gary vaynerchuk

Success is a nasty, elusive little bugger, isn’t it? Is there a topic in the business space that gets covered more often, directly or indirectly, than “how to succeed”? If you think about it, nearly every how-to tip, every list of the “best WordPress plugins to use on your site”, every tutorial on how to get more traffic to your site, etc…it all centers around the ultimate hub that concerns us all…SUCCESS. How do we become successful?

Success is Not Defined by “Them”, It’s Defined by YOU

One of the reasons success is such a troublesome topic is because it is exceedingly personal. When we accept this fact, success becomes a lot simpler. Not necessarily easy…but simpler none the less. But unfortunately, most of us have not accepted it! The problem is that most of us, understandably, look to the example of others for how to define success, when we really ought to look no further than ourselves. In essence, we look at the accomplishments of others, and make those accomplishments our own goals. This is not the way to do it.

A Lesson from Gary Vaynerchuk – Not All Goals are Created Equal

It’s important to ask yourself if the accomplishment you’re trying to emulate was in fact a goal of your mentor’s to begin with. For example, we see someone like Gary Vaynerchuk with 800,000 followers, or however many it is these days, and we say “I want 800,000 followers too. How do I get 800,000 followers on Twitter like @garyvee?”

Setting a goal is a great thing…if it’s a great goal. There IS such a thing as a goal that steers you down the wrong path, so make sure the questions you ask yourself, and the goals you set for yourself are taking you in the right direction.

The fact is that Gary Vaynerchuk has never given a damn about how many followers he has on Twitter. Getting 800,000 followers was never a goal. It just happened as an automatic result of following his business plan.

Do you want to model his follower count, or do you want to model his success? See the difference?

Maybe you should model Gary’s work ethic and business philosophy…the things that actually LEAD to 800,000 followers, instead of just trying to get 800,000 followers on Twitter.

If you truly wanted to model Gary Vaynerchuk’s success, you wouldn’t give a damn about how many followers you had on Twitter either. This is just one of many examples of arbitrary goals we set for ourselves, that sound good but ultimately don’t lead us in the direction of success.

I’m just using Gary as an example because he’s a marketer and business man who I personally agree with a lot of the time. Your mentor may be someone else, but the concept is the same.

Why Success is Elusive

My point is that success is elusive for many of us for two reasons, and the first one is because often, we set goals that take us in the wrong direction. To take care of this first concern, make sure you set goals that will truly lead YOU in the direction YOU personally want to go, not goals that you believe possibly lead someone else in the direction they went. See the difference?

The Threshold of Success – How to Cross Over and Make Your Goals a Reality

Second, success has a threshold. And many of us, while we want the things success provides, are not willing to do the work. Plain and simple. I’ve worked with a lot of sales people one-on-one and in group settings over the years. Sales training like I’ve done puts you front and center with what it takes to make a business work. It also puts you front and center with the reasons they all too often DON’T work.

No business is successful without strong sales. Whether it’s a service, a product or whatever, you need sales, and I’m hear to tell you that the sales skills I aim to teach my clients are able to be learned by anyone.

If you do the work, you will get the sales, period. I’ve seen it time and time again. When a business person or sales person wants to know how to make more sales, the first place I look is at their daily production. And by production I don’t mean sales…I mean their daily work-related tasks…the work you can actually control on a day to day basis.

You cannot control whether a person is a good prospect to buy a certain product at a certain time, believe it or not. But you CAN learn to have complete control over the following factors:

• Prospecting
• Lead generation
• Lead follow up
• Presentation skills

If you are not making the money you want to online, or wherever your business is based, there is something broken somewhere in that list. Why? Because that’s all there is. Success is simple. The plain fact is that while people SAY they’re working their tail off every day, they’re either working on the wrong things (things NOT on the list above), or they’re not working as hard as they say they are.

What is the threshold of success? It is hard work…on the right things. And bottom line: most of us just don’t want to do it.

We have things we like to do, and perhaps we just don’t like prospecting. That’s fine, but if you want your business to be successful, you need to make sales, and if you want to make sales, you have to prospect. Period. End of sentence. That’s all she wrote. And if you don’t do it…or hire someone who does…your business will fail.

The reason most of us don’t make it through the threshold of success is not because we don’t work hard. We just don’t do the work that needs to be done. Perhaps the reason “successful” people seem to be at ease is because they realize how simple it is to make their goals a reality. There are, however, only four things on the list!