Use these 5 Guiding Stars to get a Vastly Better Quality of Life

If you want to get anything done, you need to have an idea of where you’re going, and a continued push to get there.  In the stormy seas of life …it’s very easy to get off track.

Before GPS, ships would bravely cross the seas, risking all in search of new lands, exotic treasures, and new lives.   With rocking boats, moving seas as far as the eye could see, through massive storms and bad winds taking them off course, the unreachable stars were often the only thing that stood still to keep them on course.   It’s amazing to think, armed with simple tools and those guiding stars, they crossed the world, and many eventually made it…. else we wouldn’t be here today.

Just like back in those days, in our modern life and especially in entrepreneurial endeavors we need guiding lights to help make key and often difficult decisions across all areas of life:

• Should I take that new high paying job, go into consulting, or go back to school?
• Should I get married or move on?
• Should I enter a new niche or not?
• Should I focus on cash or community?

Guiding stars are a perfect complement to the beliefs that we can do it, having the resources to do it, and the luck of a good wind.

Here are the 5 major Guiding stars:

• Who
• What
• Where
• When
• How Much

They may seem obvious or silly, but I’ll show you how I’ve used them to provide clarity on tough choices. But before that, let’s go over them in a bit more detail:

Follow any of them to higher quality of life

Freedom in Who you spend time with in all areas of your life, family (pets included), friends, colleagues and coworkers. The freedom to maximize your time with those above you to learn from, those at your side fighting with you and those below you depending on you.   Freedom to completely cut out those who poison you.    The end is a complete spectrum of possibilities: Be it being a complete hermit and seeing nobody for years, to constantly being surrounded by a crowd of new and interesting people, the choice will be yours.

Freedom in What you do everyday and how that makes you feel. When doing lifestyle design, this often becomes the dominant factor, we live in a world of immense possibilities.   In my case, I was in a job I was good at, paid well, and frequently enjoyed.  However far too often I found myself in dark moods, stressed out about unrealistic projects, burnt out, overworked, and unappreciated.   On the other side, there were things I wasn’t as good at (e.g. beat boxing and improvisational comedy) but I got immense enjoyment out of, feelings of Fun, Excitement and Appreciation.  So I started moving towards the latter, and the world became a brighter place.

Freedom in Where you do whatever what you want do. Be it home-body lounging in sweats all day or nomadically traveling non-stop for months on end.  Or both at different times, again you should have the freedom.

Freedom in When you do it. Freedom to take advantage of life’s opportunities when they pop up, like a friend unexpectedly passing through town, without being chained to a rigid schedule. Staying out late for an event or when a passionate idea you just can’t put down, sleeping in.  Taking a nap when tired, or a long lunch.

While you can’t control everything, having this flexibility adds immensely to the quality of life.  The daily grind, where you are the grist, begins to drift away and be replaced by a relaxed enjoyment.  Months later, looking back you find that previous life, being chained to a desk and dead end job unfathomable.

Freedom in How much you make. Freedom to earn as much or as little as you want *per hour you put in*, with results direct based on your efforts.  With a conventional job, you are almost always capped, and restricted by others’ efforts.  Even as a superstar, if you stop working the money stops and so does everything else that depends on it. With so much automation and outsourcing possible, it’s very easy to setup companies that mostly run them with little involvement.  As Timothy Ferris puts it, you want to own the trains and let someone else worry about keeping them running on time.

This makes the money you make per hour skyrocket.  As a consultant I got paid hundreds of dollars per hour for my services doing super complicated stuff.  Putting immensely simpler products up, over the course of a product I have earned dramatically more than that.  Like one marginally profitable affiliate campaign I’ve spent zero time on continues to chug on at about $30/week, and has been for a year.  I set it up in an hour and hasn’t touched it since.  $30 x 4 = $120 a week x 4 = $480/month x 12   = $5760/hr!!!!    Sure just one won’t pay your morgage, but find 10 of them…there are tens of thousands to choose from.

A secondary benefit of having more of all of these, is being able to give more back, and spend more time on project you truly are passionate about, which leads to deeply fulfilling lives, and in the end isn’t that what we all want?

Choose with with the Fast Forward Button

If you can imagine your life being recorded on a TiVo, seeing you do the same things you do every day over and over again on tape, where you could like in the commercial break fast forward 1 day, 1 week, 1 year, 1 decade and see where that takes you.  Does it lead to greater freedom or less in those 5 areas?

Example from My Own Life

Past

I had already mastered many of the stars.   After years of strategizing, my work was almost entirely done off a laptop, I could work anywhere …and did!  Here are a few of the places I called my office:

• in the outdoors with sun and birds keeping me company
• on a museum rolling lawns surrounded by art
• in Ireland with fog banks drifting by
• in Hawaii next to waterfalls overlooking waves crashing in
• taking long walks seeing the sunset, while others were stuck in grid lock

I kept my own hours, didn’t normally use an alarm clock or a curfew,  I would work intensely for 16 straight hours, and skip the next day, or hit the farmers market and catch a matinee, and work late in the evening if preferred when my thoughts were clearest, from that perspective it was great.

Success breeds success in most cases it leads to saturation, and has a dark side.  In my case having a rare and talented skill made it easy to get work, but it also made it difficult to scale.   Bound as an employee at a start up strapped for cash.  I eventually found myself saturated with work doing the job normally requiring a team and after 2 years of frequent 60-80 hour weeks, I was getting totally burnt out.  For a person who has been happily building things non stop since the age of 3, I realized that something was seriously wrong.

Not being truly free to work with whoever I want, I found myself continually frustrated at people who just didn’t get it,  usually forcing me to do extra work to go around them.  Constant battling with these blinds spots turned into a horrible part time job instead of doing what I was good at: creating cool stuff.    It was horrible, I’d spend hours mentally rehearsing what to say for an upcoming meeting that frequently devolved into an negotiation with things that aren’t negotiable.   When a particular meeting went badly, I spent hours rehearsing what could have been said differently.   One day after a particularly bad meeting, the kind where I felt like quitting on the spot, but held back.   Rewinding I remembered that life wasn’t always like this.  I had a decade of generally happy jobs and fluidity to change.    I realized that I had done everything in my power to try and correct the problmes, and like in movie War games I realized the only way to win…was not to play.

Part of what kept me there was at the time I had also amassed a large amount of debt, working for 2 years almost entirely on stock instead of pay so the company could use the money to get additional team members, build faster, and get better deals with VCs.  With my head down for those 2 years, trusting others, I put blinders on and only saw my work. Finally looking up and seeing the bigger picture with a critical eye, how the company grew (or failed to) and kept hitting the problems with the same hammer, I realized the odds of the stock turning into gold seemed largely blind faith.

Initially thinking about getting another job, I realized rewinding and fast forwarding: every job ends up the same place.  Your J.O.B. ==You’re Just Others Bitch.

You are almost away capped in where you can go.  As working in any job, even as lucrative as mine was, my results were lost in the friction and bad management. Most had no passive income possibilities. Being promoted to management often is a guided cage, hours of meetings, postering and politics.

On the side, I was struggling with internet marketing and my own product development, I had made several products but hadn’t made any money on them…the market was literally flooded with a sea of free competition.   I had spent thousands of dollars on affiliate advertising and had made marginal profits, this is better than most do, but I had no clue how to scale it to pay the bills.   Despite spending several thousand dollars on “Guru” courses. I didn’t know where to go or what to do next as the info felt more like a jumbled puzzle put into a box than a step-by-step recipe.   With all the courses missing pieces, and a new one coming out every week I found myself equally frustrated and overloaded.

…given that they both caused frustration, and one paid much better. It seemed like staying in my job however horrible was the obvious choice.

However using the fast forward button and looking to the guiding stars: I realized one lead to freedom in who and how much areas, the other to the same set of headaches and RSI injuries.   Sure it was difficult, but I realized just like college and learning a new job, I was being unrealistic about how much information and time it takes to master some of these new subjects.  I realized in 3-6 months I’d have finished all the courses and would have if I just kept putting new campaigns and products up eventual success.    So I did something scary, despite it being in the middle of the recession and a mountain of debt. I left the high paying job, and went back to taking small gigs jobs here and there to pay the bills, and continued to study everything I could until the pieces of the puzzle began to fit into place. Others, with far less prowess had done it and so could I.

Despite being a marketing-o-phobic. I discovered viable techniques by studying many of the most successful people and not only what they were selling but HOW they sold it (after all they mostly sell you last years model), the invaluable tools, to help me think Hungry Market First, instead of Product First as (and just about every company I had worked for) had done before…almost all of whom who failed and will always fail.  Such is the price of innovation.  I found the marketing information gave me increased clarity as to why the businesses I was at were failing.

Starting to get into short consulting gigs, the marketing courses had hidden benefits, gave me good techniques to help get higher consulting rates so I could work less, and spend more time on the marketing.

Present

Now I have small simple campaigns and products in place that only took about a week and less than $500 to develop and market, and I making reasonable money off a handful (10-20) of keywords, most of whom I have emulated from successful competitors and discovered via espionage tools. Since they are products I own there is no risk of 100 affiliates getting into a bidding war selling the same thing, or users being confused why a half dozen links on Google all go to the same place.   There’s room to grow too.    Given the depth of some of the keywords (one has over 4K of them!), I have lots of room to expand, and I haven’t even done list building, cross sells or up sells yet.

That said life is not all roses yet.  While I could stop working and squeak by.  I don’t keep much for myself.  I’m dumping all profits back into the system:

1. Scaling the ones that are working. As we’ll cover in future editions, the cash flow between PPC and Affiliate Networks and refunds can be tricky.
2. Finding more profitable niches – not all niches are massively profitable. Like that $30/week campaign some just aren’t ever going to be big, but t takes just as much time to setup a stellar campaign as one that wont’ ever make much money. This is not an exact science.
3. Building new products all of which have been validated by watching competitors make money, and valuable information on how they are marketing using espionage tools like Google Cash Detective.   Plus I have several larger more complicated products long term planned. Hey I’ve built million dollar products for others that brought in millions of dollars a year in profit, so something that pulls in a fraction of that would work just fine for me
4. Automating and integrating everything There are a lot of tools and plug-in required building and running a successful campaign without going crazy with all the drudgery.  Many of the tools I use I’m not happy with; they stop at 8, when I want them to go to 10 or don’t integrate well with other steps.  I want an end to end system, and I’d rather spend the money to make a tool than pay a person over and over again, as eventually the tool will pay for itself.

Future

Massive success doesn’t happen overnight. But in 6-8 months I will have finished learning all the courses I’ve invested in and have 10-20 small products up each earning $2-$4K a month!   So if you’re having troubles of your own, hang in there.

Conclusion

So seek out how to find your guiding stars, and see where they take you. There may be difficult choices, it may take time to see changes, but like in my own life they have made massive increases in my overall quality of life, being increasingly able to have life on my terms…and have a whole lot more fun and discovery in the process.

Please leave a comment if you find this helpful, and questions you have as I always value your feedback, and want you to succeed.