The Key to Success: The Ultimate Secret
By Kevin Hogan http://www.kevinhogan.com/
[This is a reprint of an article written by Mr Kevin Hogan and contains some extremely valuable information for anyone and everyone. The "Key" is not a new app, or a new theory. It's not another home study course or 12lb box of material to learn. I know you're gonna like this.]
This article contains the first-ever $100,000 Key. About 15 times per year, I put a $10,000 key in an article.
The single most profound piece of information for achievement and success that I’ve ever written about is in this article. Pass it along to your friends….
….The intention is pure.
You truly want to do something to make your life mean something.
Maybe…You pick something that sounds fun, interesting, challenging or something that has a support system…like network marketing.
I don’t like it.
Lousy choice for a business until you’ve already succeeded in business or are a top 10% salesperson. Network marketing has too many drawbacks for people who haven’t been successful in business. Avoid it. I can’t tell you how many people have told me they were going to make millions only to make their way to bankruptcy court.
Exceptions?
You bet. I’ve seen some people do real well with PrePaid Legal and Primerica which both have solid business models and some advantages other products/programs don’t have…but I’d still pick an entrepreneurial venture. Save Amway for later.
A support system is nice but it isn’t absolutely necessary for million-dollar achievement.
Another possibility?
Internet affiliate programs are some of the easiest, fastest ways to build a kick-butt income. They might be two-tiered, which is fine and they DO qualify as a true entrepreneurial venture.
That means YOU determine whether you will succeed or not. It’s hard to say a person has 100% control in anything in life, but on the Internet you have about as much control and self-determinism as you can get in life.
So, for your first venture, you pick a business that doesn’t require recruiting. (This way your friends still love you at Christmas.)
You might do any of a lot of things, but you finally DO something.
You start the “going into business process.”
The thinking process goes OK.
The planning process goes OK.
The first phone calls or set of actions are uncomfortable.
Uh oh….
Because selling is uncomfortable, or making your first website is uncomfortable or whatever, you decide that this is probably “wrong for you.”
I was mentoring a friend who was getting ready to start a service business ealier this week.
“My marketing plan is to hang those things from door knobs. I’ll service the people who call in.”
“You’ll go broke.”
That hurts so bad to say that.
It hurts worse to hear it.
The person thinks you’re (me) “being negative.”
No.
Just saving them $100,000, bankruptcy and their future.
It takes almost no time to borrow $100,000, start a business and kill it, and then wonder why it happened, or what went wrong.
Where things go wrong is at the intersection of you and your discomfort.
When you do something you aren’t familiar with, or comfortable with, or you inherently don’t like, you rarely will find the stick-to-it-iveness to continue.
Let’s break this down to what happened to you…
Whatever it was, you got this FEELING inside that you couldn’t make the phone call or knock on the door or make the website.
(Any of these actions requires no mental skill whatsoever. Children aged 6 can successfully do any or all of these things.)
Or, you couldn’t get past writing the third chapter.
Or you got the web page up but trying to figure out the program for the page was too frustrating.
You got down.
You FELT bad.
You felt a bit depressed.
You felt like you KNEW you were doing the wrong business model.
You might have gotten angry.
You might have cursed. “IT” DIDN’T WORK.
And this of course is the most likely result. People truly think that “it” doesn’t “work.”
Or the better and more definitive cop out….”It wasn’t meant to be.”
Here’s the hard truth.
Write this down on paper, paint it on the wall. Post it on your computer;
- It has nothing to do with a positive attitude.
- It has nothing to do with what you “believe.”
- It has nothing to do with positive thinking.
- It has nothing to do with working smarter instead of harder.
- It has nothing to do with having your intentions aligned with the universe and attracting something.
- It has nothing to do with what was meant to be.
- It has nothing to do with ‘the Secret’.
The answer is simple.
You didn’t do two things that are necessary for success:
1. You didn’t CONTINUE until it was DONE.
2. You didn’t walk through the fire of discomfort, pain and fear.
You quit when it got hard.
You quit when it got frustrating.
You got tired.
You got angry.
You were upset.
You were apathetic.
You let your feelings get in the way of what you wanted in life and then to make it all OK, you determined:
a) it doesn’t work or
b) who really wants to do X anyway?
There’s a lot of people being suckered right now by a popular book that tells you to get in alignment with your feelings for things to work out.
If you do that…
….it is a 100% guarantee that you will ultimately fail. (Usually quickly.)
Don’t misunderstand…Feelings aren’t the “enemy.”
There’s not a thing wrong with feeling upset, angry, tired, apathetic, happy or sad.
Feelings are a wake-up call that you have not become comfortable in a specific life experience.
Feelings of discomfort talk to you. They say to you that you belong in your hamster wheel…but you misinterpret them to read, “this isn’t right for me.”
Feelings aren’t very smart.
They have zero IQ.
Interpreting something with no “sense” to it is something no one is taught in school or anywhere else.
And it’s not your fault.
No one ever taught you how to TRULY understand feelings.
Without going into a big long diatribe on neuropsychology, feelings and emotions, let’s just put it this way:
You simply can’t run your life based on your feelings or you will be doing all the things that “feel good” all the time…addiction.
Run your life on your feelings and you fail. And, you fail fast.
“Honey would you feed the baby?”
“I haven’t slept in a week. I’m to exhausted. Would you please?”
“No can do. I don’t feel like it. My feelings aren’t aligned with my intention to watch the game.”
Baby dies.
Oh well. At least they felt good.
People who run their lives based on their feelings become addicts of “feeling good and avoid feeling anything painful or bad.”
It’s only human nature.
And the addict won’t change.
Feeling “good” is simply too fun and easy…until they take the furniture, the house and the kids.
When you walk through the fire of your feelings, fear and pain, you WILL ULTIMATELY come to the point that your new actions become familiar.
It can take a week or two or three or four depending on how much you are involved. It doesn’t take long but getting past the first day or two or three is a toughie.
So, now, for the $100,000 KEYPOINT…
$100,000 KEYPOINT:
ACTION: Walk through the fire of your feelings, fear and pain and you will ultimately FEEL COMFORTABLE and FAMILIAR with all of the NEW ASPECTS of Life/Experience/Business/Relationship.
Next up is MOMENTUM.
Momentum is SO important.
If you dedicate 10 hours per day, 7 days per week, to your project X for six weeks, it will be almost a sure thing that you will succeed over the next 10 years at Project X.
Your life will COMPLETELY change.
You will be COMPLETELY transformed.
You will be CAPABLE of just about anything that is humanly possible.
But only a teeny tiny percentage of people will be willing to be that uncomfortable for six weeks.
After all, they work already work 8 hours a day plus commuting.
They want BALANCE when they get home.
They are so screwed.
Let’s put it this way:
Women will go through discomfort for 9 MONTHS to make a baby.
(If you think you were that important, even if you went to the baby classes, you’re so self-deluded that you’ll never make it in business. You went to the classes for one reason. To convince your wife you were worth not killing.)
Women go 9 months…but men?
The guy won’t spend 9 WEEKS to create a financial support system for the baby and Mom. (And you wonder why we are expendable as men? Hello?)
That Mom is pregnant 24/7. There is no “longer day.” They are all long. And I’m flat out serious.
Oh and don’t think I’m being politically correct. Two years later that Mom will go to a job and get paid less than a man because she missed two years of whirlwind changes in business that she couldn’t humanly have kept up with.
Success is about reality. People who whine that something is too hard: I got no problem with that.
People who whine that something is too hard and don’t DO ANYTHING TO OVERCOME IT, I got a big problem with that.
What’s a real shame is that people TRULY BELIEVE that building their own business which is something they have chosen, something they personally find interesting, something that might actually be rewarding, is harder than running the hamster wheel every day for the rest of their life (until they retire).
The only thing that is ‘harder’ is the work that will be done in the first couple of months while building momentum.
After that nothing compares to the freedom your own love and interests bring. And you know that every hour you work, is for you and those who depend on you.
But it’s darn tough to get someone to make decisions based upon how they MIGHT FEEL in two months.
The VALUE of some FEELING or some DOLLAR FIGURE in two months is NOTHING compared to the pain or fear or ANYTHING that you FEEL NOW, in this moment…
People run in the moment and only the moment. And that is why they fail.
Without getting all political (this used to be a better metaphor than it is now), when the woman gets pregnant, there is no turning back. She toughs it out for nine months and has a baby. Then toughs it out for 18 years and creates an adult.
But men?
Shoot, we don’t HAVE TO HAVE a business. We don’t HAVE to be successful. We don’t HAVE to achieve. We can MAKE IT on what we have going on now in the hamster wheel as long as nothing horrible happens like disability or the kids get hurt or they get really sick or go deaf or blind or yeah…all the things that you can count on ONE happening but you don’t know WHICH one….which is WHY you MUST set out to achieve NOW.
I want to feel good right now.
We all want to feel good NOW.
We want the burger, the cigarette, the whatever feels good in the moment thing RIGHT NOW and the idea of delaying gratification is simply unheard of.
So, we throw out Project X and go back to being depressed because we are in the hamster wheel and that is predictable, comfortable and familiar. It’s hated but it isn’t feared.
It makes no rational sense at all.
It’s all based on feelings and emotion.
It’s simply how people act. Very predictable. Very understandable.
BUT WAIT!!!!!
Say you want to be different. YOU want to be one of the teeny tiny few that actually does something that is cool in life.
What is the REAL SECRET?
The bogus secret is to visualize, feel good about it, (some say take action) be grateful as you receive it.
Guaranteed to fail long-term, if not immediately.
Here’s the real secret.
See, Believe, Begin, Continue, Finish
Those five words summarize it all. The formula. The golden key. The real Master Key.
Most people can get past the first three then of course, they stop.
Most people are great starters but don’t finish stuff.
“Idea people,” is how they refer to themselves.
“Idea people” have no self-discipline but will work comfortably (if not irritably) in just about any hamster wheel on the planet.
“Idea people” have no tangible value to offer because they can’t complete a project. And it’s a shame. Because it isn’t their fault. No one ever taught them CONTINUE AND FINISH.
They work just as hard as a “finisher” but they don’t ever FINISH their IDEA. Thus they have 25 projects that are worthless.
People aren’t worth dollars per hour….they are worth dollars per successfully completed and implemented and managed project…
I just signed a contract for another book.
They don’t care whether it takes me 2 minutes, 2 hours or two years to write the book. I get paid the same no matter what. 10% (to name a number)
They frankly don’t care if the book is all that incredible.
That’s my reputation on the line.
What do they care about?
Sales.
Period.
Is the book going to sell?
That’s the deal.
A publisher doesn’t pay minimum wage. They are happy, no, thrilled to pay you $100,000 for your royalties. It’s essentially one of the few logical businesses.
You sell 100,000 books, you make $100,000.
You sell 1 book, you make $1.
Now you know how much you are worth to your publisher.
Entitlement schemes that include “benefit packages”, minimum wage, stock options are all tossed out the window.
There is no “affirmative action”.
Black people don’t get paid more than Indians. Indians don’t get paid more than White people.
How many books sold?
When you THINK like a writer, you can be successful.
It’s pretty much the same as thinking like a good farmer.
A writer has to do several things right.
1) Write a book he is proud of. (Makes it easier to write the next book.)
2) Write a book that will sell.
3) Write a book that will sell the writer as worth doing future business with.
4) Sell the book.
5) Get paid.
No stock options. No minimum wage. No guaranteed salary. No raises. No getting fired. No pay reduction.
It comes down to ONE thing. PERFORMANCE.
You can never whine about your pay as an author (outside of contractual “misunderstandings*).
It’s the same thing in the music business.
Similar but not quite identical in the movies.
You get paid if people buy your product or service. Period.
Think about it.
If you want to succeed, to achieve, is there any other way to get paid?
If you want to achieve, there never will be another way!
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Reprinted with permission.
For more interesting reading check Kevin’s website:
http://www.kevinhogan.com
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June 30, 2010 
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beliefs, coincidence, inner guidance, intuition, thought patterns
This is one of my blogs. There are many like it but this one is mine. My blog is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. My blog, without me is useless. Without my blog, I am useless. I must write my blog true. I will offer only what will help others.