Develop and Share Your Business Brilliant Plan for Success

The L-E-A-P: Four Best Practices of the Greatest Self-Made Entrepreneurs

"L" = "Learn": Discover Your Center

Essential #1: Write Down Your Goals
(20 minutes)
- Choose a goal for your net worth and write it down as Year 10 on the right-hand side of a sheet of paper.
- Then, moving from right to left, write down your average monthly income goals for Year 5, 4, 3, and 2.
- Finally, write down your monthly income goals for each month of the coming year, starting with next month.
- Post the sheet in a place where you can see it every day from your desk. Repeat this process every time you complete a deal or have a windfall.
BACKGROUND:

Having a long-term goal, expressed in monetary terms, gives you a point of focus for all your efforts toward Business Brilliance. Dollar goals are valuable because they are easy to measure, and what can be measured can be managed. Goals make becoming Business Brilliant a manageable task.

Ideally, all your daily priorities should be informed by the amount of wealth you’d like to achieve 10 years from now. If you set a goal of having a net worth of $10 million or more in 10 years, you probably need to aim for an equity share in one or more salable businesses. Your choices of prospects, partners, and projects need to be defined by that objective, driven by your 10-year goal. What kind of businesses? Save that for later. The goal is what matters. It gives you the decision-making power to respond to those and all the other questions you’ll face down the road.

Once you’ve chosen a 10-year goal, you’ll need incremental goals to guide you on the way. Let’s say your 10-year goal is to have $2 million in investable assets. How much money would you have to have over each of the next five years to position you for reaching that goal? How much would you need to make per month in the coming year? If you are a professional who charges by the hour, what does your target hourly rate need to be?

Incremental goals clarify and simplify what you need to do. Hitting them helps preserve your sense of purpose and forward progress. But sometimes these incremental goals do the most good when you fall short of them. Failing on your monthly income targets will expose your need to make some adjustments more quickly. On the other hand, it’s just as likely that you’ll reach some of the short-term goals faster than you thought possible. Then you might need a new long-term goal, because your capabilities are greater than you had thought.
Essential #2: Commit to What You Do best
(10 Minutes)
- Write down as many examples as you can of tasks you believe you do exceptionally well.
- Try to choose skills and capabilities you think you could convincingly explain to a stranger who has some knowledge of your field of expertise.
- Repeat the process for 10 minutes the next day. Then start editing the list until you only have three items.
- Next to each of these three items, write down three clear statements that provide evidence these items are true.
BACKGROUND:

Focusing your energies on what you do best is the path taken by the world’s most extraordinarily successful people—everyone from Bill Gates to the Beatles. It’s the path taken by ordinary successful people, too, like the millions of self-made millionaires out there. Through trial and error, most of them have found the handful of things they do best, cut back on distractions and diversions, and executed on their special talents in ways that allowed them to hone their Business Brilliance.

This idea goes by a lot of names—identifying your strengths, discovering your core competencies, or distinguishing your special abilities. I like to call it “finding your Center” or just plain “Centering” because it’s a visual term that’s easy to remember.

Most people aren’t Centered at all. Polling by Gallup shows that only 1 out of 3 employees are able to say that “at work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” This is a big reason why average wages for college-educated workers have barely grown in the past 15 years. They have no leverage to bid up the price of their labor since they are only adequately suited for the work they do. If you’re not engaged with what you do best every day, you’re poorly positioned to become Business Brilliant. And in an age when millions of routinized white-collar jobs are being sent overseas, Centering might be your most vital economic survival skill.
Centering should be something that is central to your daily life. One of the best things about it is that it lends value and meaning to even your worst setbacks and disappointments. When you work at what you do best, even a crushing defeat can be an important source of self-knowledge and progress toward your Center. Most self-made millionaires say they count on setbacks to help them redefine what they do exceptionally well. They use trial and error to get more Centered. That way, even when their best efforts go unrewarded, they are still refining their expertise.
Essential #3: Follow the Money
(20 minutes)

Go over your list of three things you do extremely well from the Centering exercise and write down the occupations that, to your knowledge, most often use those skills to make the most money. This might seem a pedestrian exercise, but it’s not. With a little bit of thought, you should have two or three things you’ve never considered before.
BACKGROUND:

Look at the top people in any field and you will see who has gotten there by following the money in that field. They are working at their Centers and sharing in the rewards that come from creating things of great value for others.

The chefs who fall into money run restaurant partnerships, write cookbooks, and star in their own cable shows. The carpenters who fall into money own their workshops, do high-end custom work or partner in real–estate–development deals. Top managers in the corporate world either earn bonuses for producing strong financial results or gain equity stakes in their companies.

All of these people are positioned in “the Line of Money.” Whenever they help create value and money changes hands, they are in line to collect a share of the rewards. Business Brilliance only happens to people who put themselves in the Line of Money first.

The greatest rewards in any profession or occupation are reserved for whoever is most Centered and most directly in the Line of Money. I’ve studied this in the medical profession. On average, doctors are the most highly paid professionals in our economy. But the doctors who rank in the top 10 percent of income among doctors are not necessarily the smartest, the most proficient or even most popular doctors. The wealthiest doctors are those who first chose the specialty that best suits their skills very well and then take an ownership stake in a practice that specializes in that type of medicine. They are Centered and in the Line of Money.

The same goes for lawyers, engineers, and even academics. The charter school movement has allowed large numbers of educators to start working for shared rewards instead of salaried compensation. If you consider the proliferation of Bible Belt megachurches, you will see that even some clergy-people are Centered and in the Line of Money. Following the money generally means your main source of income comes from being in the Line of Money. It’s not necessary to quit your job if you want to get into the Line of Money but our survey tell us that only 1 in 10 self-made millionaires became wealthy by working for someone else. Most of them worked at salaried jobs where they honed their skills and found their Centers, and then transitioned into self-employment or a partnership.
Essential #4: Climb the Line-of-Money Ladder
THE TECHNIQUE
(30 minutes)
- Draw a four-rung ladder on a sheet of paper, with “Proprietor” at the top, then “Percentage,” “Project,” and “Premium” on the next three rungs.
- Leave about five lines of empty space under each heading.
- When you’re done, you’ll have ideas for 12 projects, arrayed from lowest value to highest value, each one building on those below it. You’ve mapped your path for Business Brilliance.
- Redo it every time you land a new project.
BACKGROUND:

Wherever you find your Center, you should be able to see countless ways to use it to get in the Line of Money. Some of these ways are more rewarding than others, though, so it’s important to sort them all out. When you can picture all the different ways you might follow the money, then you’re ready to take a harder look at the Line of Money as though it were a ladder. Each rung on the Line-of-Money Ladder is defined by the type of price you put on your participation. Each step up yields higher rewards, with equity at the very top.

PREMIUM PRICING is the bottom rung on the Line-of-Money Ladder. It is occupied by self-employed consultants and other independent contractors who price their efforts at hourly rates. Because time is finite, this is the most difficult way toward Business Brilliance, although top-tier trainers, tutors, psychoanalysts, and other personal-service professionals are good examples. They demonstrate their own brand of Business Brilliance by cultivating such high demand for their time that they bid up their hourly rates.

PROJECT PRICING is the next rung up the ladder. When you work on a project basis, you enjoy the advantage of being rewarded for achieving a result, regardless of your time commitment. Your brilliance comes by charging as much as you can, and then handing off portions of the work to other professionals to get the job done more quickly.

PERCENTAGE PRICING is another rung higher, because a percentage means you’re getting a discrete cut of the rewards for success. This is commonly the lucrative add-on in an agreement to project pricing. Many deals closed with project pricing have a component of percentage pricing worked in, offering additional shared rewards for delivering on a winning effort.

PROPRIETOR PRICING is another name for equity participation. It’s the top rung in the Line of Money Ladder. When you’re in the proprietor role of a business, you’re not just playing in the game—you also own the team. Each successful project and each profitable quarter builds more value into the business you own either fully or in partnership. Most of the personal wealth in the world has been gained through equity. It is the highest achievement in Business Brilliance and it should be the ultimate objective in your negotiations. You want an ownership stake, even if its just a small share, of anything that might be destined to be sold later at many multiples of its current value.

"E"="Earn": Get in the Line of Money

Essential #5: Run the Numbers
(30 minutes)
- Draw up up a pro forma.
- Leave lots of room for what you don’t know and what you still need to find out. The numbers you use will always be gross approximations, but the exercise will force you to come to grips with what it will take to succeed.
There are five critical dimensions to every prospective project, regardless of size. Each dimension requires a good hard look before you spend too much time or money on the project:

WHAT WILL IT COST TO PLAY? What will you have to spend in order to get started? Add up everything you need to buy, all the services you need to employ, and all the work you and your partners will probably need to put in before you earn your first dollar.

WHAT WILL IT COST TO STAY? How much will it cost to operate your project once it’s running? Add up all the anticipated monthly bills and labor costs. Figure in your own hours, too. Add the dollar value of your hours, too.

HOW HIGH IS THE CEILING? Estimate the potential income. This is a reasonable high-end number of dollars the project would generate if everything ran perfectly. Most projects face certain capacity limits and you need to know what they are. A restaurant’s revenue, for instance, is limited mainly by its entrée prices and the number of tables.

HOW HARD IS THE FLOOR? What’s the worst possible result? You will earn some revenue. But what is the absolute lowest monthly revenue your project will likely earn? How hard will it be for you to take a total loss? Prepare for the worst, and see what it might look like.

HOW BIG IS THE CHERRY ON TOP? If your working at your Center, every project offers some “soft rewards” that will benefit you in the long run even if the project itself isn’t a ringing success. List those benefits: a respectable track record, a set of new connections, a higher public profile, etc. But a pro forma requires a dollar estimate. It turns out it’s easy to attach a dollar value to the Cherry on Top. If someone were willing to buy out your share of the project before it even starts, what is the lowest dollar amount you would accept to walk away. That’s the exact value of the Cherry on Top.

The first job of the pro forma is to keep you out of trouble. It gives you the chance to stare at all the most important numbers and rethink the project or abandon it altogether. The rock-bottom expense of playing and staying might come too close to your ceiling on earnings. You need to ask yourself why you’d go into something with such a limited upside potential. Maybe the Cherry on Top is the answer. Maybe not.

Play. Stay. Ceiling. Floor. Cherry on Top. Whether you plan on flipping burgers or flipping real estate, these five numbers will help you determine the look and shape of what you want to do, and whether it’s worth trying.
Essential #6: Protect Your Bottom Line
(20 minutes)
- Consider your short-term goals and how much money you need from this deal to contribute to those goals.
- Compromising your goals just to get a deal done is the fastest way out of Business Brilliance.
- Putting too much at stake in the deal can keep you outside of the line of money for years to come.
- Don’t ever take on so much risk that if a project fails, you will lack the resources to try again (Essential 15).
Once you’ve run the numbers and decided to go forward, the pro forma should have helped you arrive at your bottom line. Not the project’s bottom line. Your own personal bottom line. This is the minimum reward—and maximum risk—you must have in order to participate. Until you decide on these numbers, you’re not ready to negotiate a deal with anyone.

If you put too high a premium on achieving a win-win solution, it might very well end up win-lose, with you holding the bag. Remember the Stephen Covey story about the landlord who locked into a bad long-term lease because he felt he needed to close a “win-win” deal with a tenant? If the landlord had entered those negotiations with a clear idea of his personal bottom line, he would have known exactly when the tenant was asking too much. He could have walked away with a clear conscience.

I’ve shown how self-made millionaires are much better than most people when it comes to walking away from a deal that isn’t quite right. For some this ability may reflect their sizable egos, but that’s not the whole story. People who appear most comfortable putting their personal interests first are actually just executing on a predetermined plan. They come to the table knowing in advance exactly what they must have. It’s not about ego. It’s about respecting your own goals.

Linda Babcock in her college negotiating courses advocates the same approach to salary offers. You must draw a line below which you won’t compromise. It’s an essential part of negotiating, but most people never do it.

In a business deal, a bottom line of this kind also should also involve putting limits on how much you put at risk. You want to shrink your downside risk wherever possible and walk away if it appears too high. Many business beginners make the fatal mistake of investing so much of their own capital in a business deal—maybe a franchise or an investment property—that if the deal fails they won’t ever have the resources to give themselves a second or third chance to succeed.
Essential #7: Press Your Advantage
(20 minutes)
- Before you negotiate on price or equity, redo the deal’s pro forma from your partner’s point of view.
- If you’re a landlord do it from the tenant’s point of view.
- When you’re done, circle all the areas where you have serious questions.
- What are the soft benefits for them?
- How have they limited their own downside risk?
If you can’t get them to answer these questions in casual conversation, ask around. Every clue you have about their motivations will help you press your advantage.

Once all your goals are clear, the basic negotiating formula for Business Brilliance is this: You bring people to the table according to their strengths. You negotiate with them according to their weaknesses.

That may seem a little cold-blooded, but you have to accept that in almost all business transactions, you are being sized up in the exact same way. In chapter 3 we saw how just about every boss who’s ever hired you with a smile and a handshake was also eager to exploit your vulnerabilities by offering you the absolute minimum salary he or she could get away with.

So if you want a negotiation to work for you and your goals, it’s not enough to go in knowing all about your own bottom line. You also need a strong sense of what the other side’s bottom line looks like, too. Before you sit down to make any agreement, you should know what motives, beyond money, might be driving the other side’s participation.

Let’s say you have partners who lack expertise but have access to cash. You lack cash but have expertise. Your partners will want to bring you and your expertise into the deal for as little money as possible, in order to preserve their return on investment. They will squeeze you and try to give you as little as possible in terms of project pricing, percentage pricing, and equity.

What ability do you have to squeeze them back? This is largely determined by what you know about them. How badly do they need you for this project? How easily could you be replaced? Are they in love with the project? That’s important because love can be blind. Even the most successful businesspeople give away concessions without thinking if they want a project to happen right away. The more aware you know about their vulnerabilities, the better able you are to press your advantage.

Here’s a story that illustrates the point. Marlon Brando was shooting a movie in which he had a small equity stake, known as points. But he also had tax problems and owed the federal government $100,000. Brando’s manager called the movie producer and explained Brando’s problem. He asked for a cash advance during the shoot. The producer checked with the studio head, who was delighted. “Give it him,” he said. “But get back his points.” So Brando agreed to gave up his equity share in the movie for $100,000. The movie was The Godfather. Within a few years, that $100,000 check from Paramount had cost Brando about $11 million.

The studio head hired Brando because of Brando’s strength as an actor. He negotiated with Brando, however, on the basis of Brando’s weakness as tax debtor. That’s why Paramount fell into money on The Godfather and Brando did not.
Essential #8: Plan Your Divorce in Advance
- Before any negotiation, use your pro forma to anticipate what might go wrong, and under what conditions you will want the divorce clause to either let you out with a minimum of loss or give you leverage to negotiate for more money.
- If you want the divorce clause to work best for you, then it’s up to you to propose it and provide a draft of the terms.
Just like a prenuptial agreement between mature adults, every good partnership should have the divorce terms built in from the wedding day. A deal that goes bad can be like an anchor around your leg. You should always have a way to cut the cord.

When you begin a new project, everyone is in love with each other, but then things change when the money starts to move. Expect the unexpected. Some partners suddenly realize they gave away too much in negotiations once the dollars aren’t flowing in their favor. They start whining and beg to renegotiate. If you don’t have divorce terms written out for all parties by mutual agreement, then there’s no way to respond.

The divorce clause is the last line of defense for your bottom line. If a deal is souring in a way that obliges you to continue to fund and work it, even though you feel certain there is no prospect for success, you want a prior agreement to back you up so you can quit. You can’t lose sight of what’s called “opportunity costs.” Every day you toil at a losing deal is one more day you are not out looking for a winner. You are one day farther from reaching your goals.

The most powerful thing about a divorce clause is that you don’t have to leave the project for it to be useful. It can just be a point of leverage in renegotiating terms that protect your bottom line. You can say, “I can’t afford to do keep doing this unless I get more money.” Then it’s up to your partners to decide what your participation is worth to them. Either way, you’ve protected yourself, and your goals.

"A"="Assistance": Build Your Network

Essential #11: Build a Team
(30 minutes)
- Do a quick pro forma on the one time-consuming task you either don’t do well or know you shouldn’t be doing yourself.
- Use the pro forma to calculate the minimum value you could create if someone else were taking the time to do that task. That number is your budget.
- Go through your Nodal Network, call around, and find someone who can do the task for that much and not one penny more.
- Even if the number is very low, get creative. It works.
This is the inevitable corollary to Essential #2—Commit to What You Do Best. Falling into money requires you to spend as much of your time and focus as possible on your exceptional skills and talents. For everything else, you need a team.

Team building may be little more than taking a new, more direct business approach with people you already associate with. Once you’ve committed to what you do very well, you’ll see that people with complementary skills are all around you. The ones you don’t know are likely just one degree removed from you—through your Nodal Network.

Let’s say you’re an architect. You’ve determined that your true strength is project management and not design. You want to use this strength to go into real estate development and get an equity stake in a property. There’s a lot you don’t know. But you probably already know many of the people who can help: realtors to identify building sites, bankers to set up construction financing, investors to provide capital, and contractors to build your development.

Even the worst, most hermitlike architect knows a few realtors, contractors, and lawyers. They would make up your Nodal Network. They would be your first natural points of access to your other missing parts—investors and bankers. A Nodal Network by definition puts you just one degree of separation away from all the people in the respective networks of each of your network’s members. Follow through and you will have a prospective team for the project before you know it. Following through and making it happen involves most of the other Essentials. But even a rudimentary Nodal Network assures you that your project will not die from a lack of prospects.

It’s easy to feel daunted by the idea that you need to manage a team of people. Think back to Essential 3, getting in the Line of Money. You may love to cook, but the thought of running a restaurant makes you nauseous. You enjoy woodworking but can’t stand the real estate game. And while you have a knack for managing people, the corporate ladder is a tough climb and running your own business may feel completely beyond you. The thought of these added responsibilities might give you an ache in the pit of your stomach.

Everyone who becomes Business Brilliant feels that same ache—of anxiety, of the unknown, of the suspicion that what you don’t know or can’t do yourself will sneak up and destroy you.

The difference is how they interpret that ache. Self-made millionaires take it as a signal that they need to go find some partners to take on these other tasks. For them, the ache is a valuable source of information. It tells them that there’s something they don’t know how to do, that they’re not good at, that it’s time to draw on their Nodal Networks and go outside their Centers for help.

Once again, your Nodal Network is your most valuable asset. Time and focus are your two most valuable resources. Business Brilliance requires you to rely on your most valuable asset to find help conserving your most valuable resources.
Essential #12: Get a Coach
- As with finding any personal-services professional, you should interview a few coaches before settling on one.
- If you’re using this book as your guide for developing your Business Brilliance, you want to identify a coach willing to work with you on the 17 Essentials.
- There are countless online resources for finding coaches, but you shouldn’t pass up this opportunity to source your Nodal Network for referrals first.
By now it should be obvious that it doesn’t take money to make money. It takes people. That should come as good news because accessing people is usually easier and more fun than accessing cold hard cash.

Here’s the drawback: People are human. Your network members, your team members, your clients—each of them has a uniquely human set of wants, desires, quirks, and limitations that you need to understand and accommodate. These people hold the keys to your financial goals but, very naturally, they are committed to their own goals first. Every day you run the risk of neglecting your own purposes in the whirl of responding to other people’s requests and concerns.

This is why you need a coach. You need someone who will keep you accountable to your own goals and avoid procrastinating on your projects. With the right kind of coach, you will have one person among all the people in your business life and your personal life who can rely on to help you put your own objectives first. No matter how proficient and goal oriented you are, an effective coach can make you better.

Types of coaching services vary widely, but our studies of coaches in the financial services sector showed that fairly moderate and inexpensive coaching—consisting of weekly phone consultations—can raise revenues for their clients by 25 percent or more. If you think of a coach as a “boss you can fire,” as someone you are accountable to but not working for, you can make sure there’s always someone ready to help you avoid getting diverted and distracted from your goals.
Essential #10: Manage Your Network Upward
- Put together seven file folders—paper folders or computer folders.
- Mark one folder with the name of the each of the top six people you came up with in Essential 9. This is the Nodal Network your livelihood depends upon.
- Is there anything you shouldn’t know about these six people?
- Fill each folder with items from their company websites, facts about the companies, their corporate board memberships, charity involvements, and the names of their spouses and names and ages of their children.
- The seventh folder should be marked “Bench.” This is where you toss information about all your potential network members.
- Check it once a week to reevaluate the status of your network.
Nodal Networks are always in flux. People come and go, businesses change direction, your own priorities change. The best way to deal with change is to take change into your own hands. If you accept the premise that your Nodal Network is your most valuable asset, then it makes sense to manage it just as you would any asset portfolio. You want to be on the lookout for new promising network members while withdrawing your connections with underperformers.

Let’s go back to the bakery shop with its Nodal Network of one wedding planner, one party planner, and four caterers. Maybe wedding cakes are the highest margin product and you want to get more of that kind of business. And maybe one of your four caterers, with lower-margin cakes, has dropped off in referrals. So you consciously start trying to identify a second wedding planner to add to your Nodal Network.

The act of networking has gotten a bad name. Its main pitfall is that it tends to be casual and random. Online “social networking” has made things worse. It’s hard to keep a network small and tight when you’ve got old college buddies and former workmates linking in unannounced and adding you their own networks.

If you’re in the serious business of Nodal Networking, you collect information about your prospective network members, look for mutual connections, and reach out to them. You’re not cold-calling, as a salesperson might. You’re marketing your services in the hope of finding a good alliance, some shared values about the business that makes it advantageous for you to be in each other’s networks.

And if you ever show up an industry networking event, go there with an agenda in mind. You’re going to meet three prospective members for your network and you’re going to ask their advice about a problem or an issue you’ve been facing. Few people enjoy sales pitches, but almost everyone enjoys dispensing advice. This way you have a direction for each conversation you have at the event. And you can excuse yourself from spending more than a minute or so with anyone who can’t help you. You just apologize politely and explain you’ve got to find someone who can help you. It’s a networking strategy Prince calls “NEXT”—Never Extend eXtra Time.
Essential #9: Keep Your Network Small and Focused
(10 minutes)
- Make a list of the top dozen people you would go to tomorrow for advice on finding a new project in the work you do best.
- Rank the top six you are closest to or who are best positioned to help you. That’s the beginning of your Nodal Network.
- If you work in a salaried job, make up similar lists of people you would go to regarding either a promotion or changing jobs. What could be more important?
If you want to become Business Brilliant, your network is your most valuable asset. Not even the skills and capabilities at your Center are as important as the network you rely on for new business opportunities. Without opportunities, your skills and capabilities will go to waste.

On average, self-made millionaires tell us they maintain a circle of six people whom they “closely network in order to source new business.” The middle-class survey respondents claim an average of nine people for the same purpose.

Why would the millionaires have smaller networks? I suspect it’s because the millionaires are actively managing what Russ Prince call Nodal Networks. They’re not randomly collecting business acquaintances. They’re maintaining a deliberately compact set of capable people, each one of whom serves as a strategic point of contact, or a “node,” for that business person’s channel of trade.

Let’s say you’re running a bakery. Your Nodal Network should be made up of six people who are well-positioned to send cake-buying business your way. It might include a wedding planner, a party planner, and four catering-hall managers. These are people who like your cakes, consider you reliable, and will gladly recommend you to their clients. You value these people and go out of your way to cultivate their friendship and stay in touch with them because your livelihood depends on them.

But why stop at six? Wouldn’t it be better if the baker’s network had 10 or 20 caterers and party planners?

The baker probably does know 10 or 20 other caterers and planners. But he relies on the six in his Nodal Network for perhaps 80 percent of his revenue. You can’t really rely on more than six people for the simple reason that paying proper attention to those six takes a lot of work. Maintaining a Nodal Network well and faithfully demands more effort than you could ever devote to 10 or 20 people. You can’t have 10 or 20 people in your Nodal Network any sooner than you can have 10 or 20 best friends. Someone who counts 10 or more people in his or her network probably has no useful network at all. True Nodal Networks work only when they’re small and tight.

"P"="Persistance": Persevere in the Face of Adversity

Essential #13: Make Friends with Failure
(30 minutes)
- Look at the pro forma (Essential 6) on the project that failed.
- Take down a few notes on each assumption within the pro forma that fell short of expectations.
- Even if you feel it’s obvious what went wrong, write it down for the same reason you commit your financial goals to paper—to make it real. A concrete set of failed expectations, clearly written out, gives you some firm points of reference and sets the stage for the second or third try.
It’s never fun when a project falls short. The only thing worse than failing, though, is failing to learn from failing. To develop your Business Brilliance, you need to embrace the setbacks that come your way. You need to examine each one carefully and use that analysis to make adjustments in a second effort. Why? Because anything worth trying is worth trying again. It’s natural to want to give up and run away from the pain of disappointment. A failed attempt of any kind will give you plenty of evidence that the project was fundamentally unsound, or that you’re not cut out for it. That’s the trap that failure sets for us, a trap most of our middle-class survey respondents say they fall into. I’ve learned through three separate surveys that their most common response to failure is to give up and do something else.

The vast majority of self-made millionaires are different. They go right back at whatever failed because they know that it often takes more one attempt to gain the insights and knowledge necessary for succeeding at anything. Each time they miss the mark, they bring themselves that much closer to making it on the next try. They end up becoming Business Brilliant because it is this rare quality of persistence that ultimately sets them apart.
Essential #14: Keep Your Changes to Yourself
(20 minutes)
- Go back over the notes you made in Essential 13.
- Rewrite each element of what went wrong in language that makes you accountable for making sure it goes right next time.
- Wherever it appears that one of your partners, dropped the ball, scratch it out. You need to take the risk he’s learned from the mistake. There’s little or nothing you can do about it, short of getting a new partner.
There is a difference between persistence and banging your head against a wall. Before you try a second time at something that didn’t work, you need to consider what’s worth trying to change and what’s not.

Self-made millionaires are almost unanimous on one point: When rebounding from failure, don’t try changing other people. Only 1 percent said they are most likely to “Try to change your partner’s behavior or approach the next time.” Instead they put the onus on themselves. About 7 in 10 said they were most likely to change their own behavior or approach, with the other 3 in 10 saying they would likely try to change circumstances on a second try.

It’s a point that’s pretty consistent with all the 17 Essentials. Whatever happens, you should assume it’s 70 percent due to your own actions and 30 percent due to circumstances, because those are the only two factors you can control or change next time. When you take that next crack at anything that failed or fell short expectations the first time, you will save yourself a lot of wasted effort if you keep this much in mind.
Essential #15: Try, Try, Try, Try Again
(30 minutes)
- Review your worksheets from Essentials 13 and 14.
- Then go back to Essential 5 and run the numbers all over again for a new pro forma.
Discovering your full Business Brilliance is an “iterative” process. The term comes from the Latin word iterare, “to repeat.” Mathematicians who use iterative calculations start out with an initial guess at an answer. Then they run a series of ever-finer approximations to get closer and closer to the correct result. The reason they use the iterative method is very instructive: Some equations would take longer than a lifetime to solve if they were computed by exact mathematical formulas. The same is true with Business Brilliance. It can’t be done perfectly and exactly. There aren’t enough hours in a day or in your lifetime to find the precise method of getting it right on the first attempt. You’re better off starting out today with iterative expectations. You draw up your pro forma, you make your deal and you move forward, knowing that there’s a lot you don’t know.

Maybe you succeed. Maybe you succeed only modestly. But if you fail or merely disappoint yourself, consider that you’ve just taken the first step toward homing in on your target. Now you’re better informed. You know where some of the pitfalls lie. The second go-round might reveal still more pitfalls, but because it’s your second time, you’ll be better prepared to deal with them, too.

Remember that anything worth trying is worth trying again. And again. And again.
Essential #16: Do Not Procrastinate
- Go down the list of 17 Essentials.
- If you’re procrastinating, find the one Essential that may have gotten you stuck.
- When in doubt, rely on your network.
- If you’re really stuck, you may need a new coach.
Procrastination is largely fed by fear of failure. If you can acclimate yourself to occasional setbacks and disappointments, it’s easier to move ahead because you’re starving procrastination of its fuel.

Procrastination is also about perfectionism. Lots of people put off pursuing their dreams because it can be more fun to imagine achieving something great than to endure the difficulties of achieving anything even reasonably good. Putting off making decisions and taking action are the two most certain ways to avoid bad decisions and poor results.

Business Brilliance requires that you take opposite tack. You keep making decisions with imperfect information, because as long as you’re doing more right things than wrong things, even a bad decision is usually better than no decision at all. That’s the synergy effect of these 17 Essentials. When you set out with a strong set of goals and work at your Center, in the Line of Money, with a talented team and a strong network, the only real mistake you can make is the mistake of not trying.
Essential #17: Make Your Own Luck
- Double down on what you do best.
- Press your advantage whenever and wherever you have the advantage. Work your network.
- Try and try again.
- Above all: Ask. Ask for what you want. Ask even when it feels uncomfortable. Ask for more than what you need. Ask for what you’re afraid to ask for, and ask for it more than once. Ask until the word “No” loses its sting.
- When you can laugh at “No” and look at each setback as a source of instruction, then you’ll know you’ve become one of the lucky people destined to become Business Brilliant.
Self-made millionaires are lucky and they know it. In our survey, 7 out of 10 ascribed “luck” as important to their financial success. Only career choice and persistence ranked more highly. Education, creativity, and putting one’s own capital at risk were all considered less important than luck when it came to financial success.

Researchers have studied people who consider themselves lucky. They find the same personal preferences and qualities among the lucky that I find among self-made millionaires. Lucky people nurture their goals and expect them to happen. They make the most of opportunities that come their way. They associate with other people who consider themselves lucky. They turn their misfortune into good luck by persevering and seeing the good side of even the worst of circumstances. Business Brilliance and making your own luck are really the same thing. They both draw upon the ordinary, mundane practices laid out by LEAP: Learning, Earning, Assistance, and Persistence.

LEAP, at long last, is just another way to spell LUCK.

Additional Resources

In December of 2012, your instructor, Lewis Schiff, prepared to speak to a gathering of very successful people in Beverly Hills, CA about his revealing research. Here's what he told them..
- Learn
- Earn
- Assistance
- Persistance
Together, they spell L-E-A-P.

While this sounds like a relatively simple formula for such a complex topic such as entrepreneurship and wealth-creation, I will share with you the data that illustrates the power of these ideas but the techniques you can use to train your mind to prioritize them properly and the specific benchmarks that match your own capabilities and temperament.

Here's the funny thing about studying rich people. Lots of experts say they can "teach you how to be rich" but very few of them approach it using a "best practices" approach. Readers of business books recognize the phrase "best practices" as one part of the lexicon of business jargon but best practices is a simple and proven process: You study those who have done what you want to do and you replicate their steps.

But you can't just study anyone. you have to study enough of them, and a random sample, too, in order to present compelling evidence that it works for a broad section of people. That's what I've done and that's different than most others who "show you how to be rich.

So, get ready to learn:
- The data that defines best practices.
- The stories that illustrate these best practices.
- The mind-training that allow you to transfer these practices to your life, capabilities and temperament.
In other words, get ready to learn what works, how it works and how you can do it, too. There, now I sound like every other late-night infomercial huckster. Judge for yourself whether this "best practices" approach works for you.

I can be reached at lewisschiff@business-brilliant.com
Steve Jobs did. So has David Neeleman, the founder of Jet Blue. In fact, you couldn't find a successful self-made business icon who hasn't experienced multiple crushing business failures. In today's video segment, we explore an unseen barrier that stops most people from achieving their greatest successes.

Seth Godin, himself a veteran of multiple failures, tells us that failing to persevere through adveristy prevents us from achieving real expertise in anything important because we quit just before we really learn what it takes to succeed. Even after you master all the other elements of the Business Brilliant, it won't matter unless you are ready to confront the very real and likely aspect that multiple failures stand in the way of great success.

Wasim Osman

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