The “Inner Game”

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In addition to learning all of the “how to” mechanics involved in building your portable empire, you also need to work on getting your mindset in order. Building your own online business requires that you have a set of skills that are different from those of employees. At the same time as you’re learning all of nuts and bolts skills integrated into the seven steps, also focus on getting your inner game aligned.

The “Inner Game” 1: Have a higher goal than merely “making money”

As amazing as it may sound, after a little bit of early success, working hard just to make more money gets to be a little bit stale. Once you’ve made enough money to buy yourself some of the toys you’ve always admired but have never been able afford, you’ll sit down and think “what next?”

The first generation of Internet marketing gurus don’t focus on making more money. Instead, they work on projects that feed their souls. Some of them are so busy using their financial resources to try and make the world a better place that you wonder how they find the time to do anything else. It’s not at all unusual to find them:

Taking medicine to villages in third world countries.

Setting up community health care facilities.

Providing educational funds and scholarships.

Working with economically challenged athletes.

By consistently following the seven steps, you will be able to generate for yourself a steady income. As you get better, that income will grow and eventually outpace your own financial needs. To stay motivated to keep getting bigger and better, start thinking now about what kind of charitable work you would like to fund in the future. This will not only inspire you to work hard, but it will also feed your soul.

The “Inner Game” 2: Understand what your “money thermostat” is set at

Everyone has a “money thermostat”–a self-belief about how much money you’re entitled to make from the work that you do. It’s something you learn from your parents without even realizing they are influencing your internal beliefs quite so profoundly.

You have to make a conscious and deliberate effort to reprogram your own thermostat if it is set too low. Otherwise, you’ll stop working at your online business as soon as you’ve made enough money to pay your bills each month.

To set your thermostat higher, remind yourself:

We all live in an infinite universe

The universe has unlimited wealth.

The more personal wealth we generate, the more good we can do for causes we really care about.

The universe doesn’t mind how much we make–it’s perfectly happy for us to make whatever we earn.

The “Inner Game” 3: Learn how to avoid self-sabotage

When you start achieving a level of success with your online business that exceeds your comfort level, you can actually do things unconsciously that throw a spanner in the works. Be aware of this. You have to keep on giving yourself permission to excel. Day by day, reset your money thermostat a little higher and expand what you’re doing to that newer and higher level.

The “Inner Game” 4: Inject loads of authenticity

The best authors write just they way they talk–with an authentic voice rather than changing their vocabulary to terminology that they would never use from day to day. When you think and talk about Internet marketing, you need to do the same. Put together articles and e-books that are couched in everyday language rather than trying to use a fake “internet marketing voice.”

A good practical way to achieve this is to imagine you’re telling a good friend what you want to say over the phone. Write down your thoughts in the kind of friendly, conversational tone you’d use in that setting. If people want to read what you write because they share your passion for the topic, they will appreciate hearing your authentic voice come through rather than someone who is trying to be what they clearly are not.

The “Inner Game” 5: Find your own “gold zone”

Athletes and musicians talk about getting “in the zone” all the time. From an Internet marketing perspective, you get in the zone by doing great things yourself and not just by reading about what others have achieved. The people who succeed are those who find problems to solve, come up with products that address those specific problems and then sell them.

The defining characteristic of being in the zone when it comes to building a successful online business is that you’ll be surprised by how easy everything is. You’ll come up with a substantial problem worth solving, some practical ways to get your product to the people who will be most interested and the opportunity to make a great living by providing a worthwhile solution.

Keep in mind a few suggestions:

If you seem to be getting bogged down, that might be a good indicator you’ve picked the wrong topic. Keep looking until you find something that is both fun and profitable.

If nobody is buying what you have to offer, change it sooner rather than later. One of the great advantages of an online business is that you can make dramatic changes instantly. You don’t even have to reprint your brochures or other promotional material–just change your website.

Life is too short to bang your head against the door marked PULL. You can push and push and band and hit and throw bombs and cry and just generally exhaust yourself. And the door will stay closed. Find your passion, and then find people to pay you for doing what you love. Quit banging on the door and just open it.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 6: How big is your sandbox?

Successful people are always positive in tone and energetic. They’ve given themselves permission to play in what are very big sandboxes. Or put differently, they have the self-confidence and personal drive to think big and do interesting things.

There isn’t a certifying board that grants this permission. Instead, you have to make personal decision to be a success. You will attract what you focus on. If you focus on concepts and ideas that are large and impressive, in effect you expand your sandbox and move onto a larger stage of life. Focus on prosperity and happiness, feel responsible for generating your own outcome and then start doing whatever it takes to achieve the outcome you want. This is a much better idea than spending your life worrying about failure, scarcity and unhappiness. Give yourself permission to succeed.

The “Inner Game” 7: It’s better to fail big rather than live small

Sam Walton’s Rule #1 was: “Break the rules.” For most people who come out of the education factories, getting a good job and keeping it is the epitome of success. The problem with that is if you like to think for yourself, working for someone else is too limiting and restrictive.

Nobody ever accomplished anything important, or grand, or outrageous by coloring inside the lines. Following the rules is for losers.

–Pat O’Bryan

Outrageously successful people don’t wait for permission to be great. They just go out and do it even if that puts them outside mainstream thinking. Most of these people end up being self-educated anyway because they blaze their own trails and do the things that other don’t even attempt.

Feel free to join their ranks. Nobody is going to invite you–you have to seize the opportunity for yourself. Be prepared to have some grand failures along the way, but out of the ashes of these glaring defeats you will be learning what it takes to soar to great heights in the future.

The “Inner Game” 8: Learn how to “fail up”

The only way you’re ever going to learn how to do new things in life and in business is if you’re prepared to fail initially while you’re getting the hang of it all. Therefore, give yourself permission to fail when you’re trying new things.

Even better, go out and find something that is incredibly fun and completely screw it up the first few times you try ir. Then keep at it until you get the hang of it. Fail up in life and in your career. Unless you’re doing this on a regular basis, all you’re doing is treading water. Learn how to do new things all the time.

There ain’t no such thing as failure. It’s all data. To succeed big you may have to fail big. It’s just a stretch of highway: you may have to go through some bad road to get where you’re going.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 9: Authenticity works best

All successful Internet marketers project their personalities so strongly that they end up becoming their brand. They all have an interesting story behind their success that they tell. It seems like most consumers prefer to interact with someone who is genuine–even if that includes a few warts and quirks–rather than someone bland who uses corporate speak.

Don’t try to compete with big companies by attempting to be a cheap imitation of them. Say something interesting and say it in your own voice. A certain percentage of the population will relate, and from that percentage you will do just fine. Be authentic.

The “Inner Game” 10: Un-frame yourself

We all use mental frameworks every day. They are our mindset or the set of filters through which we see the world. If you want to see more possibilities, change your mental frames for different ones. Un-frame yourself and let your imagination come to the fore. To make sure you’re doing this, always ask yourself:

“What frame am I using to look at the world today?”

“What does the world look like that frame?”

“How can I combine what I’ve got and what I do to create something the market will buy.”

When you start un-framing yourself, you’ll actually find the world has no boundaries and no limits except those you have imposed yourself. Give yourself permission to remove those boundaries and you’ll be able to develop some amazing assets, skills and talents that align with your passions.

Once you stop defining yourself as what you’ve done and who you were, and open up to the infinite possibilities available to you, what do you see? Anything is possible. In an infinite universe, such as the one we live in, it just doesn’t make any sense to acknowledge any limitations.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 11: What’s next?

A few years ago, the Internet would have been unimaginable to most people. Today, most people can’t imagine what the world would be like without the Internet. In a similar vein, you can guarantee that what becomes available to us in the future is just as hard to visualize using our current experience base.

With that in mind, keep your mind open to fresh ideas and concepts. Look at what others are doing and see whether there isn’t a market opportunity available by going in the opposite direction. Acknowledge that what becomes available in the future may require a different set of skills and be ready to learn as you move forward.

If you have a healthy appetite for change and growth, you’ll probably be able to position yourself advantageously whenever and wherever the next big thing rolls into view. Have an open mind mixed with strong doses of self-confidence.

The “Inner Game” 12: Move from your comfort zone into the fun zone

When the rubber hits the road, it always takes courage to try new things. Stretching yourself in any new direction is always scary. It’s much easier to stay in your personal comfort zone and keep on doing what has always worked for you in the past. The problem is that if you stay in your comfort zone, you’ll never reach your fun zone–where you get to do things that are exciting and adventurous.

Realize that there really aren’t squads of “e-book police” who will come and take you away if your first attempt at writing an e-book is lousy. Instead, you won’t sell that many. Over time, however, you’ll get better and with persistence you can come up with something that sells like hotcakes.

The point is not to limit yourself. Get out and have fun learning how to do new things. There is literally a universe without limits to explore if you give yourself permission to do so.

The “Inner Game” 13: Wealth is all in your mind

As you become more and more successful, you’ll soon find that wealth is far more of a state of mind than you even thought possible. To take a simple example:

If you walk all the time and someone drives by in a run-down car, you think they’re wealthy and if you could just get to where they are all your problems would be solved.

When you buy first car, you’re happy for a while until you notice your friends have nicer cars. You imagine that if you could do the same, life would be sweet.

By the time you can afford a luxury up-market car, you start to realize that amassing more and more toys really doesn’t give you the feeling of accomplishment you expected. Instead, you start to focus on other rungs of the ladder of success. You get a richer view of what success really means and you start going after other things that are more interesting and powerful.

The whole point is that as you become more successful, your attitudes and belief systems will evolve and change. You’ll start to realize that your previous goals were too low and there’s so much more you can achieve with the tools you already have. Anticipate that and enjoy the journey. After all, if you kept the same standards of success you had as a child all your life, you’d end up buying all the candy in the store and giving yourself some serious health issues. Grow and evolve and improve your goals, especially your financial ones.

You have to change your inner ‘wealth thermostat’ before you can accept, and keep, wealth at a greater level than you’re used to. It’s an infinite universe. Everybody can have the wealth they want. There’s no shortage of anything, once you do the mental work to attract that wealth, and the much harder mental work of allowing yourself to accept it. All I do is create information products and market them. Then I do it again. Over time, I’ve developed multiple streams of passive income. Developing the strategies I used in my business was important, but more important, I think, were the changes I made in my attitude and belief system that allowed me to succeed. I had all the tools I needed all along.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 14: Dealing with information overload

The same technology that enables you to build your own online business can also deliver to you far more information than you could ever read in a lifetime. If you’re not careful, you can end up spending more and more of your time learning stuff you’ll never be able to use. To cut through this blizzard of information:

Clarify in your mind what it is you do, and then pick one guru to follow. All of the gurus have their strengths and weaknesses, but it’s impossible to study them all in detail. Pick one guru, follow his or her advice and make their strategies become yours. Go with the guru you choose and follow their advice to the letter.

Decide where you need to be heading in the future and listen to whoever has already been there and done that. Remind yourself you’re not trying to go everywhere, but one place n particular.

Focus on the little things you must do to succeed. Trust your intuitions. If you find something useful, study it and use it. If what you’re looking at is merely noise, delete it quickly. Save your mental energy for what really counts. You should be able to say within a few seconds whether what you’re looking at is relevant to your needs or not.

The “Inner Game” 15: Turn problems into opportunities

If you’re not careful, little things will come along that stop you from conquering the world. The key to avoiding getting sidetracked permanently is to find practical and workable ways to turn every problem into an opportunity to move forward instead. To do this:

Understand and appreciate what you are strong at and the places where your skill sets are weak. Rather than being depressing, this is actually quite liberating. Acknowledge openly that you’re going to need to hire others to help you in some areas of your business and then go about hiring the best help you can get.

Always keep reminding yourself that there are so many gifts and talents that nobody on the planet has them all. That’s perfectly fine. Focus on making the most of what you do have.

Never let a lack of resources hold you back. Once you know what you don’t have, it’s time to get creative. Look at who does have resources and find out what it will take to enlist their aid. With the use of a little creativity and technology, you’ll be amazed what you can come up with.

Look long and hard at any excuses you’re in the habit of using. If you’re not careful, you can hide behind a logical sounding excuse for years and years. Have the mindset that you’re going to turn each excuse into an opportunity to move forward, and you’ll be amazed at how rapidly you can move forward.

Don’t forget to keep notes along the way so you can write a book about how you did what you did in the future. Other people will pay good money to learn from your experiences. Keep your eyes open to the hidden opportunities that are embedded within any problem you face. There will be plenty there as long as you’re looking out for them.

The “Inner Game” 16 Life is meant to be an adventure

One of the real advantages of creating an online business is that you can take it on the road at any time. You can literally run your business from a laptop anywhere in the world that takes your fancy. There’s no dress code, no office hours, no time clock to punch in and out every day. That’s great, but with that freedom comes a fresh and distinctive challenge.

The long-term success of your online business will be fueled by the new ideas you keep coming up with. To generate more ideas in the future, keep expanding your experiences. Get into the game and have fun.

The trick about ‘work’ is that it’s a boat that carries you where you want to go. It’s the means through which you achieve your goals. Only rarely is attachment to the boat a good idea. When you get to your destination, it’s okay to get out of the boat. Or not. If you’re very, very lucky, work becomes a magic carpet that you really enjoy riding. That’s what the Portable Empire is all about. Realizing that life is an adventure and putting that sense of adventure into every single thing we do.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 17: Destroy to create

In order to attract good thing into your life, you often first have to tear down and destroy the old and superseded systems of the past. You have to make room in your life for something new by giving up what you don’t want. This will require a leap of faith because you’ll be going from the known to the unknown, but this is the exact point at which you indicate whether or not you’re serious.

Unlike the infinite universe of possibilities, your personal energy levels are finite. If you devote all your energy to things that don’t matter, there is no room for positive things to come into your life.

I have heard two highly successful businesspeople give a passionate lecture about deleting the word ‘try’ from your vocabulary. Think Yoda. There is no ‘try.’ If you’re going to do something, do it with all your heart, and with a full intention of accomplishing what you set out to do. It is a waste of your time, for example, to ‘try’ Internet marketing. Don’t bother. If you’re going to be an infoproduct marketer, and you can’t seem to find the time, now is the time to look at the things standing between you and success, and make the decision to choose success. This means not choosing the things that were causing you to fail. Delete them. Stop doing them. Make room for success in your life, and leave no room for distractions. Get rid of what’s not working. You’ll be amazed at how quickly the void is filled with things that do work. This works for whatever your goal is. If you’re going to do it, don’t ‘try’–DO.

–Pat O’Bryan