Yin vs YangThe Battle for Success in Life

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Article by Peter J. Normandia. Follow me on twitter!

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For anyone new here, the goal of this blog is to motivate you in the daily battle for success in life. Sometimes that battle is financial, sometimes personal, sometimes internal, and sometimes out of your control. However, the important part about any battle, is understanding you are in one.

If you are not literally ‘battling’ for success, then chances are, success is not going to find you. Even someone I grew up with, now known worldwide as ‘the situation’, battled through a lot just to make it on to that reality show that made him famous. I’m not going to go into details, but trust me, the kid could not get someone to get a slice of pizza with him 2 weeks after the show stopped filming. Now, everyone I know talks about him and how ‘lucky’ he is.

I’m not a big believer in luck. I kind of think, bad or good, everyone has luck. It’s how you deal with everything else that matters. Battling for success is about understanding first & foremost that it is going to be a battle. A tough one at that. It is going to take everything you have to win this battle. There will be many ups and downs that cloud your confidence. Staying focused is the key.

Understanding how to battle your way to success is going to come from inside you. Only you know about the ‘voices’ or ‘intuition’ you get when you know you should do something, but you don’t want to. That is part of the battle. In fact, as I said before, you should try to look forward to the things you don’t want to do, cause each one brings you closer to your goal.

Reaching that goal is what this site is dedicated to helping you with. So, with that in mind, I have put together a few lessons I have learned about battling toward my goal of success, which is to make a living doing what I love.

Enjoy the Storm

As I write this there is a Winter Storm blaring on par with a level 2 Hurricane out my window. It’s a perfect analogy for the battle to success. Success is like a far destination you have to get to in this kind of weather. At first the road may seem easy to navigate, but as the weather worsens, and the storm picks, up, things will get extremely difficult to manage.

The way you react to these obstacles is what defines your success. Think of it this way. If you are driving in a snowstorm, what’s the best way to drive?

If you step on the gas, rev your engine, and peel out down the snow-covered block, chances are you will not get too far before the sound of metal crunching is heard.

If you put on your emergency lights, and drive 2 miles per hour, stopping every time the car seems to slip the slightest bit, as your two ghost-white sweaty palms grip the steering wheel like life depended on it, chances are you should not even bother getting on the road. Ever notice, car accidents happen a lot to people who seem solely focused only on avoiding them?

The best approach to driving in a snow storm is to take your time, not overreact, and calmly assess each situation on the road as it comes up. You have to come to a calm understanding that, even though things are really bad outside, you can handle it. In fact, you live to handle it.

There’s Only One Way to Get a Black Belt

Once you understand you are in a battle, you will realize you have to take your lumps too. Can’t become a great fighter without getting beat up. It’s just not possible. Same goes for success. You are going to make mistake after mistake. Some people call this failure. I call it learning. In fact, I have yet to meet a success that had not lived through some sort of failure.

There is a saying in Jiu Jitsu that there is only one difference between someone who gets a black belt, and someone who does not. It is not their athleticism, or their physique. It is not their genetics, their technique, or their personality. It is only one simple thing that separates every white belt who ever got on the mat and the people who eventually succeeded in getting black belts. Do you know what that difference is?

The black belts kept coming. That’s it. If any of those white belts would have done the same, eventually, they would have became black belts themselves. Maybe not as fast, or at the same pace, but they would have eventually reached their goal.

The point of the story for you is, what ever your goal, you must get on the mat. If you want to win the lottery, you must first play a ticket. If you want to hit a home run, you must first strike out (or get really lucky). If you want to be successful, you must first….TRY! Then you must try, try, try again, until you get there. No matter how long it takes, you will not give up.

Success is a mindset!

Being successful at anything is all about your mindset, not your finances, or your clothing brand, or your material things. Take all of that away from a successful person, and chances are they will get it right back. That’s because they believe they are successful.

If you can’t picture yourself successful, or you judge every detail of your journey as a make or break moment, then you will not be successful. Successful people are like black belts. They know, whatever challenges they face, they will be successful. They know if they fail a challenge, they will just come right back and try again. However, this time, they will be even stronger from their previous defeat.

It is this mindset that lead successful people to their goals. They are not just lucky, or born more fortunate. They simply have taken the hand life dealt them and rolled with it. If someone’s got a better hand, so be it. If someone’s hand is worse, so be it too. After all, it’s not the cards, but how you play them.

In life, it’s not the battles that matter, it’s simply how you choose to fight them.

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Article by Peter J. Normandia. Follow me on twitter.

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For the last three plus years, I have been engrossed with the web, social media, and its effect on the way businesses market their products and services. My company, Pixel Mobb is an elite unit of versatile talent producing high end new media. We specialize in building brands.

Based on this experience, I thought it would be a great value to list the top ten lessons I have learned on the web as a business, blogger, and every day web surfer.

1. Information is Today’s Money Maker

Welcome to the information age. On the web, people, businesses, and anyone in between are all after one thing: Information. They will stop at nothing to get it, mercilessly entering phrases into their favorite search engine until they find what they seek. You do it, I do it, we all do it. Now that we know what everyone is after, we can move on.

2. Branding is Everything

Branding your business, or self, is the key to success on the web. Remember, people are looking for information. Once you figure out what information you are going to provide, the next step is to build a ‘brand’ around it. You don’t have to be Nike to take branding your business serious. Know what value your information holds, who is after it, and then brand yourself as that answer. Branding encompasses your web design, brand message, and defines who you are in the minds of your target market.

3. The Value of Your Information or Service = Your ROI

We understand that everyone is after information. However, a key to success on the web is using web analytics (tracking) to help determine exactly how many people are actually searching for that information daily. You may be the foremost expert on how to build doghouses from snow, but if no one is looking for that information, it is useless to start a blog or business about it.

I am not going to get into the depths of analytics, and how to use the information. There are endless resources on the web that can explain it much better than me. In fact, that’s how I learned. Just be sure you understand the value of being able to see how much of a market there is for your idea, before you dive into it.

4. The Web is the Central Hub for any Business

Years ago, if people wanted information, they had to find it. If a business created a brochure, commercial, or even a website, they focused their efforts on giving as much information as possible all at once, for fear of the client not getting more than one impression.

Well obviously, the web has changed everything. Now businesses know, whatever marketing they do, the target market is most likely to check the website before contacting the business. It’s just easier for them. Why go to the hassle of calling someone, and speaking to them, when the information is only a few clicks away?

Businesses know this, and the trend has been toward more enticing marketing pieces with less information. In fact, the less, the better. Put the relevant information on your site, and let that be the ‘central hub’ of information for your business. That means, if anyone wants to know anything about your blog, or business, they have to go to the site to find out. The marketing pieces simply concentrate on spreading your brand’s message, not necessarily the info about it.

5. Social Media takes time for any ROI

So you opened up a twitter account, and now what? You have been tweeting away, even on Facebook, and trying all sorts of things to gain traffic. After a few months of effort, it is getting kind of redundant. What can you do?

You may not want to hear this, but just keep going. Social Media can take time, and a little luck, to really work for you. The basic idea is to keep plugging away until you get what you are looking for. Do not pay much attention to the ‘subscriber number flexing’ of other sites. Simply put, concentrate on putting out the best information you can, and tough it out. Eventually, if your information is valuable enough, the fruits of your labor will begin to blossom.

6. Every Social Media weapon has its Uses

Okay, so I signed up for twitter, facebook, linkedin, myspace, digg, reddit, stumbleupon, and every forum I could find, but I have not had much success. What’s the deal?

If this sounds like you, let me help you out. Social Media tools, like the above sites, are like Martial Arts weapons. You don’t have to master every weapon to become an effective Martial Artist. You start off mastering one, and when you are done with that, then you move on. The same goes for the web. Try out one Social Media weapon at a time, and see how it truly works. If you just jump all over everything, you may never see which one truly should be your brand’s weapon of choice.

7. Practice makes Permanent

Like anything else in life, practicing using the web to your advantage is the only way to learn. You can read up on methods, ideas, and strategies all day, but the truth is, until you try them for yourself, you never know how they will work. Every blog, business, and entity is slightly different from the rest. What works for one, may not work for the other. That’s okay. Just put the time in, and everything else will follow.

8. Your Competition is Your Friend

Growing up in the real world, I learned all about the sometimes cutthroat competition between similar businesses. Well, the web has changed that too. Now, your biggest competition is also your biggest asset.

Remember, we spoke about the value of information for a target market. This blog is all about the daily battle for success in life. It is a personal development (PD) blog, which means, that other PD blogs are my FRIEND.

How can that be? Well remember, people who read PD blogs are my target market. On the web, it is quite easy to surf from one blog to another. So chances are, if they like my competition’s blog, they will probably enjoy mine as well, and vice versa. That is why if you link up with the competition, both of you can benefit from each other’s traffic.

9. Building a Web Presence is Hard G** Damn Work

Sounds so easy, right? Well don’t get too excited. Building a web presence takes relentless effort and dedication to be successful. It rarely happens overnight, and if it does, there was probably a lot of work prior to getting to that point. So tuck your chin, and get on the virtual mat to take your lumps. Think of it this way. If you are not working on getting that traffic, that traffic isn’t stopping. It’s going somewhere else.

10. Can it Be That it is All So Simple?

Love ending with a Wu-Tang classic! The truth is, using the web to your advantage is really simple. It takes a plan, execution, and then you make adjustments, and start again. Simply put, you have to put in the work to learn how business works. However, be warned, there is no excuse. Every piece of information you desire is located somewhere on this world wide wondrous web, which means success is only fingertips away.