Why to Learn?

Some of us learn to achieve a goal or vision, to do something the right way, to see our alternatives, to change our lives, to live better lives, to equip ourselves before opportunity knocks on our door, to better manage our risks so we’ll be more comfortable, to provide the best future for our kids or our family, to understand how we can be happier, to add value to a community or society, to help others, to change the world, to solve a problem, to save a species from disappearing, to help our country, to manage a company more efficiently, to raise our kids the right way, or to enhance our self-esteem.

There are so many different reasons why we are learning, and most of them revolve about personal or social gain, pleasure, passion, adding value, self-esteem, and to solve a problem or make money. Life is all about learning and discovering, so this is why you have to learn.

What to Learn?

There are four main types of learning:

1. Academic (School)

To learn how to read, write, and solve basic math formulas.

2. Professional (College/Job)

To acquire specific skills to excel in a career as professional.

3. Financial (Real World/Different Resources)

You get this type of learning either from the real world, such as your business and life, or from different resources and institutions to understand how to deal with money and break its code.

4. Spiritual (Religion/Belief)

This type of learning will add balance and meaning to your life.

You can start learning things that are related to your passion; many of us are born with a certain talent, so start learning to polish and boost this talent. For instance, if you are a talented musician, you need to study music so you can read the notes or you can understand the history of the music and the types, so you can excel, adding value to the world and increasing your knowledge and talent.

Sometimes talent is not enough. Some great musicians who are talented, like The Beatles, never knew how to read or write the music notes.

“None of us can read music. None of us can write it.” – John Lennon, 1980

But when you add experience to talent, things start changing.

In 1960, while The Beatles were still an unknown high school rock band, they went to Hamburg, Germany, to play in the local clubs. They were underpaid, and the acoustics were very bad. The audience didn’t appreciate them, but what The Beatles gained out of this experience is hours upon hours of nonstop playing time that shaped them and made their music much better. As The Beatles grew in skill, audiences demanded them more and more. By 1962, they were playing eight hours per night, seven nights per week. By 1964, the year they burst on the international scene, The Beatles had played more than 1,200 concerts together. By way of comparison, most bands today don’t play 1,200 times in their entire career. Experience adds a lot to your learning. It allows you to diagnose your weaknesses and strengths, then make adjustments to bring the best out of you over the years. If you take a scientific angle and add academic studies and professional mentorship to your experience and talent, you can become stronger and reach bigger outcomes.

You also should learn about how to achieve your goals. You can read books, take courses, and attend seminars. You can learn about life, business, success, sports, and even being the best speaker. You can learn things that will improve your life. You can learn things that will save you time, such as time management and some other techniques that will allow you to get more things done.

Learning is essential, especially now in the information age. All the information is available around you, and it’s easier to get to the information. The world is moving very fast, so we need to keep up with the world. We are not in the industrial age, where things were going slower. Now, consistent learning is very important, so never stop learning until you die.

Many people quit learning when they finish school or university. Thinking that you know everything you need to is a big mistake. I know some people who have been graduated for 30 years and never read anything new about the subject that they studied, and they think that they know everything they need to know on that subject. The world is changing every second, and you need to stay up to date with what’s going on.

Learning will expand your way of thinking and your mindset. You will understand other cultures; you will be more flexible; you will be more open-minded; you will be less racist; you will understand why people have certain habits, why people who grow up in a certain country act like that, how their education, background, and habits have shaped their culture. Learning will expand your absorption and eagerness for more knowledge to answer more questions; as you know more, you can add more value by solving even more problems.

When I discovered my personal development path, it was unbelievable how it transformed my life. Now I’m eager to learn more and more, because day after day I feel its power is getting bigger and bigger.

Your learning also can be about finances. This will help you solve your financial issues and live a happier life, raise your kids in a better way, and achieve your goals faster. Money will help you do things faster, and if you know how to use it, it will boost your happiness level. However, money alone will not give you happiness; happiness requires fulfillment more than money, and money will not give you the fulfillment that you need.

It’s also very important what you decide to learn next. You need to pick what to learn based on your current needs and to take an extra step toward what you want to achieve. If you take a look at the books that I’m reading, you would see that I’m reading about investments and management today, and tomorrow I’m reading about happiness and habits. I read based on my current struggles or what I want to improve. When I struggle with ideas for investment, I go read about investments. If I want to understand how the banks are working, I read about banks. If I want to improve my negotiation skills, I read a book about negotiations. If I want to improve my time-management skills, I read about that. If I want to understand how video marketing and SEO works, I read a book about that.

You usually learn about what you want to improve, or your health, your life, your happiness, your business. If you want to solve a problem, learn more about it; you must master it before you can start adding your value.

How to Learn?

You need to figure out what are the most efficient techniques or ways that suit your learning style. That could be books, seminars, audiobooks, e-books, mentors, websites, university, school, experience, blogs, online or offline courses, your failures, or your successes.

I have found that the most efficient way to learn is to combine passive learning (reading and listening) with active learning (taking action).

Please share with us some of your most efficient techniques of learning that you have learned through your life journey?

The post Why to Learn, What to Learn, and How to Learn Efficiently? appeared first on 1on1 Business & Marketing Mentoring.

“Broke is temporary; poor is eternal.”  – Robert Kiyosaki

I’ve been broke many times. You know that time called “back to zero,” when you have nothing and sometimes you even owe thousands of dollars? Yes, I have been there many times, even after I made the transition to entrepreneurship. I call those times the “restart times” or, even better, “the restart time but be wiser this time.” It does not matter if you are back to zero after some failures; what really matters is what you have learned through that experience and that you know how to come back and stand on your feet.

One of the reasons I have been able to come back is that I learned how to invest. I continued to be broke for a couple of years, because whatever I was making I was reinvesting, testing new ideas or businesses. Of course, some failed and others worked, so I was always lacking in cash flow. Sometimes you need to be able to break into a certain level of cash flow to be able to finance your other projects, but when you are in an early stage of breakthrough, the restart times might repeat again and again until you find your own magic formula of success.

And sometimes what makes you broke is that you understand the power of investing and you start investing most of your money. As an early investor, sometimes you start with 10 percent to 20 percent of what you have. Sometimes when your knowledge of the investing subject exceeds your cash flow, it pushes you to try to invest more, regardless how little cash you have. I have been in this situation many times; despite my small cash flow, I still invest up to 70 percent to 80 percent of what I’m making. Of course, that process pushes you many more times into the restart time, but at the same time it stretches you more to succeed. Without stretching yourself, you will stay limited. Of course, when you have more at stake, such as a family to take care of, you need to be more careful with your stretching.

So being broke is not a necessarily bad thing. Even if you are not building businesses or systems, it’s normal that you sometimes fail and become broke. It’s not a shame that you are broke. This is how you are going to learn. When you start from zero and you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, you have more motivation to do something. The pressure shakes us from time to time, and sometimes this shake is good, because that is where most people take massive action toward what they want to achieve. Many entrepreneurs make the transition after they lose their jobs; so many entrepreneurs made the transition in the bad times of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008. Since they couldn’t find a job, they took the entrepreneurial journey.

So coming back to zero a couple of times is not a bad thing. It’s part of the success and learning process. You better do it quickly and the younger the better, because when you are young, you are more flexible in stretching yourself and discovering new limits. When you’re young, you also can take more risks as you have less responsibilities. That’s why startups usually are led by people in their 20s; their drive is amazing and they are generally fearless at this age. So do it as early as possible in your life, so for the rest of your life you will enjoy the wisdom that you gained from these experiences.

This will be a priceless experience that you will never forget and you will always appreciate. But, of course, at the time of the crisis, you will feel pain, you will hate yourself, and you will have disbelief in yourself. But later on, when you look back and connect the dots, you will feel that this is what made you who you are: stronger, wiser, and more successful.

So being broke is a very, very normal thing. What is abnormal is being poor; this is when you have nothing but never bounce back from it. So this is what you should have in your mindset: Although the words mean the same for many people, you have to differentiate them and focus on the feeling of coming back, bouncing back. This is what is important; the real entrepreneurs can just bounce back.

After what I learned through the years, I made the transition. I’m not rich yet, but I’m financially free. I know I’m going to be very wealthy; it’s just a matter of time and more experiences, because I broke many areas of the money code, but it just requires more tuning to break it completely. Before you break the money code, you need to work on breaking many other codes, such as how to learn efficiently, how to have a vision, how to be persistent and fight to achieve your dreams, and many others. Each one of us learns to break different codes at many different levels, so breaking the wealth code requires breaking certain other codes. The most important aspect that you need to keep in mind when you break any code is time. For example, everyone is learning, but the question is how efficiently you are learning, whether you can achieve your goal within a certain period of time.

So the main point of this post is not to talk about being mega-rich, because I haven’t become mega-rich yet. If you want to learn something from someone, make sure to listen to the people who have achieved the thing you’re trying to accomplish. What I have accomplished is financial freedom, and this is what I’m trying to teach you about. So don’t listen to the people who want to impart wisdom about things that they have never done. I see so many authors or professors who talk about, let’s say, business, and they never had a business in their life. They never managed a company in their life.

If you want to learn how to manage a company, then you go learn it from somebody who has broken through in making a great company. If you want to learn how to be an investor, you go learn it from an angel investor or a venture capitalist.

This is the point that you need to understand: Being broke is a temporary thing. Being poor is something that’s going to continue and you need to do something to change that. It’s completely fine to be broke. And the point of being an entrepreneur, a real entrepreneur, is to know how to bounce back from your previous failures.

Before, when I was an employee and when I was at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I was terrified, because I was confused on what to do. Again, I had to start from zero. But now I’m completely fine with coming back to zero, because I know that I will bounce back. I know how to bounce back from many disaster situations, and in case I still don’t know how to bounce back from some of them, I will figure out a way to do so. It’s important to learn and gain experience, because no one can take those two things from you, and those two things are what will help you figure your way out of a disaster. Maybe I will lose my money and make mistakes, but nobody will take this experience from me that has taught me how to bounce back. That’s why I’m no longer scared of going back to zero or becoming broke again.

Even if it’s painful, even if it will take time to bounce back, when you’re confident enough that you are able to bounce back, then you will become fearless in the business world. You will be able survive many disasters and come out of it stronger and wiser and more successful.

The post How Many Times Should You Be Broke In Your Life Before You Become a Successful Entrepreneur? appeared first on 1on1 Business & Marketing Mentoring.

“It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” – Bill Gates

Most people are scared of failure, especially when they make the transition to entrepreneur. Just like when they take an adventure, fear and failure are the biggest concerns of those people. But failure is the biggest tool of learning in life when you take action. When you fail, you learn – you just learn. After you fail, you start thinking, you take a break for a while, then you come back and try to correct your mistake.

If you have a certain project that you’re already working on, then usually it’s a kind of experiment. However, try as much as you can to calculate the possible failure’s reach, so you know where you’re heading and what the worst-case scenario is.

“Never test the depth of river with both feet.” – Warren Buffet

In some projects, the worst-case scenario may exceed what you have expected, especially if you don’t have certain experience. Sometimes something goes very wrong. However, trying to visualize and calculate the lowest possible point will give you some indication of where you are heading.

Sometimes when you look back at what you have done before and the challenges and failures that you have faced, you realize that it’s really what shaped you to succeed later. Failures will make you stronger with time and make you succeed in the future.

The biggest fear of most people is the fear of failing. I think that the most important thing to remember is to not quit your dream because you have failed before, because the biggest failure is quitting your dream. When you have started something, you have to either finish it or quit it after trying all the possible possibilities to make it work. Sometimes you try your best and the business still doesn’t work. However, you should know when to quit certain businesses to reduce damages when there is no hope of success so you can start over again somewhere else. Sometimes it’s good to fail fast and quit a project if you feel that it’s not going to work for you from the beginning so you can shift and focus on something else instead of wasting too much time and then quitting.

In some of my businesses, I felt the business at a certain point started declining. I tried my best to find solutions to buy time to test more methods to try and make the business work, but then I realized that there was no hope to continue based on the tools that I had at that point. In cases like this, you should shut it down and then start something totally new or try with another location for the same business idea that you tried before. But don’t forget to apply the lessons you learned from your failed project to the new project.

Most employees want to feel secure and don’t want to risk anything – I understand that. My advice to you is to minimize the risk by staying in your job while working on a part-time project. Try to dedicate one hour a day to learning something new. I assure you that if you put your mind into it, you will achieve something out of it, whether it’s a year or three years or five years from now.

Well some of you will say, “I don’t care. I work 9 to 5 and I drive 1-2 hours to come back home very tired and then I spend some time with my family and watch some TV.” That’s also completely fine, and I understand that, but still you can find 1-2 hours a day to work on something that will materialize in the future if you focus on it. If you are completely against investing 1-2 hours a day in something, then when you get fired from your job when you are 40 or 50 and you do not know what to do next, face the moment of truth and don’t nag about it.

You need to be responsible from the beginning and plan and think about what will happen in the future if you’re going to continue doing what you are doing now. Most people ignore everything; they don’t care. They just watch “American Idol” in the evening, sleep, and go to work. They keep nagging about the rat race that they are in, and for sure there is no solution for that unless you do something about it. And then they face the moment of truth when they lose their job and they don’t know what to do, because they have spent all their life just doing one thing and building only one column of income.

So you need to keep trying and understand that failure is the biggest teacher in life and business. It’s part of the game, part of the equation of success and of any business. When you approach any project or challenge in your life with this mindset that failure is an opportunity and it’s part of the game, then you will feel comfortable.

Share with us the story of your biggest failure in the comment section below?

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