Author: danmolgan

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Got Fight?: The 50 Zen Principles of Hand-to-Face Combat by Forrest Griffin

danmolgan

Mental toughness is an asset for all of us in every situation, especially in cases where competition is tough and winners take all such as business, sales, entrepreneurship, athletic events, and tournaments. Apart from being mentally stronger you ought to be able to project that image into others so that they do know that you are a person with clear red lines and distinct rules and that challenging you will have consequences. 

Displaying a willingness to embrace pain will project that image and encourage others not to challenge you since they know that when it comes to protecting your territory or defending your values you are willing to go places where they are not. In other words, your willingness to rock the boat, demonstrate your dissatisfaction openly, or walking away in cases where doing so would not be in your best interest but you do so for the sake of demonstrating your willingness to embrace pain to protect your values and rules will make others think twice before attempting to challenge you again. 

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Being emotionally strong is also about not being afraid of biting more than you can chew but to do so you need work hard to develop your skills because you need to get good if you want to take on challenges that at first you are not fit to take on. Winning in life and business requires you to also observe your opponents, particularly their weaknesses, and then make those weaknesses your strengths. So for instance in business, if your competition is superior in quality but also more expensive, you try to focus on pricing and make your product or service much more affordable, or in politics if your opponent can gain more votes among the elite you need to focus on gaining the votes of the lower and middle class who are of lower overall education and wealth. 

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There is a time to be nice and cooperative and there is a time to be bent on viciously winning by willing to fight and do whatever it takes. Being nice and cooperative in a situation where you need to be combative and aggressive not only does not help you but could actually be the end of your success or even your life! At the same time you should never underestimate your opponents you are trying to gain victory over no matter how much better you think you are, this will compel you to remain humble and constantly work on getting better and avoid complacency. When engaged with fierce competition in any area of life you must avoid overthinking since doing so would lead to paralysis by analysis and you getting in your own way. All competitions or fights in life and business will inevitably arouse a lot of negative emotions which is why in such cases actually doing less thinking and relying more on using your strengths and experience will be far better. 

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The most important element of being able to last in competitive situations or fights, be it in business, politics, or personal life, is your ability to implement compartmentalization, meaning that you will have specific mental spaces for specific things, so for example, you will not take your standoff with the clients or business partners to your home, or anytime you enter the gym your mind is free of the competition. By being able to have locations or activities in your life that are associated with peace you will be able to last much longer in all stand offs or tolerate inevitable defeats than your opponent who might take that fight, competition, or losses too personally wherever they go. 

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Dan’s Action Plans

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– Everyone who knows you, whether they are on your side or on the other side, your friend or foe, partner or competitor, they all should know that if push comes to shove you are willing to rock the boat and go places where they are not willing to go be it to negotiate more aggressively, end a relationship that is valuable, walking away, or even starting a war if that is what it takes to contain their other side. 
– Winning in life is more often a result of offense rather than defense which is why you need to focus on developing your strengths instead of fixing your weaknesses and then use your strengths against the weaknesses of your competition. 
– The ability to distance yourself emotionally from all confrontations, competitions, and losses is the key to winning in life, most people avoid those negative emotions by avoiding confrontations, competitions, or loses which is why they cannot win. So instead of avoiding these situations that demand courage learn to distance yourself emotionally from them when you are away from the scene of action. 
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Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger

danmolgan

Getting ideas, products, or brands to become popular is not a matter of luck since now we know that there is a science behind why certain things catch on while others don’t.

Studies have now proven that word of mouth marketing is far more effective than traditional marketing because we trust our friends more than we trust advertisement and the next question that immediately pops up is how do we generate word of mouth marketing? If you answered online and social media then you should know less than 10% of word of mouth marketing is done via social media which is why you need to be talked about when people are not online. So how is that done? One of the ways to do so is to create content online that gets shared and only then you can get the consumers to think about you in their personal lives when you are not there.

The steps required to get people to talk and share what you have to offer is dubbed STEPPS which stands for Social Currency, Triggers, Emotions, Public, Practical Value, and Stories. Let’s explain what you need to do as part of each step, shall we? 
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Social Currency: Make people feel like insiders by giving them status for using your products or services or supporting your ideas so that they want to share it with others.
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Triggers: Link your idea, product, or service to a unique thing. If you know NLP then this means anchor yourself and associate what you want to catch on with something that is a part of the environment. For instance link your personal brand to a common word or a specific style of dressing or associate your product or service to a specific day or location so that anytime people encounter it they would think of it!
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Emotion: You need to discover the emotional reason why people should like what you offer. By asking why a few times in a row to know what is the emotional benefit that we can provide, what is the reason for others to use it, and how it could catch on. For instance, why would someone want to buy this luxury product? Because that would make him feel rich; so why does he want to feel rich? Because that would make him feel special and superior? Why does he want to feel special and superior? Because he needs the admiration of the people around him! Having asked why three times in a row we discover that our prospective customers need to be admired so by making them believe that they will receive admiration by using our products and including that in our ad campaign we can effectively get good customers.
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Public: People can only imitate what they see so you must make sure that you or what is associated with you is as public as possible. Obscurity equals failure in marketing and branding. Thus, find any means necessary to get more and more people to see your product, brands, services, logos, testimonials, etc since you need to be as visible as possible!
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Practical Value: People have a tendency to share what has strong values for them personally and that is why we need to create useful information and then let it get shared so that our brand comes along for a ride. So instead of just posting ads online or renting billboards you can create useful informational videos, offer free seminars or events, or any other free means of adding value to the lives of others and your idea, product, or service will get advertised in the process!
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Stories: People have a hard time remembering facts but they remember stories very well so instead of listing good features embedd them in interesting stories. Good marketing and advertising does not look like advertising but instead you want to tell Trojan horse stories that narrates a story includes good features about you while not directly about them! The indirect approach always work best when it comes to demonstrating your good features and story telling is the way to do it!
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By using the aforementioned STEPPS you can get any idea, product, or brands to catch on!
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Dan’s Action Plans

  • Obscurity is the worst thing that can happen to any idea, product, or service because people don’t necessarily buy what they like but what they know!
  • Include free stuff in promoting your product or service, free tips, free videos, free podcasts, free donuts, free trials, etc so as to take your brand in for a ride!
  • The value of your brand is a function of what others think not necessarily its real value so focus on marketing and advertisement as much, if not more than, enhancing its quality and using STEPPS can help you to do just that!
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The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

danmolgan

The book Extreme Ownership was an effective publication written by two Navy SEAL commanders that promoted a very tough approach to leadership with an emphasis on control, domination, and discipline. However, many readers faced with serious problems in their personal and professional lives trying to be so called “extreme”. 

In the book the Dichotomy of Leadership the authors promote a more balanced approach to leadership simply because a good leader is almost never an extremist and the very art of leadership is about finding the sweet spot in between two extremes, a trait possessed only by top leaders since going to extremes is always easy but having a balance requires not only mental strength and emotional intelligence but also intelligence and wisdom. 
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A good leader is as strong as a rock while as soft as a leather, he or she is paradoxical in nature and knows there are times to enforce the rules and there are times to bend them. Also a good leader is aware that in order to realize the final objectives sometimes he or she has to cut off ties with team members or associates who despite coaching, mentoring, and warnings do not change their behaviors. 
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Extreme ownership doesn’t mean doing everything yourself, nor does it mean being at the leading role all the time. Rather good leadership is about dividing responsibilities among the team and telling them why it is important for them to do what they ought to do so that they themselves feel a sense of responsibility to do their tasks. Also being a leader means that you need to be a follower in an area when someone in your team has superior skills, talents, or experience in that particular area. After all, all leaders have only so much leadership capital to spare and by trying to take charge for things that are not very important or the things that they are not qualified for, they run the risk of losing credibility among their followers. 
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Being aggressive has been associated with winning in life and business and all leaders possess that sense of aggression and initiative but being overly aggressive itself can lead to major problems whereby the leader acts to maintain his or her ego instead of doing the right thing.
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Ultimately training and mentoring the subordinates is a big component of leadership and all leaders should aspire to push their teams out of their comfort zone but at the same time burning out the team won’t yield good results either which means that, like all other dichotomies mentioned in the book, finding the middle ground is extremely imporant in good leadership.
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Dan’s Action Plans:

  • To be alpha you need master the art of balance since that is something that most individuals cannot do. Being overly kind is as bad as being overly cruel, being overly selfless is as bad as being overly selfish, being overly dominant is as bad as being overly submissive. Master the art of balance and you will master leadership itself.
  • If you want to please everyone then sell ice creams instead of being a leader. Leaders have polarities meaning they make some really love them and make the others really hate them. If you are not okay with cutting ties or firing bad associates or subordinates you are not strong enough to be a good leader.
  • Doing the right thing does not always feel good and doing what feels good is not always the right thing!
  • Learn to hold contradictory thoughts and qualities to remain a top leader.
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The Formula: the universal laws of success by Albert Laszlo Barabasio

danmolgan

When we think about success we not only think about success itself but also the performance that leads to it. Performance is about how well you do something but success is about whether the people around you acknowledge and reward your performance. So the more positively others react to your performance the more successful you are. While performance certainly matters, research has proven that there is no absolute link between how well you do something and how successful you are.

The issue with linking performance to success is that firstly performance is bounded meaning that there is a limit on how well you can do something and the difference in performance among the most successful individuals in any field is often very insignificant and almost indistinguishable. Secondly, judging performance has proven to be biased when comparing the performance of top players and are subject to many irrelevant things including whether you are the first to be judged or the last.
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Success on the other hand is not necessarily about the objective value of what you do but how your network reacts to it and since we are living in a world with billions of people it means that unlike performance, success is unbounded and limitless. Also it has been observed yet and again that success leads to more success and getting acknowledged for your performance by a few people can actually make room for more people to acknowledge your performance even if your performance is not necessarily that good! This crowd effect is due to human nature in that people tend to align in opinion with the majority when the criteria are more subjective be it the success of a music track, an internet personality, or a stock, having said all of that, quality matters and when combined with previous success it does predict future success.
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Ultimately success is amplified by time but getting older won’t insure more success, rather, getting older only contributes to more success only if you keep pursuing your goals with the same zest and enthusiasm as people in their 20’s and early 30’s. The people who don’t slow down with age actually will accumulate more success than their younger counterparts. 
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Dan’s Action Plans:

  • Focusing only on developing your skill or abilities or simply working harder won’t insure your success because success is not a solo affair but a social one. This means that to be successful you need to develop your social skill with a focus on self-promotion, salesmanship, as well as a touch of showmanship to be able to get more people to take notice of your performance and reward you for it.
  • If you are introverted or shy you cannot attain much success unless you develop your social skills and start building relationships and alliances, not to mention putting yourself in the spotlight for others to see.
  • So long as you don’t slow down with age and remain motivated by continuing to set bigger goals your success will only be amplified through time and aging. This means that success has no age limit and for as long as you remain productive you will become successful.