
ML is used more for the analysis of data chunks and generating successful predictions. This simply means that business owners do not have to worry about large-scale financial losses.
In terms of deployment and usage, a reputed company like Netflix employs machine learning for decision-making.
Blockchain is increasing the count of business opportunities
Tampering of financial transactions is quite common and causes severe monetary damage to customers. With the rise of digital payments, this risk has increased.
Blockchain is used to elevate your experience for monetary transfers. It combats penetrating events to extract confidential customer information.
Most business sectors are using block chain but finance and supply chain management sections have a higher count. These two corporate sections have several monetary deposits and withdrawals taking place.
In terms of percentage, approximately 72% and 5% of finance and supply chain firms have implemented block chain successfully.
Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Learning and Individual Development
You invest in learning some of the very important skills, including digital marketing, financial management, and how to gain customers as an entrepreneur.
You need to set up your knowledge base about doing business on Coursera and Udemy with the basics that are necessary for the business, building further by networking with experts through webinars.
Besides, Agile methodology will introduce elasticity to your company: this review and feedback system with further correction regularly will allow for enhancing efficiency and promptly reacting to the market.
Developing key skills to achieve goals
Running a business successfully is not only about having niche/domain knowledge. Business owners need to have communication / soft skills as well in addition to niche information.
Here are some key technical/domain-related areas that business owners should have a strong grip on.
Data Storage on Cloud: These days, companies do not store their data on physical servers. Therefore business owners should know how data is stored/edited/removed/updated via AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other platforms.
Data Analysis/Interpretation Qualities: These days, data is as precious as gold. Business owners with data analysis abilities make correct predictions. As a result, their ventures grow in volume.
Development/Coding Knowledge
Programming knowledge gives business owners an edge whether the application is developed in-house or outsourced. It assists in getting updates deployed and handling application underperformance without getting professional support every time.
Hacking proof framework
There is no benefit of having an advanced automated system if can be penetrated. Successful business owners have above-average knowledge of cyber security and hacking attempts. They are able to choose top-notch anti-hacking software without much of an ambiguity.
Communication Abilities/Soft Skills
Here are some key communication qualities that business owners should have:
Communication/Conversation: Business owners should use to-the-point sentences in both written and oral communication.
Issue Resolution Abilities: Business owners should be able to drill down to problems and solve them. This is done successfully only if an entrepreneur has in-depth business domain knowledge.
Agile Implementations
It is mandatory for business owners to have knowledge of iterative/agile models. With such a competitive environment, it is impossible for business owners to succeed without adopting an agile framework.
Create a productive well-crafted Business Strategy
A productive business venture starts with a clear vision. The first factor making a business successful is the idea behind it. It helps with endless growth and combating competition successfully. Katherine Philips once mentioned that business goals are inevitable if goals are set concretely.
- Goals should be based on smart achievements instead of complexity. Focus on the value that each one of them adds.
- Business objectives should not be vague. Key indicators should be constructed to measure the success/failure of each milestone.
- Be realistic when setting goals. Do not aim at impossible milestones since they can be demotivating.
- Milestones/goals need to be time-bound. Set a completion deadline for each one of them.
- Business goals should not be alien. Owners can think out of the box but not be obsolete / unrelated.
Create a productive well-crafted Business Strategy
Business owners cannot succeed without having a network. Some tips help in this case. Attend conferences and professional gatherings to connect with other entrepreneurs.
Here are some other related points business owners should pay attention to.
- Attend meetings and conferences to stay updated with trends and meet business owners who already have well-set ventures. This helps in enhancing the learning curve of new / growing entrepreneurs.
- Being a part of business communities/groups is very productive. When one shares opinions and discusses decision-making tactics, it helps in preventing errors and enhancing success rate.
- Even the most experienced business owners have mentors as learning never stops. Take part in mentorship programs so there is an assurance that you are following the correct roadmap.
Conclusion
There is absolutely no doubt that business dimensions have evolved with technological advancements. Successful entrepreneurs have grabbed these changes in due course of time and continue to evolve. On the other hand, people following old paths and conventional steps fade out of competition. In a nutshell, keep an eye on the processes and practices you follow as these factors decide success rate.
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