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Resolve to Never Make a New Year’s Resolution

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I hereby resolve…blah…blah…blah

The best resolution you could make in January is to not make a New Year’s Resolution. They rarely work, and tying them to the New Year nearly ensures they never will.

Last year I reported that 97% of people who make New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight actually weigh more 12 months later. New Year’s Resolutions enrich companies selling diets and ab-duction machines, but they don’t effect real change.

Later, Dude…
A New Year’s Resolution is almost always focused more on celebrating the decision than on resolving to be different. There isn’t a wit of difference between Mardi Gras and New Year’s Resolutions. Both of these “decision” mechanisms are built on putting things off until a special date where you can then celebrate the decision to start losing weight, working out, spending time with family, or giving up smoking.

Until then, you can go on pigging out, being mean, ignoring family and smoking like a chimney. Now that you’ve announced you will quit on some future date, your self-destructive behavior is actually permissible to “get it out of your system”. Mardi Gras and New Years makes your actions downright celebrated – get your glutton on, because soon you’ll be in a forsaken and tortured desert of good living.

Getting Ready to Get Ready to…
Here’s a clue – the more you need to point to January 1 as the day “I will absolutely start doing or stop doing x”, the less you probably mean it. If it’s important, change now. If you have to walk on coals or chant at your vision board to prepare for the big day, you can save yourself some self-imposed guilt and just keep going with what’s not working.

My mother passed away a few weeks ago. She used to tell me, “Chuck, there’s no such thing as excuses, there’s not even reasons, there are just priorities.” She lived that out well, making no excuses and simply doing the things she found important. She didn’t live to make decisions on special days; she just DID what she VALUED.

How to Change Something
We do what is a priority, not what we SAY is a priority. Last year I gave you three few practical suggestions on how to DO our priorities. I added a fourth this year:
1) Don’t “get motivated” Most of this walk-on-coals stuff is emotion-based and has no lasting power. You’re either committed or you aren’t. I don’t get motivated to brush my teeth. I either do it or I don’t.
2) Run toward something, not away from something. People who want to lose weight rarely lose any. “I want to stop being fat,” is running away from being fat. “I see myself living a great lifestyle,” is running toward something. Run toward a great life, not away from being fat. Read, Get a Second Planet.
3) Make decisions through a new lens. See yourself and/or your business AS IF YOU WERE ALREADY THERE. Read last years New Year’s Resolution post on how Peter Arnell went from 406 lbs to 150 lbs and stayed there. If you can’t already CLEARLY envision yourself exercising three times a week, don’t even start.
4) Diligence, not Discipline – Anybody can have the DISCIPLINE to do something for 30 days. But few people will have the DILIGENCE to continue for the rest of the year. Diligence is a drip system. Do the right thing a little bit every day – it will add up to something big down the road. Diligent rules; discipline drools.

The above four steps are all about intentionality vs. hope. Intention is the key because:

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

New Year’s Resolutions are full of emotion-based “hope”. Real decisions are full of intention and don’t need a special day or audience to be walked out into the open.

Don’t get there. Be there.
Don’t gin up the motivation to do something on a special day. Just start living the way you know will make you more successful. Today. It’s OK to cheat on your New Year’s Resolution and start it a few days before January 1. Especially if you actually want to change.

Where do you want to be in 2013? Tell the world here, be there inside today, and then let’s go do it on the outside for the whole year. Carpe Diem – seize TODAY and enjoy doing changing something that will make your life, and maybe even your checking account, richer.

How to Get Five and a Half Months Off Every Year

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After 15 years of not.

Two partners I’m working with are doing $40 million a year with 35 employees. For years they’ve had 2-4 weeks of distracted annual vacation, filled with Crackberry emails and calls, while the family was having fun. Now they’re both going to get five and a half months every year. How?

They haven’t changed who they are. They aren’t smarter, better educated or more enlightened than they were for the last 15 years. But somehow they’re going from a lousy lifestyle to a great lifestyle in just 15 months.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

For years they intended two things and hoped for one. See if you can relate:
Their two intentions for 15 years:
1) To work really hard.
2) To make some money.

Their one big hope for 15 years:
1) …and we hope it all works out.

They got exactly what they intended – hard work and some money, but not what they hoped for – a life. The fatal assumption coming out of the Industrial Age is that if we just have money, we’ll somehow get a life, too. These guys are living proof that money doesn’t equate to a great life.

So how did they make such a life-changing transformation of their business in such a short period of time? Simple. They changed their intentions.

1) They no longer intended to work hard. Why in the world would you make that an intention? But we all do.

2) They intended to get a life, not just hoped for one, then started making all their decisions to accomplish that objective.

3) And they intend grow the business and make more money in less time.

Peter Arnell wrote a book called “Shift” where he described how he went from being a 406lb man to a 150lb man. The first step – “I decided to do it.” The strength of that initial decision determines the outcome. If you are tired enough of the treadmill, you will intend to get a life. The partners in this business made a clear and final decision that things were going to change, and change radically. If you’re not at the end of yourself yet, you won’t make this decision.

The second thing Peter did to go from 406lbs to 150lbs was even more important. He said “from that moment on [after making the clear and final decision], I saw myself as a 150lb man.” He even went out that week and fired some clients who he felt were the clients of a 406lb man. He wasn’t hoping, he had clear intention to get to 150lbs and saw himself already there. And every decision he made going forward was filtered through the question “Is this the decision of a 150lb man or a 406lb man?”

My clients have done the same thing. Once they decided to both take five and a half months a year off, they started making all their decisions in light of what they needed to do to begin to take five and a half months off per year, while still growing their revenue. Their intention changed from working really hard to working really effectively, distributing the workload, finding geniuses already in their business to take over things, and a long list of other actions designed to get them off the treadmill.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for. The biggest reason this is working for them is because they changed their intentions, and decided they could make more money in less time.

They got what they intended.

You Only Need One
By the way, they’re not special or unique, and neither are you. Every business owner can do this – every single one. As Henry Ford said, “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Intention. There may be 1,000 ways to keep you from doing this and only five ways that it might work for you. How many do you need? Just one, and the sold-out intention to make it happen.

What are your primary intentions? Are you intending to work hard and make money, or are you intending to get a life as a result of owning a business?

What’s the one way off the treadmill that will work for you? Stop focusing on the 1,000 ways to keep you from doing it and focus on the one way off.

Intend to get a life, then make every decision intending to make more money in less time. You’ll get what you intend, not what you hope for.

Then go public here and declare your intentions. I look forward to hearing how you’re doing it.

Yesterday I Met a Rich, Self-made Hostage

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Riches vs. Wealth – the big lie.

I was stunned when I heard it – “Next summer is our 30th anniversary, and I’m planning a full two-weeks off work to celebrate with my wife.” This proud declaration from a man who owns a $30 million a year company demonstrates what a sad life he has. This is a man who lives in abject poverty with no clue how to run a business.

I see it all the time. Business owners whose personal lives are train wrecks, with no time to invest in their kids, spouse, or non-existent hobbies, and no time to even think about creating meaning in their own lives. They are hostages to their businesses with no end in sight for their incarceration.

People think this guy is a great business owner because he works all the time and has a lot of toys he doesn’t have time to use. I think he lives in abject poverty.

Riches vs. Wealth
Riches is just money. Wealth is freedom. Freedom is the ABILITY TO CHOOSE what to do with my time. Time is more valuable than money. It usually takes money to buy time, but unless the specific goal is to buy time, money can make us hostages.

Money does not bring freedom. Time brings freedom. This man has millions and has no freedom. He readily admits that if he is gone from his business for a few days things begin to go awry. He has built a $30 million business that depends on him personally being there every day! He is a hostage to his business. He is not a business owner; his business owns him. He lives in abject “time poverty”.

Intending to receive time, not just money
You get what you intend, not what you hope for. You can just hear this man starting his business. He intended to do two things:
1) “I’m going to work REALLY hard” and
2) “I’m going to make me some money.”

He got exactly what he intended – hard work and some money. And he is trapped by the hard work. He did not go into business intending to get both time and money from his business, just money. He HOPED that getting money would give him time and create freedom, but we don’t get what we hope (wish) for, but what we intend to get.

A Day a Week, a Week a Month, a Month a Year
I built five businesses like he did and was trapped as a hostage every time. This time around I intended to do something different – I decided this next business was going to give me both money AND time, and everything I did from the beginning was driven by forcing my business to produce both.

As a result, I now have every Friday off, the last week of every month off, two weeks every three months, and the month of February. I also now get the unintended bonus of every other Monday off, and only work a half day on the other one. A three-day, to three-and-half day week, with 16-20 weeks off each year is something I’m getting used to. I use only a few weeks for vacation, and CHOOSE (freedom) to invest the rest in Africa and helping others build businesses around the world.

A recent American Express OPEN survey found 66% of business owners haven’t taken time off in several years. And of those few who do take vacation, 68% of them check in daily to try to run things from their beach chair (we didn’t call once from New Zealand for 3 1/2 wks last February).

The famous Framingham Heart Study found those who took regular vacation are 32% less likely to die from heart disease and 20% less likely to die from anything else.

The objective of your business should be to build your Ideal Lifestyle. If you’re proud that you finally get two weeks off, you need to reassess how you are running your business and your life, and refocus on WEALTH (time/freedom), not just RICHES (money).

Is this just for special people? No. I built five businesses and never got off the treadmill. The sixth time I simply decided/intended to do it differently, and, what a surprise, it turned out different.

You get what you intend, not what you hope for.

What are you intending to do with your business and your life?

A Business Maturity Date Really Works

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We bought our tickets to NZ today.

Two years ago, in March of 2009, I wrote this blog http://chuckb.me/xF about how I started my business 3 1/2 years ago in March of 2007. Four years after we started we’ll have a Mature Business, which is what we intended to do.

In March of 2009, I wrote about March of 2007:

“2 years ago this week, March 6, 2007, I started my business…

But something is different. I have a Business Maturity Date…

In 3 years, 11 months, 2 weeks, and 22 ½ hrs. from when I started, I expect to be done building a business that makes money when I’m not around. I’ve got a lot of work to do and the clock is ticking relentlessly, the train is screeching, belching, and going in circles, and at the same time I’ve got little time left already to build this business to maturity.

My Business Maturity Date? Friday, February 18, 2011, at 10am – 1 year 11 months and two weeks from now. At 8:30am on that morning I will have a staff meeting and turn over the business to them to run, leaving the office in good hands, and be out of the office by 10am to pack my bags. At 6:10pm that evening my wife and I will be on a plane to Auckland, New Zealand, her dream vacation, for three weeks of celebration. We land in Auckland at 7:25am Sunday morning. The trip will cost $12,380.”

There were three problems with that blog post nearly two years ago. 1) The plane now leaves at 5:30pm, not 6:10, 2) it lands at 7:05am, not 7:25am, and 3) the trip will cost $12,840, not $12,380.

But other than that we’re on schedule. Our business will be making money while we’re on vacation for three and half weeks in New Zealand and it will be in great hands while we’re gone. In most ways we’re farther ahead than we thought we would be in 2009 when I wrote that blog post.

It shouldn’t be surprising because I’ve said for four years “You get what you intend, not what you hope for.” And for a number of years we’ve been intending to build a business that would make money while we’re on vacation.

We stopped intending to work hard and make money a long time ago because that always gave us exactly what we intended – hard work and SOME money.

Does it change you a little bit even reading this? Imagine what it’s done to me, and what it will do to you when you make the same commitment. It will change you forever.

What are you intending to do?