In high school physics, you learn that a Body at rest generally stays at rest, and a Body in motion generally stays in motion.

In this segment, Darren Hardy relates that Napoleon Hill did a survey of how long it generally takes an entrepreneur to take that first step. Guess what? The number was “less than one” – meaning, that most people give up before they begin!

Don’t let fear rule your life. Cutting out pictures for your Dream Board, organizing your desk, and ordering your business cards are NOT “first steps.” They are Fear manifesting as Puttering.

In my book Fempowerment: A Guide To Unleashing Your Inner Bond Girl, I relate a story that Darren Hardy also talks about in this segment. Often in my coaching practice, I would use the analogy that I heard in Marines Corps Boot Camp and you’ve no doubt heard before – “Ready, Aim, Fire!”

The problem is, most of the time, people go Ready…Aim…. and then just keep Aiming, never Firing at all!

In reality, you’re not going to believe I would tell you this but this is true – it’s often better to go “Ready, Fire, Aim!”

At least that way you have taken Action, and then you can refine your Action by changing your Aim. Remember – most people never even get to the “Fire” part!

The first step is the hardest. Take it quickly and don’t think about it. Then go ahead again.

Mr. Hardy talks about how the real key to success is MASSIVE failure. I’d like to share with you what I think is one of the best books ever written on this subject – it’s called Go for No. The key to massive success is to get a lot more failure, faster. That might sound counterintuitive, but every great entrepreneur talks about this being the key.

What the book Go For No explains to you is that you should rewards yourself by how many NOs you receive, not by the YESes. Because if you get a YES in your business, you are already rewarded – by the income that is tied to that YES. However, often what that means is that if we set (for example) the Goal of getting 3 YESes a week, and we get 3 on Monday, we will go off and play for the rest of the week! Then, come the next week, we can’t figure out why we don’t have a pipeline, and how other people are expanding their businesses faster than we are.

Instead, if you go for the NOs, then you turn a Fear (the fear of rejection) into a positive goal. Your GOAL is to get a certain number of NOs in a day. I do this with my business. I use a program that one of the leaders in my particular business, Jim Packard, invented. You try to get 8 “points” per day on each day you’re working the business. If you get 10 NOs on that day, it counts as 2 points. So if you have a day that you are not showing someone the business (which is also worth 2 points), you can “Go for No” on that day.

You know the funniest part? I will often get to 8 NOs – and they have to be in person or on the phone, not via email! – and then people will start saying YES! The way that Jim teaches it, a NO is anything but a date to move forward – so a NO can be leaving a voicemail, it can be a real NO, it can be a “Not right now, call me back in a while” (but if they say “call me back next week” and you get a firm date, that’s a YES!)…you get the picture. I’ll often get to 8 NOs and then folks will be saying YES. I want to get those 2 points, so I start calling the folks that I KNOW will say “NO” to me. How’s about that! These are the people that I normally would Fear most – but I WANT them to say NO, so I call them up! I actually signed up folks for my MLM that I never, ever thought I would – because they were on my “Go For No” list as “for sure” Nos. In reality, when I would call and leave them a friendly message (“Do you know what you’d like to do, or do you need more time?”), though I really Feared that I was being a pain in the neck, it would turn out that they’d completely forgotten about me….and it was my “persistence” that ultimately won them over. When I got my toughest one to actually sign up I was kinda bummed – because that person was my “Go to” NO! Isn’t that funny? When you’re SAD someone says YES?

Remember, you can use the language that you learned from Jim Rohn a while ago – you can just invite folks to listen in on your business, and tell them that you generally seem to get 3 out of 10 to join you – and you don’t mind which way they go, they can just be one of the 7 out of the 10, because that will help you get the 3!

Remember, your attitude is: I’ m going to be successful with or without you – either way it’s no sweat off my back.

Write down your NO goal for this week RIGHT NOW – and go for it! If you want to learn more about the system that I use based on Jim Packard’s, just write to me, I’d be happy to share!

Darren Hardy Day Fifteen