Personal Development

What A 500 lb Tree Root Taught Me About Entrepreneurship

June 21, 2015 by Paul 1 Comment

Today I spent the day ripping out a giant tree root in my front yard.

It must have weighed at least 500 lbs – maybe more.

It my third day working on this project.

The other two days I spent digging a big trench around the root to get at the big roots an to cut them.

Here’s a picture of the tree stump before I ripped it out today.

…and here’s a picture of me standing by the root, taken from the other side, for scale…

What you see in these pictures was the starting point for me this morning.

It appears that with all that digging that was done around the root, it should just be easy to just push the root over right?

Not likely. 🙂

The roots on this tree were so deep and they intertwined themselves between a whole bunch of rock and very heavy and sticky clay soil.

My John Deer tractor couldn’t even budge this thing a millimeter when I started.

In fact, about 5 hours in to the “mission”, I had dug out an even deeper trench around the root and used a chainsaw and a reciprocating saw to cut out some of the more larger roots and the stump STILL wouldn’t even budge when I tried pulling it with a heavy chain attached to my tractor.

Not even a wiggle.

Nothing.

Solid just like it was before I started digging on Thursday!

A part of me really wanted to just give up, and call in a professional with a bigger tractor or heavier equipment to just do it for me.

However, that would have meant that I had let the stump beat me.

And I didn’t want that to happen.

See, as an entrepreneur, one of the most important skills you can develop is mental toughness.

The ability to face unfavorable situations and circumstances and to keep going even when it seems like NOTHING you’re doing is working.

It sure felt that way today when I went to pull that log out with my tractor and even after all that digging for HOURS, it wouldn’t even move a millimeter.

I was exhausted.

I wanted to give up.

But I didn’t.

I took a short break, got something to drink and then went back out there to finish the job.

About 6-7 hours into the digging and cutting of the roots around the stump, I finally saw the stump wiggle a tiny little bit when I pulled it with the tractor.

Once I saw that, I knew I has this sucker beat.

I did manage to move it over a few feet, ripping out any roots that were holding it to the ground, but then I learned the battle was just beginning.

Just because I got the stump to move didn’t mean I had it out the hole!

It took everything my John Deere had to flip the root over on it’s side, exposing the underbelly.

The underbelly of the root was FULL of rocks, roots, and CLAY.

Ever try to lift anything made out of clay? It’s HEAVY!

Now imagine a tree root made up of nothing but rocks and clay – LOL.

Let’s just say it was heavy.

When I tried leaning up against the root and pushing it with everything I had, it didn’t even budge a little. 🙂

What I had to do then was to flip the root on it’s side, then move the tractor to the other wide of the hole and fill the hole with some dirt, then flip the root back over on top of that dirt – essentially raising it a few feet.

Then I had to flip it again the other way, and now fill the other side of the hole.

That’s what I kept doing. Re-positioning the tractor to opposite sides and flipping the root back and forth, and filling the hole with more and more dirt each time.

Then I FINALLY had the root OUT of the hole at ground level.

Then it was just a matter of cutting the stump flush with the root since I didn’t need to use it for flipping leverage anymore, and getting it dragged to the other side of my property.

All in all, it took me over 9 hours to get this done and by the time I was done I was exhausted but feeling very accomplished.

I worked on this all by myself, with just my tractor, my chainsaw, my reciprocating saw, some shovels, a super heavy duty chain and my MIND to help me.

Once in a while I like doing stuff like this to help me build my mental toughness as an entrepreneur.

Since I mostly make my money with businesses that are Internet based, I don’t have to do any “manual labor” to make my income like some people do.

Sometimes I forget just how fortunate I am to be able to make money from home running Internet businesses and taking on a challenge like this tree stump helps me to stay grateful for how awesome my “job” really is.

I have a lot of respect for people who have to work manual labor jobs every day, but I definitely don’t envy them.

Especially people who have had to work hard labor all of their lives and are now in their later years and their bodies just can’t do it anymore, but they’re forced to in order to pay the bills.

It’s people like that who I think would most benefit from building a business income online to augment and eventually replace their hard labor jobs.

What have you done lately to challenge your mental toughness?

Have you been shying away from a challenge?

If you’re an entrepreneur, you may want to consider taking on a challenge outside of your comfort zone.

It may just be the thing that helps you to develop the mental toughness needed to take your business to the next level.

It doesn’t have to be ripping out tree stumps.

It can be anything that challenges you.

One thing I can definitely say after working on that tree stump for 9 hours today is that I’m so glad that I get to make money from home as a blogger. 🙂

P.s. If you work a manual labor job, and you’d like to one day be free of it, I highly recommend joining me in Empower Network so that one day you don’t have to work so hard anymore!

The One Dirty Little Secret Which Makes Being an Entrepreneur Worth It

June 15, 2015 by Paul Leave a Comment

Entrepreneurship is not easy.

There are many challenges that we have to overcome as entrepreneurs.

And in a lot of ways, it could be easier to just give up on our entrepreneurial dreams and just work a 9-5 job.

Well, I guess I should say JOBS with an “s” because as an employee you’ll probably have about 5 to 25 of them in your lifetime since there’s really no such thing as a “stable job” anymore.

Being an entrepreneur isn’t much different though.

You may have 25 different “failed” businesses under your belt before you succeed.

However, there is one thing that really separates entrepreneurs from employees.

You see, as an entrepreneur you may start a business, and run into all kinds of challenges and make bad decisions and fail.

If you’re in the MLM industry, you may join a half dozen MLMs thinking that this time it will be different, and fail each time.

You may make a lot of wrong decisions, face rejection and failure.

Some days you may want to just give up and quit, especially after making a poor decision and once again being WRONG about something.

However…

… there’s a dirty little secret that successful entrepreneurs have discovered…

… which makes entrepreneurship SO worth it…

… and that dirty little secret is this…

… Even though, as an entrepreneur, you may make a lot of poor decisions and be WRONG a lot…

The truth is…

… that to succeed as an entrepreneur, you don’t have to be right 100% of the time…

… in fact you don’t even have to be right 90% of the time, or even 80% of the time, or even 60% or even 51% of the time…

… you don’t even have to be right the MAJORITY of the time…

… meaning you don’t have to be right 50% of the time or more…

… really, as an entrepreneur, you can make a lot of BIG decisions and be totally wrong on most of them…

… but you can still succeed in a really big way if you just make ONE really good decision!!!

This is the little secret.

If you look at successful entrepreneurs, you’ll find that most of them have a past history of failures, wrong decisions, bad moves, and you’ll discover that they weren’t right most of the time…

In a lot of cases they were just right about ONE THING… they made ONE really good decision, and that decision was the catalyst that made them ultra successful.

Then, once they became ultra successful, they had the financial backing and the means to surround themselves with people who are much smarter than they are who could help them to make good decisions more often.

But as a starting point, their success started with just ONE right decision – that’s it!

Writing one blog post which goes viral and gets you a tonne of traffic could skyrocket you to success.

Finding one traffic source for an affiliate campaign you’re running could skyrocket you to success.

Sponsoring one downline member who becomes a superstar could skyrocket you to success.

The trick is to never give up on your entrepreneurial dreams.

Keep going.

Even if your track record is failure, after failure, after failure, after failure.

Just learn what you can from each failure and realize that all you need is one big success and then you’re set!

You can be wrong MOST of the time, and still succeed just by being right ONCE.

This is the little secret that makes being an entrepreneur so worth it.

🙂

Manifesting Body Diet and Fitness Plan – Day 56

June 14, 2015 by Paul 4 Comments

I has been a while since I’ve done an update on my “Manifesting Body Diet and Fitness” plan.

I will most likely do a more formal update next week when I’ll officially be at the 2 month mark, but I wanted to get an interim update posted today as well.

Progress With My Diet

I started off this plan by tracking my daily meals and counting calories using MyFitnessPal.

I was only able to keep that up for a short period of time and then I stopped doing it.

I may go back, but it’s not really a priority right now.

Instead, what I’ve been really focusing more on is getting my strength training workouts implemented, and trying to make better decisions during meal times.

For example, instead of having a can of Coke with meals like pizza, or Greek food, or other similar foods like I usually do, I’ve been trying to substitute some of those for just plain carbonated water.

I haven’t cut out soda pop completely, but I’ve just been trying to build a habit of switching out a different beverage once or twice a day and just drinking more water.

Also, in terms of meals, I’ve been trying to really watch my portions and becoming aware of when I’m full and satisfied with my meal and getting myself to stop eating at that point, instead of stopping when my plate is empty.

I’ve also been making a point of drinking more high quality nutrition shakes, and a few different types of vitamin drinks that I just love.

It really doesn’t feel like I’ve been on a “diet” of any kind, but I have been losing some weight – although slowly – so I’m pretty happy with that.

Progress With My Fitness Plan

For my strength training / fitness plan, I’ve hired the personal training services of a local company called Ivanco Fitness.

Although I’ve only had 3 training sessions so far with my personal trainers Ivan and Sam, I’m really loving the program they put together for me.

I’ve done a grand total of 6 training sessions so far, 3 of which were with Ivan and Sam, and 3 of which I did on my own based on the program they put together for me.

I would have more sessions completed, but I ended up getting sick with a really bad chest flu that was going around and I had a really tough time getting my workouts done while sick.

When I did start to feel a bit better, but was still coughing, I did 2 training sessions with Sam – completing about 70% of the sets that they planned out for me, but at least I got it done.

Now that I’ve been feeling at 100%, I felt great doing those same workouts the last two times on my own.

Another thing that has been kind of interfering with my strength training regime, has been some landscaping work I’ve been doing in my yard.

Last Monday I had a huge tree fall on my property and it broke through two parts of my fence.

I had to cut the tree up into “small” pieces, and get them off the fence and then fix the fence.

That process of chainsawing the tree into smaller pieces and moving them, and fixing the fence took about 8 hours and it was the equivalent of about 3 or 4 full body workouts – LOL.

I had NO IDEA that trees are that heavy. I’ve cut big branches and small trees down before, but I’ve never dealt with a tree of this size.

The weight of the trunk, even when cut into smaller pieces is just incredible.

We’re talking hundreds of pounds of weight for each piece.

It’s actually kind of interesting, because in the past when I would start a fitness program like P90X or some kind of daily workout or 3x/week workout program, and something like this came up and I had to go outside to work on my yard – which is clearly a full body workout in itself – I would feel guilty for missing my actual workout.

But this time around, I am looking at it totally differently.

I even reached out to Ivan from Ivanco Fitness and asked him how he looks at a situation like this.

I wanted to see what his beliefs are around this issue. I wanted to know if he has to do something like this, where you’re out doing landscaping work or yard workout which is clearly a workout, do you count that as a “workout” for that day, or do you still try to do a strength training session that same day?

Ivan told me that in a case like this he would definitely count what I did (landscaping work) as a training session for that day.

I know it may sound dumb, but in the past when I was doing other programs if I missed a day of THAT program, because I was too exhausted after doing landscaping work on my property, I would kind of feel a bit guilty.

Now I don’t.

In fact, today I was originally going to do another strength training workout, but instead I ended up doing about 7 hours of work in my front yard building a retaining wall and putting down some gravel.

It was a great workout, especially digging / shoveling dirt and moving gravel, AND I felt really great when it was done because I’ve been wanting to get that retaining wall built for months!

My Results So Far

I haven’t done my measurements recently as far as tracking muscle gains, or body measurements.

I’ll most likely do that next week.

However, I do track my weight almost every day and it’s been decreasing so I’m happy about that.

Here’s my weight loss chart so far for the last 56 days:

As you can see, it’s nothing too drastic, but I have lost 6.4 lbs of fat so far!

The dotted line in the graph above represents the first mini-goal I set for myself when I was at 245 lbs, and that was to get to below 240 lbs.

I’ve now gone below the 240 lbs mark, so it’s time for me to re-set my goal again.

I think this time I might set it to 229.9 lbs.

I’ll have a more extensive update on all my stats and measurements soon.

How to Not Get Overwhelmed In Your Business

June 13, 2015 by Paul 5 Comments

Last week while sitting in my living room and watching the last episode of the Harry Potter series, I heard a really loud “whoosh” sound in my back yard.

It sounded really weird, so I jumped out of my seat to investigate.

When I got outside, I saw that both of my dogs were staring off in the same direction, so I looked in that direction as well.

What I saw was rather bizarre.

A huge tree had fallen on my property and hit my fence on two sides.

This tree was massive!

Luckily nobody was hurt, it wasn’t near the house, and didn’t hit any power lines or anything like that, but it did damage my fence.

Here’s a short video clip I shot the following morning, showing the fallen tree and the damage to the fence.

Now, when this happened, it would have been easy to get frustrated and overwhelmed by the situation.

I had to find a quick solution to this challenge, as one of my dogs likes to escape, so a broken fence means that I couldn’t have my dogs out in the yard unsupervised.

Instead of panicking and getting stressed out, the following morning I just decided to deal with the situation one step at a time.

I had NO IDEA how I was going to fix the fence, how or when I’d get it done, and how long it was going to take.

I had no idea what I was going to do with the dogs if this was something that might take a week to fix.

I didn’t even think about those things.

Instead, I just focused on taking the first step, which was simply to put on my gear for when I go outside to do landscaping work, grab my chainsaw and go out there and see what I could do.

Once I got out there and looked at the tree more closely and how it fell, and assessed the surrounding area for any dangers like possible large broken branches that hadn’t fallen yet, etc. I started looking at what the first step would be.

The way the tree fell, the top part of the tree landed on the outside of my fence line, so I went out there and my ONLY concern was how to go about making the first cut with the chainsaw.

I saw that the first thing I needed to cut was to cut off some of the branches that were sticking out, so that’s what I did.

Once I cut some of the branches, my next step was to find the best place to make my first cut in the actual tree. So I did that and I made my first cut.

Once I got that done, I looked for the second cut.

Then the next.

And pretty soon I had the whole tree cut up into smaller pieces.

Now, up until this point I had NO IDEA how I’m going to move those pieces, or where I was going to move them to, or how I was going to go about fixing the fence.

I didn’t even think about those things.

I just focused on what was in front of me… the task at hand.

Fast forward about 8 hours later and with the help of my friend Jabeel, my chainsaw and my utility tractor, I had the tree cut up, moved out of the way and the fence fully fixed.

It wasn’t easy, but I didn’t allow the situation to overwhelm me.

Now, what the heck does any of this have to do with starting a business?

Well, EVERYTHING.

You see, one of the challenges that I see people running into when they try to start a new business or even when they launch a blog or an online business, is that they instantly get overwhelmed!

They get so stressed out, frustrated and overwhelmed with all the things they have to do, that they just give up and become completely paralyzed.

The reason why most people get frustrated and overwhelmed is because they try to solve every challenge, every problem, and every detail of the situation in their MIND before even getting started!

You don’t need to do that!

Instead, try simply taking the next step that you can see in front of you, and once you get there, you’ll see further!

For example, sometimes people ask me about how to make money blogging…

… and they’re talking to me about some potential challenge or question they have about some advanced step that they might or might not even have to take 6 months or 12 months down the line with their Blogging business, and at the same time they haven’t even taken the FIRST STEP towards starting their blog.

It’s like they’re trying to figure out EVERYTHING, before taking one step forward.

Building a business in 2015 just doesn’t work that way.

You can’t see 5 or 10 years into the future anymore like you used to be able to in the 1950’s.

5 or 10 year business plans are a joke, even among some of the largest corporations in the world.

Forget about trying to solve every problem before it’s even an issue.

Instead, just take the FIRST STEP towards your business goals.

Once you take that first step, the next step will present itself and then take that one as well.

People ask me “Paul, how the heck do you write hundreds of Blog posts like that?!”

The truth is that I really don’t know. I have no idea how to write hundreds of blog posts.

I never think of it that way.

I only think about writing ONE blog post.

And even then, I just think about the next sentence that I’m going to write. Once I write that sentence, I then worry about the next one.

And he next.

See my point?

Writing 100 blog posts or 1,000 blog posts seems WAY to hard and overwhelming.

That’s why I never think of it that way.

I just think about the next step in front of me, and that’s it.

I can figure out the rest when I get there!

THAT is how you build your business without getting overwhelmed.

What’s the next step in YOUR business? Just take that step. Don’t worry about what comes after that.

Have you started a Blog yet?

If not, why not?

Still not sure what the whole plan is? How it all fits together? How you’re going to do everything?

You don’t need to know all that.

All you need to know is the next step.

Think of the next step in your business and go get that done.

If your next step is to get started with a Blog, I recommend clicking here to get started.

Driving With Paul Episodes 11 – 20

June 12, 2015 by Paul 1 Comment

Continuing on with yesterday’s recap of the first 10 episodes of my “Driving with Paul” series I’ve been publishing on YouTube, here are episodes 11 through 20.

Enjoy!