I was listening to an interview yesterday between Frank Kern and Gauher Chaudhry. These are two guys who have made fortunes, 7-figure fortunes, on the Internet. One of the comments that was mentioned in passing was “It’s hard to imagine not being able to make money on the Internet.” They have been doing it so long, that so many of the things they do are second-nature. If it was all stripped away, they could recover within 30 days, before the next mortgage payment was due.
I may not have achieved their level of financial success, but I have a very similar belief. Once you know the work it takes; once you know what works and what doesn’t; once you understand that (as Robert Kiyosaki would say) money is an idea, you begin to realize that it is all mental at this point.
I have the full belief that I could give away my business, and within a very short period of time I could recover. It’s not arrogance – it’s confidense. And, the longer I am at this, the more confident mentally I am with this idea.
I hear the opposite of that quite a bit. People struggling for dollars to live on. As I’ve mentioned before, I understand that feeling. I was there. I don’t ever want to forget where I’ve been. I am very, very blessed to be where I am, but the biggest thing I have come to realize is difference from where I was 5 or 6 years ago and today is a mental difference.
My mental strength has grown through experience, trial and error, long hours, success and failure, education, personal connections, etc. In some ways, it was there before, but I had so much self doubt and a lack of confidence, that it would slip away quickly.
I am grateful for my wife, Traci, who believed in me when I refused to. I had hit bottom in many ways, and with her and some others from church, things began to build. An elder from our church, Bernie, was one of the other key people in my life. He encouraged me more than he’ll ever know.
One of the things that Traci and Bernie did was help erase my self-doubt so I could be the man God created me to be. It’s kind of like Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. He was the rightful king of Gondor, but was the refused to be king. He had to overcome his own self-doubt before he could take on the role he was destined to fulfill.
Here’s the deal – it IS all mental. Mental strength is a journey. Back in 1988 I climbed Mount Kahuzi (3,308 meters or 10,853 feet) in Zaire, Africa (now the Congo). There were certain points or camps along the way. They were markers in our climb to let us know how far we’d come and where we needed to go to reach the summit. At each marker point we were amazed at how high we were and how satisfying it was to have persevered to the next marker camp.
I have reached several of these markers in my life and they have shaped me into a different man than I was even a year ago. They say a mind once stretched beyond it’s original dimmensions can never return to it’s original shape. That is so true. I am excited and pumped about what lies ahead.
Take your first steps to start and keep climbing on your journey until you’ve reached the first marker point. Then, move on toward the next. Before you know it, the heights you will have reached would be unimaginable in the past.
One of my dreams is to go back to East Africa and climb Mt. Kilamanjaro. It has a peak at 19,340 feet. Kili also has camp points along the way. But, the altitude, the snow, the cold, and the terrain make it much more difficult. It is not a mountain I am preparing now for that dream.