The Missing Message In the 4-Hour Work Week

The book that inspired me to actually get up and start this blog was "The 4-Hour Work Week", which has some great ideas about how to get priorities straight, how to create a "muse" to generate a semi-passive income etc.

However, I've just noticed a very important area that has been missed in the book.

As I've been playing around with some of the ideas in my spare time, I've found myself experiencing a strange internal conflict that I'd never experienced up until now.

I'm in a great, very challenging, very rewarding job; I recently got married to my fiance who I have been good friends with for 12 years and are happy starting our life together; and I have loads of great friends who I was very happy to see attend the wedding - so why the conflict?

Then it suddenly hit me today.

One of the core messages of the 4-Hour Work Week is about minimising the time spent on your business through automation and through minimising the interactions you need to have with customers and the people you outsource your work to.

The Missing Message

The key missing message is: relationships are still the single most important thing in our lives.

This does not contradict anything in the book, and in the later chapters Timothy Ferris does allude to having fun with friends etc, but I strongly believe that our relationships are the most important thing in our lives and the message needs to be remembered.

Surround yourself with lots of happy, successful people and you will be happy and successful.

In a product-based, automated business, yes you can reduce the level of human interaction required - but in the rest of your life, including in the blogosphere, at work (if you have a job that is not automated) etc - relationships are key. In fact, service-based businesses are built on them.

I still think the book is great, but when I re-read it I will definitely be keeping this in mind, and I walk forward from today with a renewed interest in my relationships. Make sure there is a social element to your goals too!

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• Personal Development Book Store on Amazon.CO.UK
• Personal Development Book Store on Amazon.COM

6 Steps That All Personal Development Approaches Cover

All personal development books, courses, programmes and other media, consist of the same basic steps.

Generally speaking, some are stronger in some areas than others, and some have more emphasis and detail on some areas than others, but they all follow the same fundamental steps.

This is my first attempt to summarise the key steps. If there are any I've missed please let me know by adding a comment!

1. Work out where you are
2. Work out where you want to be
3. Work out how you're going to get there
4. Change your mindset
5. Take a lot of action and keep re-aligning your actions with where you want to get to
6. Persevere, repeat steps 1-5 as many times as it takes

For each of these steps there are a wide variety of techniques and tools that can be employed, and there are even books on each individual one of them. Below I've included a very brief summary of what each one involves. I would recommend reading more specific material (including some of the posts and books recommended on this blog) or details on each.

1. Work out where you are

This is the "self-assessment" or "life temperature-check" that is vital an absolutely vital step towards the self-awareness necessary to decide what action to take first.

You need to be completely open and honest with yourself so that you can start make informed decisions based on an understanding of the gaps in your life.

I wrote a bit about some frameworks you can use for this here: http://business-life-success.blogspot.com/2009/06/balanced-personal-and-career-goals.html

2. Work out where you want to be

This is all about setting goals. Without an idea of where you're going, it's not possible to:

• Ensure any actions you take are in the right direction
• Know whether you are making good progress towards your goals or not
• Know when you've got to where you want to get to

3. Work out how you're going to get there

There are a couple of parts to this.

One is to take the pie-in-the-sky, green-field, ultimate wishes that provide you with a trajectory and map out those milestones to getting there, with a timescale.

The other is the set of closer actions you need to take, aligned to those longer-term ones, that help you see where you're aiming and give you a starting point that you know will eventually lead to your ultimate aims.

In my experience, making lots of little short-term plans that are easy to achieve and actually doing them is the most effective way to push things forwards. Making lots of long term plans but doing nothing gets you nowhere. Moreover, the more action you take the better and more realistic your plans get, the more you accelerate and quicker you get to where you want to go.

4. Change your mindset

There are books after books on this subject. From positive affirmations, to hypnotism, to general life-rule-type recommendations, this is all about breaking out of your limiting beliefs and realising that anythings is possible.

All of this is great, motivating stuff, but is often the kind of material that leads to a lot of big dreams and no action.

Trust me - taking action is the best way to change your mindset, because the minute you actually see changes in your life you will start to believe without needing to read some book to tell you how to change your beliefs...

5. Take a lot of action and keep re-aligning your actions with where you want to get to

This is easily the most important step. Taking action is the thing that changes everything.

Taking action will also completely change your view on your goals and your feeling about what is possible.

My recommendation would be to keep your overall goals in mind but keep a focus on those short-term goals: keep re-writing them and doing them. The more you achieve, the more you will try to do, the more realistic your longer-term goals will feel and the bigger your aspirations will become.

6. Persevere, repeat steps 1-5 as many times as it takes

The final point is to repeat, repeat, repeat.

Perseverance is really important - the more you do something, the better you will get at it, the more you will believe it, the further you will be able to go.

We are all human beings and all get knocked back by things at times, but keep it up and you will succeed: our success will never be based on how well we do in good times, but how well we respond to challenges and overcome obsticals to succeed during harder times.

How to Persevere with No Traffic!

So, you've started a new blog. You've got some great ideas and you've posted a couple of articles on them...

...but no-one's reading your masterpieces!

You've followed the advice from every traffic-building site out there and submitted your links to every directory you can find...

...but there still isn't anyone reading your genius creations!

The problem?

Content. Plain and simple.

Why you need lots of great content

Just think about the blogs you've read in the past. Which ones do you go back to, time and time again? Which ones keep cropping up in searches and which ones did you just glance through, never to return?

Put simply, you need great content, preferably the kind of content you might go back and re-read for reference or general inspiration, and enough content to keep people interested with a range of points.

The alternative to having lots of content is the promise of content to come - which requires regular updates - but again, the updates need to be good quality for people to want to come back and read them.

What to do if you don't have enough content

I wrote the following article about how much content you need to start generating any real kind of traffic: http://business-life-success.blogspot.com/2009/06/reaching-content-critical-mass-when-to.html, and it's clear that for a while when you first start out, you simply will not have enough content. There's no escaping it, and the only way to get enough content is to get writing!

A few people visited this blog recently and it's a great feeling - but I know that I need to write a lot more before people are going to have any real reason to visit - or more importantly keep coming back - and I know it's important to persevere and keep writing - despite the strange feeling that at the moment I'm writing things and there's no-one there to read it!

So, how to get over that sinking feeling that you're hammering away at something that isn't going anywhere?

The key thing here is: SET A TARGET.

My target is to reach 50 good-sized posts (not including the brief ones where I've posted recommended links I've found). This number is based on the rule-of-thumb figures I mentioned in my previous post.

I have signed up to various blog catalogues etc, but by setting myself this (admittedly quite high) target, I will not be disheartened if I don't get much traffic before then - moreover I'm not going to put any major effort in getting any serious traffic until I hit that target, so if people come and see my site before then it's all a bonus.

By using a target in this way, you can change your mindset about your blog and focus on what is important - the content - so that when you do start promoting your site, there is lots of good stuff up there for people to read and you're not just shouting about a virtually empty site.

If you're struggling to motivate yourself to write or have a similar challenge, set your own target today to change your attitude towards it and get motivated!

Why to Avoid Accepting Friends and Reciprocal Links on Subjects That Are Not Relevant

This may seem like an obvious one, but when first starting out it is a strong temptation.

If you're writing a blog, I would guess that you're doing it because either (1) you have things you want to share with others and/or (2) you want to make money through blogging.

Either way, you need traffic on your blog to make it worthwhile.

One of the most effective ways to drive traffic and increase your site's rankings in the search engines is by getting lots of other sites to link to yours.

The trouble is, people often take a scatter-gun approach and try to get links from loads of other sites even if they're not relevant.

Whilst this will increase the chances of people going onto your site, it will dilute the overall quality of these links because they are generally irrelevant.

• From a search engine perspective, this is decreases the ranking of specific relevant keywords in relation to other less relevant ones;
• It also means you will build an inaccurate idea of traffic, as it will increase the number of people getting onto your site who aren't actually interested (and if you're looking for AdSense clicks this decreases the likelihood of any of those too);
• It also impacts your credibility because it's clear you're just fishing for traffic instead of building an audience based on their interest in what you are writing about

...so, my advice would be:

• If you want traffic, don't just ask loads of randoms to link to you if it's not relevant;
• If someone with a site that has nothing to do with yours asks you to link to them in return for a link, don't accept: why would anyone visiting their site what to read yours, and vice-versa?

There's nothing wrong with trying to drive traffic to your site, but make sure you're focusing on the right audience, to get the right people who will actually get some value from your writing to look at your work.

The Danger and Causes of Not Taking Action

Not taking action is the #1 barrier to success, the #1 reason why people fail in their attempts to change their lives through personal development, and #1 reason why people often start things up but don't finish them off.

The irony is that nearly all of the self-help and personal development books, cd's, courses and programmes I have ever come across place their emphasis on taking action NOW.

So what is it that causes us to falter?

Spending more time reading than doing

I know I've been guilty of this one in the past.

There are a number of reasons for falling into this trap, but the key ones are:

• it's actually more fun to read up on great ways to achieve your goals than to actually do it;
• it's safer to read than to have a go at something and risk failing;
• taking action can be hard - it often involves a lot of time and effort and stepping outside of our comfort zone.

I need to understand the context before I do anything...

Have you run into this one before?

For example, you reach the end of a chapter and it has a set of exercises - but you think to yourself, that's great, some stuff to do, but let's read the next chapter to make sure I understand it in context before doing it - I want to know how it fits into the bigger picture first...

Big mistake. How often have you done this and not actually managed to go back and do the exercise?

Ok, so it is good to re-read these books and do the exercises as you go along that way - but that is eating into the time you could have been spending actually making some changes in your life instead of just reading about how!

Focusing on the wrong things - take the right action now!

The final key one is about what kind of action you take.

The grand, life-changing things you can do are all very important and need to happen, but not at the expense of everything else in your life. Sometimes it is important to do the mundane, day-to-day stuff before you sit down and think about the bigger picture.

There's a lot out there about how focussing on strengths over weaknesses is important - but ensuring that you have the right focus in life is really very important too.

A focus on strengths is not the same as avoiding doing important things you don't want to do. Mundane examples include washing the dishes, mowing the lawn, doing that little bit extra work you know will make a massive difference but you just can't really be bothered...

You know deep down what you should be doing right now - so stop reading this post and do it!

...okay, so if you're currently in a position where you can't do that thing you have been meaning to do but haven't got round to, make sure you do so as soon as you can. In the meantime, I found the following couple of posts when searching on this topic that are worth reading:

• http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2008/02/07/five-mistakes-i-have-made-with-personal-development-information/
• http://www.positivityblog.com/index.php/2009/03/10/three-sneaky-traps-of-personal-development/

Top 50 personal development bloggers

I'm clearly in discovery mode at the moment - and found this great list of top personal development and self-help bloggers that I will be coming back to reference: http://www.healthmoneysuccess.com/802/top-50-personal-development-bloggers/

It includes a brief description to each of them so you can read the summary before exploring their articles.

The following article is also useful in listing good sources of information online: http://generallythinking.com/blog/?p=623.

50 of the best personal development blogs

Just found the following article and had to share it: http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/2007/01/07/50-of-the-best-personal-development-blogs/.

Enjoy!