You Must Resist This

What you’re about to read goes against practically every message that you hear each day.

You see, you live in a world surrounded by mediocrity, and worse, the promotion of it.

Country and Western songs tell you to kick-back and relax, don’t worry about working, and just enjoy a beer while playin’ hooky to go fishin’.

Television advertisements entice you to plunk your butt down in front of the boob tube for hours on end, and have your ‘vote’ about who gets to stay in the various competitions they hold each night. (And yes, I’m sure you spot the irony in the fact that TV shows want you to just sit there and watch while other people take action.)

All of your friends and family tell you, “Just be thankful that you have a job” or that “You’re lucky that your business is still surviving”.

They don’t encourage you to step it up. The world encourages complacency.

It wants you to stand still. It wants you to never change. It inhibits growth. Neglects improvement. Ridicules ambition.

And that, my friend, might be the greatest challenge we face on a daily basis.

It’s tough, darn tough, to resist this.

The “average” life spins a sweet, seductive siren call. “Just put in the minimum effort, collect your check, clock in and clock out and don’t give a minute more,” the Devil of Complacency whispers in your ear. “Go home, put your feet up, stop pushing, start relaxing.”

But you must resist. You know it. Deep inside of you there is the knowledge that if you don’t keep growing, pushing, and testing your limits that a part of your soul would die. You’d live the unfulfilled life if you gave into complacency.

And so that devil on your shoulder must be ignored. In fact, it must be cast off. You must rise up, proud of your ambition, and become unwilling to settle for average or the status quo.

The sooner you resist this, the sooner your life and business will grow.

Complacency tempts us all.

I catch myself considering it all the time. My successful coaching clients come to me and admit a loss of motivation after they’ve achieved more than they ever thought possible back when they were struggling and just scraping to get by. It’s natural.

But they know better. I know better. We all know better.

We MUST resist. We must keep pushing. We must remain proud of our ambition.

In fact, during my daily document reviews each day, I go through a summary of Dan Kennedy’s best information delivered at a seminar he called, “The 7-Figure Academy: 7 Steps to 7 Figures”. In his section about Overcoming Resistance, he teaches that, “7-figure earners have extreme complacency resistance. You can’t rest or try to sustain the status quo. You must be finding the replacement for the replacement.”

This means the business you are in now likely won’t be the business you are in two years from now, five years from now, and certainly not ten years from now – particularly if you want to keep growing your income.

As Kennedy said, You’ll move from the “doer of the thing” (i.e. the accountant) to the “marketer of the thing” (i.e. marketing to get more clients into your accounting business). You may even then move to the “teaching marketing of the thing”. Each time you resist complacency and grow outside of your status quo, you will increase your income.

At ETR, we could be quite complacent with the results from the past year. We have almost 6000 Financial Independence Monthly subscribers. We have built an incredible, cohesive team of positive people based in a fantastic office in downtown Denver. We love our work. We love the way the business is right now.

But we aren’t stopping there. Because that would kill us.

In fact, not only are we not stopping there, but we’re going back to risking it all with our next big venture.

Matt and I have decided to go ALL-IN on a $100,000 Transformation Contest for you in early 2013. That’s right, to help you resist complacency and get the greatest results of your life in the shortest amount of time possible, we’re putting up over $25,000 in prizes in four categories (Healthy, Wealthy, Wise, and Overall) to encourage you to take massive action.

2013 is going to be a big year for Early to Rise, and more importantly, it is going to be a huge year for YOU.

The truth is that if you are willing to resist complacency, to challenge the status quo, and to overcome your innate desire to remain within your comfort zone, then you can continue to grow your business and enhance your life in bad times and in good.

As Dave Kekich, another one of my “Daily Document Mentors” writes in Kekich Credo #1, “People will do almost anything to stay in their comfort zones. If you want to accomplish anything, get out of your comfort zone. Strive to increase order and discipline in your life. Discipline usually means doing the opposite of what you feel like doing. The easy roads to discipline are setting deadlines, discovering and doing what you do best and what’s important and enjoyable to you, and focusing on habits by replacing your bad habits and thought patterns, one-by-one, over time, with good habits and thought patterns.”

That’s worth repeating. Resist complacency and focus on replacing your bad habits and thought patterns, one-by-one, over time, with good habits and thought patterns.

“The failure to act is much more often the product of inner, emotional resistance than external resistance,” Kennedy explained at his seminar. “To move forward you must give up your story, whether it is excuses about your childhood, lack of education, your ‘bad luck’, your unsupportive family, where you live, etc.”

Resist complacency to reinvent your business.

Resist complacency and instead, always be testing new things.

Resist complacency and get out and network.

Resist complacency and start evaluating new markets.

Resist complacency and evolve.

Resist. Resist. Resist.

“Resolve your own internal resistance. A 7-figure earner has no margin for such weakness,” Kennedy concluded.

It is up to you. And you can do it.

[Ed. Note. Craig Ballantyne is the author of Financial Independence Monthly, a complete blueprint to helping you take control of your financial future with a web-based business that you can operate from anywhere in the world – including a coffee shop, your kitchen table, or anywhere around the world where there is Internet access. Discover how you can achieve the American Dream and your financial independence here. You’ve never seen anything like this before.]