How To Win The Game Of Life

If you want to be a professional footballer and win major competitions you will aspire to play for Manchester United, Chelsea, Real Madrid or another top club.

You wouldn’t be happy playing for your small local club, however fond you are of them because you know you’re never going to win The Champions League playing for them.

Likewise, if you want to win the game of life, you need to join a winning team.

And if you want to qualify for that team, you will need the right mindset – the mindset of a creator, an innovator, an entrepreneur… a Producer.

You've all heard the expression the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

Well, it’s true.

And, there's a good reason for that. But it’s not why most people think.

It's not because rich people were born with a silver spoon in their mouths… it's because they think differently.

That’s right: the way they think is what really separates the rich from the poor.

Producers get richer. Consumers get poorer.

In short, if you want to win in life, you need to make the leap from being on Team Consumer to joining Team Producer.

But it may not be easy. Since the day you were born, you’ve been conditioned to play for the losing team.

Action man, Barbie, Scalextric, your BMX bike… you've been programmed to want stuff in the belief that these things will make you happy.

But if you want to be on the winning team, your mindset needs to shift to being one of producing not consuming.

• Instead of buying products, you make products.
• Instead of working for someone, you hire people.
• Instead of borrowing money, you lend money.
• Instead of buying books, you write a book.

Once you begin to see the world from a producer's perspective is like re-tuning a crackly radio station and getting crystal-clear stereo sound.

You will start to see opportunities everywhere.

And you will be able to separate the wheat from the chaff quickly.

So, if you want to join the top 1% and play for the winning team re-tune your dial to the way Producers think.

And guess what, the great thing is once you succeed as a producer you will have the pleasure of being able to consume whatever you like in much greater quantities than before without worrying about whether you can afford it.

To Be A Producer:

You need to learn how to become a person who finds good ideas, has the ability to make decisions, to take risks and is willing to make short-term sacrifices for long-term gain.

You need to understand leverage and implement it in your business to create systems for

• lead generation
• sales
• hiring
• production
• distribution
• customer service

You must transfer the income generation process from you as an individual to your business asset.

Your work as a Producer revolves around creating a business asset so it can continue to make money for you for many years after you stop working in the business.

Many moons ago, I was a lawyer working in the music industry and I can tell you as a young man I was astonished at how much money our clients made every year in royalties from songs they had written years ago.

Every time one of their songs gets played on the radio, played live by someone, or used in a commercial it adds to their bank balance.

One of those clients was Elton John... and if you've seen the film Rocketman, you know how quickly he could write a song. Imagine - a few minutes of work and decades later you still earn hundreds of thousands of dollars every year from those few minutes of creative output, without having to raise a finger.

That’s per song.

Imagine having a portfolio of those songs and you can understand how Elton John has managed to live such a lavish lifestyle.

You may not have the ability to write great songs or write bestselling novels but there are plenty of other ways to do similar.

The Difference Between Consumer And Producer Mindsets

Consumption is easy. We’ve been conditioned to believe it brings us happiness. We don’t have to make sacrifices to be a consumer.

Producing is difficult and time-consuming.

It involves sacrificing short-term pleasure in the expectation of long-term benefits.

It’s difficult and it makes us uncomfortable. It’s the reason only a small number of people are producers. They create the stuff that the rest of the world consumes.

Take a look at the people around you and consider how many of them are producers or consumers. And you’ll see there a very few producers, but they are the ones that create the wealth.

To give a simple example a blog post like this may take you 10 minutes to read but it took several hours of work to research and write and many more hours to repurpose it and turn it into a YouTube video.

I get paid nothing for those hours – in fact, it will cost me money as I will hire people to do some of those tasks like filming and editing.

Why do it?

Because it will be available to read/watch for years… and each week it will attract some new viewers and some of them will decide to join The Freedom Code my online membership site. It is like a little soldier working for me 24/7 and without any more work from me and could help produce thousands of dollars in revenue over the next few years.

Or maybe it won’t do that. Maybe nobody will like it. That’s a risk you have to be prepared to take as a Producer.

Making The Switch

So, you want to get conscripted to Team Producer?

Here are 5 things you can do to step up and join the winning team:

1. Stop procrastinating and start doing

People often spend too much time studying for the sake of studying. It’s a form of procrastination and it can kill productivity.

We hide behind books videos and online courses and put off engaging with potential customers.

Because we have been conditioned by the school system that we must have as much knowledge as possible before doing anything. We think we will have the confidence when we have just a bit more knowledge.

But you don’t need more knowledge in order to be a producer.

You already know what you need to get started and you can acquire more as and when you need it. You only need to learn what you need to solve the immediate roadblock on your journey.

Then when you have solved that problem progress until you hit the next one and repeat.

Think of your entrepreneurial journey in the same way as a long car journey.

When you start a car journey you don’t wait for every traffic light to be green. If you did you would never get going.

2. Start small

If you look at all the gurus and marketing on the internet today, you could be forgiven for thinking that everyone (except you) has it all sorted – everyone else is crushing social media, they have mastered multiple complex marketing funnels they have a 7 figure business and investors falling over themselves to invest.

It can create a huge sense of overwhelm and put you off getting started.

Here’s the thing: most of it is absolute crap.

There are less than 5% of businesses that generate over $1M in annual revenue and that includes all the big household names – so the people who are genuinely making that much are few and far between.

Just start somewhere. Produce something of value to a single person, no matter how small it is. It’s your first step, not your final destination.

Just take that first small step and keep on walking.

3. Focus on the process not the outcome.

Consumers constantly think about the end goal they are trying to reach and what it will mean for them if they achieve that goal.

Producers, on the other hand, focus on the steps needed to get there.

Instead of saying: “I want 10,000 subscribers”, they say: “I will publish a piece of quality content every day”.

Instead of saying: “I want to make a million dollars in sales this year”, they say: “I will speak with 20 prospects every day.”

Instead of saying: “I want to be a best-selling author”, they say: “I will write 3000 words every day”.

Focusing on the process forces you to produce results continuously. It helps you to hold yourself accountable for what you do every day.

Having a big inspirational goal, you are working towards will keep you motivated through the tough times, but focusing on process-related goals is what will get you there.

4. Build the right habits

If your process-related goals (e.g. “I will produce 3 Blog Posts every week”) are what you will do, then the habits you form are how you will accomplish those goals.

‘Habits are God’s way of making good automatic’ - Robert Russell.

Habits will help streamline your processes and establish automatic behaviour that leads to continuous consistent output.

Once you have established the right habits, you no longer consciously think about what you are doing. Your actions become automatic just like brushing your teeth or driving a car.

5. Don’t worry about failing. Just produce consistently.

I’m not saying that you must produce a perfect piece of work every day. But produce something. Consistency is critical to success.

It’s what Darren Hardy calls ‘The Compound Effect.’

Of course, you will have good days and you will have bad days. But you can’t let your bad days stop you from moving forward.

Jimmy Carr is one of the most successful comedians in the world.

But he has admitted in interviews he writes lots of bad jokes every day. But his process is to just to keep writing and then he weeds out the bad ones so that he is left with the good.

As a producer, the most important thing is to keep the momentum going and show up every day. If you don’t things are likely to stall. So, keep on producing.