In this episode, Don Cote shares his riches, to rags, to riches story, how he created a 3-step program to live the life of your dreams based on Think and Grow Rich, the guiding principles behind it, and how anyone follow it to accomplish their life goals and succeed beyond their wildest dreams.
Resources mentioned
http://ellenlikes.com/lifeworks
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
3 Key Points
The answers to success are in Think and Grow Rich
“Whenever two or more minds come together in a spirit of harmony towards a definite purpose, a third more powerful cosmic,” This is the power of Masterminds.
Life works when you make commitments and you keep them, and it doesn’t, when you don’t.
Transcript
[0:50] Ellen: Hi and welcome to Episode 47. Today my guest is Dr.Donald R.Cote, an international bestselling author, powerful speaker, and inspiring coach. Since 1996 he’s been teaching people worldwide how to reach their goals and fund their dreams. He’s the founder of LifeWorks university and the creator of the LifeWorks life mastery system. So welcome to the call, Donald.
[01:15] Don: It’s great to be here. Thank you, Ellen.
[01:17] Ellen: Well, we spoke the other day and your story is fascinating. So, why don’t you tell people a little bit about you and how you came to be where you are?
[01:27] Don: Sure. I think as I get older and meet more people, I think most people have a fascinating story, but the short version is I grew up in a loving but a really poor, uneducated family. Neither parents finished seventh grade. I’m the oldest of three kids and the only boy. And my dad ran away from the orphanage at fourteen. Nobody knows what happened while he was living on the streets. He was one of those really quiet types. But at twenty-one, he purchased his first house and it was a crappy little house in a crappy neighborhood. And he put his mind to it and fixed it up, and he bought it for $2,400 and sold it for $6,000. So if you add a zero, it kind of makes a little more sense. That was a pretty good profit for his first go at it.
[02:14]: And then, he moved us into a second house. So, a crappy house in the little nicer neighborhood. His dream was always to own a home on a Lake. So, pretty audacious for a kid that ran away from the orphanage. But I love my dad, so I was always underfoot and he would be trying to get things done on home projects. He would send me for tools, get me the hammer, and get me the nails. And first thing, it got to be a few years later and a few houses later. And I had learned how to rehab houses. We did plumbing and heating, electrical and siding, and roofing, my dad would just take on any project and he had this sort of uncommon self-confidence.
[02:59]: So I would ask him, “Dad, how did you figure out how to do this?” And he’d say very calmly, “I didn’t, we’re figuring it out right now.”
Ellen: Nice!
Don: Here’s this young impressionable boy who gets this singular example of uncommon self-confidence. And so, that’s how I developed. I just thought I could do anything, and he always told me we could do anything. If we put our mind to it. And so, he bought the fifth house he ever owned, never owned more than one at a time, but when he moved us into the house, we were a family of five and it was a two-bedroom, one bathroom, cottage on a lake. So he’d finally got his dream, but it certainly wasn’t adequate for us. And then he immediately got sick, and it became totally disabled, couldn’t work anymore. And I was just going into high school.
[03:44]: So, at an evening’s when I got home from school and on the weekends, I would do the projects that he wasn’t physically capable of doing. He used to say, “My mind is trapped in this body that doesn’t work anymore.” And so, he’d tell me what to do and I would go do it. So that two-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage turned out to be a five-bedroom, three-bathroom, a jacuzzi in mom’s bedroom, full in-law apartment, two-car garage, second floor on the house. And he paid $14,900 is worth about $650,000 today. So, she still lives there; my mom still lives there. But he always told me, “You’ve got to be in real estate. He’d say, “Son, you’re not the sharpest tool in the shed.” We always had a shed. I knew what that meant.
[04:24]: So he’d say, “Pay attention, I’m trying to show you how to put a roof over your family’s head, get me the hammer and the nails.” And so, I was just conditioned that that’s what I was going to do. I was going to go into real estate. And I grew up in Massachusetts, and in the year 1976, they were changing the real-estate licensing laws and if you went and took your tests before the end of the year, you could get a broker’s license, after that, you would have to wait three years as a salesperson. So, I knew I was going into real estate, so in my high school year, I went and got my real estate license. I didn’t realize how ambitious that was because that’s how dad always was. He’d just do anything he put his mind to.
[05:07]: So I, I got my license, I held it for about ten years and didn’t make one red cent from real estate sales.
Ellen: Oh no.
Don: But in 1980, I purchased, when I was twenty-one, I purchased my first house, two-bedroom one-bath, turns it into a five-bedroom, paid $49,000 for it and sold it for $117,000. And I was like a fish on a hook. I was completely hooked on this was going to be the way I was going to make my mark in the world. And throughout the eighties, I bought a lot of real estate and I bought it all, no money down, which was an easy decision because I didn’t have any money, and never looked back. I amassed a pretty significant portfolio. But then 1989 came, and my dad had never seen a downturn. He was born during the depression, but as an adult he’d never seen a downturn in the real-estate market, so he never prepared me for it, and a lot of us were not prepared for it.
[5:58] But we had a crash, the S&L crisis and the RTC, the resolution trust bought up all the S&Ls across the country, and we had a huge crash. So I tell people, I learned how to make money in the eighties and I learned how to lose it in the nineties and I did a both really good. So, I lost everything. I call it the “death spiral”. I lost all my real estate, filed for bankruptcy. I was married with two little kids. I went through a painful divorce, and ended up homeless. And, I felt bad for myself for a while; I was a hardworking, honest guy and couldn’t understand why that happened to me. So, I had a little bit of a pity party for a little while, but that didn’t seem to solve anything.
[06:33]: So, I got up my courage and put my big-boy panties on and I went to a guy who I knew who was what I call “a 20 percenter”. So, all the real estate landlords in my area knew each other. So, we were all friends. And the 80% of us went bankrupt during the crash in 89, 90 91, the other 20% bought up all our real estate for pennies on the dollar. And I knew one of those guys, one 20 percenter, he kind of had been a mentor to me early on, nice guy, much older than I was. So I got up my courage, I called him and I said, “Sammy, can I buy a cup of coffee now?” Albeit, I hadn’t talked to him for about ten years. And he said, “ Yes”, which was, such a blessing. But, I remember waiting there for him at the coffee shop, and he came in and sat down, and it was this pregnant pause.
[07:21]: I didn’t really know what to say. So I just kind of blurted out, “Sammy, I’ve lost everything.” He said, “Yeah, you and 80% of our friends.” I said, “Well, thanks for stating the obvious. That doesn’t make me feel any better, but I can’t figure out how to get back into the club. This seems like the rules have changed, and I don’t know where the secret door is anymore.” And my dad always said, “Unfulfilled expectations create this appointment”. So, I had an expectation that he was going to put his arm around me and say, “Come on kid, let me show you how to do this again.” And he didn’t. Instead, he asked me the craziest question, Ellen, at least it seemed that way then. He asked me if I ever read the book Think and Grow Rich. And, I had joined Amway in ‘79 and that’s the first book they give you.
[08:03]: So I read it and apparently it had somewhat of an impact because I became a millionaire in my twenties, and I learned how to make it, but not keep it obviously. But I said, “Sure.” And he seemed really perplexed. He’s like, “Really? How many times?” I’m like, “Well, once, how many times do you have to read a book?” So now I’m a smarty pants and I’m broke, not a good combination. And, he just kind of stared at me and said,”I think you should read it again because all the answers you’re looking for are in that book.” And he said, “Thanks for the coffee, I’ve got to go”. So, it was a really short, really painful meeting, but one of the most powerful meetings of my life. I actually felt like I was standing at the great abyss, the only 20 percenter I knew was walking out the door.
[08:48] And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what to do next.” And I was paralyzed there for a bit, but I remember being angry and hurt and just a basket of emotions. But about halfway home, I remember thinking, “Wait a second, he’s rich and I’m poor. That’s probably a clue. I probably should get my hands on this book again.” And so, I did, I went to the store and I bought it, and I read it, the whole thing, and just read it to the end. And then I went, “Oh, I must have missed it,” cause as I went back and I read it again, and I remember him just before he left. I don’t know if you remember that program Colombo where at the end of the program he would turn around and say to the person, “Why did you kill him?”
Ellen: Yeah, yeah.
[09:30] Don: And then, they would admit it and we’d call that entertainment. Back then. It didn’t take much. But so, he kind of did that just before he left. He said, “Hey, if you don’t read it, if you don’t get it this time, I’d just keep reading it until you do.” So apparently, he knew I was a C student and so, I did. I kept reading it over, getting more and more frustrated. And for our listeners who have read the book, that there are thirteen principles in that book and they’re all sound. And that’s what I kept going back to. I kept thinking, “Gee, this is truth”. it just resonated with me except I couldn’t figure out like how to apply it. I don’t even have enough fingers to be able to count up these thirteen principles.
[10:11]): And so, I was looking for “how-to”. And as it turns out, the person who commissioned the study that took twenty-nine years to produce that book, Andrew Carnegie, asked the author Napoleon Hill to write a philosophy of personal achievement, which he did, which was my problem. Philosophy doesn’t have a lot of” how to’s”, and I was looking for step-by-step, paint by numbers. And so, I went looking to see if someone had put a “how-to” together. The book was published in 1937. This was like 1995 when I thought certainly somebody has, has needed this like I do. And alas, I couldn’t find it. So out of frustration, I asked myself, “What would this thing look like if I found it?” And at that moment, my life changed forever. I took out a yellow-lined pad of paper, a legal pad, and I started drawing out what I thought it would look like.
[11:04]:And this remedial little thing that I created allowed me to be able to apply all the principles every day and really good…
Ellen: That is so awesome. It comes back to that thing of asking better questions.
Don: Yeah, yeah.
Ellen: Yeah.
[11:19] Don: And so, I started getting my success back, and I remember I was meeting with three friends; we were just having coffee. It happened to be three women. And they were, as women often do, kind of whispering, kind of giggling. And one of them said, “So, you are way too happy for your circumstances.” Now, I had just gotten off the street and I was living in the backseat of my BMW. And I had to give it back, because I wasn’t making the payments. And I went to my baby sister’s ,who’s fifteen years younger than me, living in a tiny little two-bedroom apartment with a husband and two little boys and I asked if I could sleep on her couch.
She said, “No, you won’t have any privacy. I’m going to fix up the half room.” It turns out that was the pantry. And so, I was living in a pantry. I walked across the street to the pizza parlor and asked the guy for a job, and he said, “Sure, you should be a delivery person for me, my delivery people make like $35 an hour.” And I had already been a millionaire, so I wasn’t ready. That was like, “Ah, okay.” He said, “So, you need a car.” And I said, “Well, I don’t have one”. And he said, “Well, you could use the company van.” So, I used the crappy van that he had that used more oil than gas and delivered pizza.
[12:30] And so, I’m sitting with my friends they’re like, “You’re delivering pizza with somebody else’s vehicle, you’re living in a closet, and you’re like, super happy. What’s up? What drugs are you doing and will you share? I said, “It’s not drugs. I said it’s this.” And I reached into my briefcase and I pulled out this yellow pad and started showing them. Ellen, it was like, you could see the light bulbs going off over their head there. They’re like, “Oh my gosh”. So, I said, “If you do this and you do this, then you do this, you get this.” They’re like, “Do that again.” I’m like, “If you do this and you do this and you do this, you get this,” it was like a three-step system. And they were like, “Will you teach us?” And so, the following weekend, we all went to one of their apartments and I spent a couple of days just showing them.
[13:16]: And three weeks later, we have coffee again. And they’re like, “Our friends were saying the same thing as you and will you teach our friends? “Now mind you, I’m still living in a closet. I don’t have a car. I’m delivering pizza with somebody else’s vehicle, and people are asking me how to be successful. So, it was a little weird. But I said, “Listen, I, I still don’t have the money to be able to put on a show for you guys, but if you guys band together and pool your money and pay for a place for us to do it. And so, they did. They got food for the weekend from the pizza place. And then, we spent three days together in a bed and breakfast in Massachusetts, right on the ocean; it was really pretty ethereal and some of those people, that was February of 1996, and some of those people I’m still friends with today, and they’re still using this silly, little system that I created.
Ellen: Wow.
[14:07] Don: Now, there are thousands of people all over the world, and I’ve created an online university. And so, using the power of video conferencing, there are no borders and no boundaries. And we’re creating what I call a society that is free to design and really live the life of their dreams because you can have anything you want if you know the system.
Ellen: Well, can you tell us a little bit about the system?
Don: No, that’s a secret. No, I’m kidding. Well, ironically, it is based on The Secret. So, most people know that the movie, The Secret. is based on the book, Think and Grow Rich. And in the preface of the book, the office preface, he says that he discovered, after interviewing five of the world’s most successful people, people like Henry Ford and William Wrigley and King Gillette and Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, four presidencies of the United States, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, all the most successful people in the world at that time, Rockefeller and everybody, he said, “I discovered there is a secret to success and it comes in two parts.”
[15:11]: He says you have to bring the first part, which is pretty easy to figure out because the first chapter of the book is called desire. And what would you need to need the secret to success for if you didn’t have a desire to achieve something. The second part, he doesn’t tell you what it is, but he gives you a couple of clues. He says, “I mentioned it in every chapter and I mentioned it over a hundred times throughout the book.” So, here’s the C student that keeps reading the book over and over again and can’t find… like it’s a hundred times, and I can’t figure it out. Well apparently, I’m not the only one that couldn’t figure it out. One of my many careers was uh, I was a full-time public speaker, international public speaker. I spent seven years, forty-five weekends a year for seven years, teaching a two-day wealth-building workshop all over North America.
[15:58]: I had about a quarter of people go through my workshops. And I would always start off as a Saturday and Sunday. I’d always start off by saying before we get started, I want to ask you guys a question. “How many people by a show of hands have ever heard or read the book, think and grow rich?” Sadly, it was about half the room and I’m thinking, “You spent $2,000 to listen to me talk for two days and you didn’t spend $10 for this book. Your first assignment is to go buy the book,” I would say. But for those people who have read the book, “Keep your hands up if you know and use The Secret every day.” Sadly, all of it went down. So, I recognized that there was, a big need to be able to tell people what Napoleon Hill thought we could figure out for ourselves.
[16:42]: And the second part to the secret is one of those thirteen principles. Of course, the first principle is, is desire. But the second one is every single one of the successful men that he interviewed, all 500 of them told him that they owed their secret to the mastermind principle, that they all had a team of people. You can’t be as successful as possible without a group of people all working in harmony towards a definite purpose. And so, my university is designed around The Secret, so we help people get really, really clear about what they want. Half the people I’ve ever talked to said to me, “I don’t even know what I really want.” And that’s just so heartbreaking for me to think of it. But we help people get really, really clear about what they want and even turn up the heat under their burning desire.
[17:29]: And then secondly, we help them form a mastermind team so that they can use the power of the team to be able to literally get over any obstacle that might be in their way or find any resource that’s missing. And he talks about this mastermind principle as something he calls “ a cosmic”. He says, “Whenever two or more minds come together in a spirit of harmony towards a definite purpose, a third more powerful cosmic,”( I would call it a spiritual entity) “gets created”. And he says, “It’s the connecting link between the finite mind of man and infinite intelligence.” So, I kid with my students all the time. I said, “If you had God’s phone number, do you think there’s any goal you couldn’t reach?”
Ellen: Laughs
Don: Really, it’s really equivalent to that. Certainly.
Ellen: Well, I have a question about that.
Don: Fire away!
Ellen: When you say “a mastermind for a purpose,” like what kinds of purposes in your university do people work towards together?
[18:23]: Yeah, great question. So, Carnegie told Hill that he had fifty men that he brought together. They all worked in harmony. He had a zero-tolerance for disharmony. And so, if you weren’t in harmony, he kicked you out. So, it was pretty harsh. But the one thing that they were all focused on, that single purpose, is the manufacturing and marketing of steel. And that caused him, the guy who says he knew hardly anything about the subject to become the richest man in the world and the world’s first billionaire. So, when my students come together, we all work on one thing and that one thing is that everybody gets to live the life of their dreams. So, when we form a mastermind group, let’s say you were the leader of the group, and you had four participants in your group, you would give each of them a little bit of time to say, “Hey, I’m working on this project and I’ve got this list of things that I’ve done already, but I’m kind of stuck. Can you guys help me?
[19:20] And then, you would brainstorm or mastermind, and I know you’ve had this experience. Everybody, every adult that I’ve talked to has said they’ve had this experience where you’re in a group of people, and you’re trying to problem-solve, and someone says one thing, and then someone else says something else, and first thing you know, you’re talking about something that nobody actually individually brought to the table. And you go, “Where does that come from?” I call that “the download from universal intelligence” and that phenomenon is created over and over in our masterminds, and it helps people to be able to achieve things they never thought were possible before we came together.
[19:54]Ellen: Awesome. I wanted to go back to what you said about real estate for a minute.
Don: Okay.
Ellen: When I was in graduate school (in architecture), we actually built a building. And you were talking about how just doing as opposed to the theory of things. And I just wanted to say that that is so powerful because a lot of times, and I’ve been guilty of this where it’s like I learned something and then I don’t implement it and I just keep getting more and more information. And then, what happens is you’ve got too much information, and then you’re overwhelmed by all the information.
Don: Right.
Ellen: So, I just wanted to go back to that to say that it is really important to when you learn something to go back and forth between the learning and the implementing.
Don: Yeah. Analysis paralysis they call it, right?
Ellen: Yeah.
Don: Yeah. My dad gave me amazing nuggets of wisdom. Like I said, he never graduated seventh grade but had more wisdom than anybody I know. But he would say to me,” Son, it doesn’t matter what you know; it only matters what you do with what you know.” Right?
Ellen: Exactly.
[20:57] Don: Go get me the hammer. Right?
Ellen: Exactly.
Don: So, the other really amazing part of getting together as a group of people all focused on helping everybody achieve their goals and dreams is not only the connection with infinite intelligence, which is really powerful, but it’s the accountability. So, we meet once a week and then everybody gets to commit to the things that they’re going to do that week towards their goals. And then, when they come back the following week, they reported on that. Right? So, might sound something like this. “This coming week, I will. I will. I will. I will. I will.” Those are promises or commitments to yourself.
[21:35] And we have something we call “The LifeWorks Creed” and it says this, “Life works when you make commitments and you keep them, and it doesn’t, when you don’t,” it’s pretty simple actually. So, we make commitments and then when we come back the following week, we say, “I did, I did, I did, I did.” And if I didn’t, for whatever reason, here’s what I’m doing to overcome the obstacle or we say to the group, “So, I’m stuck and I need some help, can you guys think of something?” The cool thing about that is that “It’s easy to be a backseat driver or an armchair quarterback because I’m not emotionally attached to your stuff.” Oftentimes, the reason why you have blinders on is because you have all these emotions attached to it.” I don’t have those emotions, so I’m thinking clearly.”
[22:19]: But he also says everybody needs to be in harmony. So, we have a very strict rule that nobody gets to take a stand about anything because as soon as someone says, “This is the right way or this is the best way,” anybody who disagrees with that opinion automatically feels wrong. And then, you have this disharmony. So, harmony is just the absence of conflict. So, we offer our opinions as opinions for the person in the spotlight to consider.
Ellen: One of the things that I would add too,” I will, I will, I will,” is scheduling. I found that those things started changing for me when I hired somebody to help me with time management, and I had to start scheduling things.
Don: Yeah.
Ellen: And…
Don: Go ahead:
Ellen: And I was going to say, and I even found that I was missing lunch because it wasn’t scheduled, and it was like, that’s not okay.
Don: Yeah.
Ellen: So, I even had to go and start putting that on my schedule to make sure that I left time for me to eat because I found myself always rushing through meals.
[23:18] Don: We actually, um, we’ve discovered our research has shown over the last thousands of people in twenty-five years, that there are universal areas of priority. So, no one ever disagrees with me when I say, “You could have all the wealth in the world, all the friends, all the toys, but if you don’t have your health, none of it matters,” right? So, health is naturally a priority.
Ellen: Right.
Don: Money’s a priority. Obviously, we don’t live on a mountain in Tibet.
Ellen: Right.
Don: That’s kind of important, right?
Ellen: Right.
[23:45]: Don: And what we call lifestyle management and what lifestyle management means is that if you’re really clear about your goals, your dreams, the outcomes that you’re shooting for, you can check these four things against any activity that you might put in your calendar.
[24:02]: You look at it and you say, “Is this something that gets me closer to my dreams?” And if not, you eliminate it. If it does get you closer to your dreams, you ask yourself if you can automate it. If you can’t automate it, then you can potentially delegate it. And if you can’t delegate it, then you collaborate about it. So, those are the four lifestyle strategies that we have that create tremendous leverage. And I tell people if you’ve ever said, “Yeah, if I just had a couple more hours in the day, you do, you’re just spending them on doing things that somebody else could do. Or, it could be automated. If you had two extra hours in your day, 365 days a year, and you divide that by forty, as in a forty-hour workweek, that’s over eighteen weeks of vacation a year.”
[24:47] Ellen: Wow.
Don: And most people couldn’t tell you if you held a gun to their head, they couldn’t tell you where that eighteen weeks went. It just goes away in five minutes here, fifteen minutes there, and it’s gone. That’s the juice. That’s where you can write the book. If you’re one of those 50% of the population that wants to write a book and you say you never have the time, or you want to go volunteer at the soup kitchen or create, create a garden. I don’t know, anything that you say you don’t have enough time for this important you have to.
[25:14] Ellen: That is awesome because I can use that in my marketing.
Don: Yeah. Eliminate, automate, delegate, and collaborate.
Ellen: Yeah. I people say to me all the time, I don’t have time to write a book.
Don: Yeah, you do.
Ellen: It’s like learn the way I teach it and you’ll have eighteen weeks.
[25:31] Ellen: There you go. Anybody can get that done in 18 weeks.
[25:35] Ellen: Yeah. That’s awesome. Well actually no, I want them to do it in a week, so they can then have eighteen weeks of vacation.
Don: They can write eighteen books.
Ellen: Right. Or, write eighteen books. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, no, that is so true. And I know for me one of the big things was, and I keep happening, to go back to this is like what you just said, “Does it get me closer to my goals?” I am so good at running off the runway. I’ve gotten way better with shiny objects. I don’t buy a lot of stuff. But one of the things I have found, and we are going to have to wrap it up soon here, but one of the things I have found is that, and I was talking to someone about this the other day, she was saying I should create this, but I’m not interested in doing this myself.
[26:22] Ellen: But what happens is when, or at least for me, when I first got on the Internet, I think it happens to a lot of people, is that you’re trying to figure out what you want to do, and you’re trying to figure out how to do it. And so, you take this course, and you take that course, and you go to all these webinars and masterclasses and everything else. But what happens is, at some point you go, “Okay, well I’m going to go in this direction.” And then, you start to do that. And then, what can happen is you reach that point where you get stuck. And so, it’s like you said, “If you don’t have a mastermind if you don’t have, I know I’m in some courses where there are Facebook groups and you can ask for help there. But if you don’t have that, what happens is sometimes then you go up that’s not working, and then you go to something else, right?
[27:09] Don: Yeah.
Ellen: And then, you do that for a while, and you go to something else. And also, if you’re a creative like me, what happens is it’s really easy because you like to be creative. And so, there’s that certain dopamine fix.
Don: Yes, satisfied,
Ellen: Right? Right, that happens each time you get into something new and exciting and creative.
Don: I call them distractions disguised as opportunities.
Ellen: Yeah.
Don: And that gets, that has a lot of people take the off-ramp on the highway to success.
Ellen: Right.
Don: And never ended up getting there, yes. So, distractions disguised this opportunity.
Ellen: And it would be so great if there was a program that started you at the beginning that explained to you that this is what’s going to happen, and kind of like what to do, so you don’t do that. But also, kind of explained the options starting out, so you don’t feel like you have to try every single one and spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in the meantime and end up with courses that you ultimately don’t end up doing or pursuing all the way, so….
[28:11] Don: That’s the difference with having a system like ours. It’s kind of like something’s wrong with your car, you take it to the mechanic and he says, “Well, let’s change the alternator and see if that fixes it.” And that didn’t fix it. “Let’s change the thermostat. Let’s see if that,” and then they just kind of try a whole bunch of stuff because they really don’t know how to diagnose. And that’s what Stephen Covey said. “Start with the end in mind.”
Ellen: Right.
Don: It’s one of the seven habits of highly effective people.
Ellen: Yes.
Don: And so, that’s what we do. We start those three steps. Just in case, I forgot to tell you, it’s embarrassingly simple. I didn’t invent, I just discovered it at least three steps that I told my friends about, right? I said, “Well, first you have to decide what you want.” That’s what we call a vision.
[28:54]: And then once you have the vision, then you have to put together a plan for it, and then you have to execute on the plan.
Ellen: Right.
Don: So, if you were going to bake a cake, you have to decide what kind of cake, right? Carrot cake. Then you have to have a recipe. That’s the plan. Then you execute on it and you have cake. If you want to build a business, you have to decide what kind of business, you have to have a business plan, and then you execute on it. If you want to build a building, you have to decide what kind of building, then what’s the blueprint, and then execute on the blueprint, so it really is three steps are just out there, and they’ve been in front of us under our nose our whole lives.
Ellen: Absolutely. Yeah, and if people go to www.booksbusinessabundance.com/podcast, there is a book- writing blueprint and it goes through exactly what you just said.
Don: Yeah. See, yeah.
Ellen: For book writing.
[29:39] Don: Here’s the absurdity of life though. We know we wouldn’t bake a cake without a recipe. Yet every single person tries to create the most important thing they’ll ever create, which is the life of their dreams without a life plan. It’s crazy. So, that’s what LifeWorks university helps people do, put together a life plan, and make it a team sport.
[29:58] Ellen: Well, thank you for coming on. It’s been a pleasure to meet you and hang out with you. That’s it for today. I want to say that if people want to learn more about the course, they can go to http:ellenlikes.com/lifeworks.
So, to get the transcripts go to www.booksbusinessabundance.com/podcast. You’re also welcome to join our Facebook group. That link is on the podcast page. And as I said, the Book-writing Blueprint guide is there as well. And the Facebook group is great, if you want to get first notices for new podcasts, network with other authors and get support.
So, till next time, Bye-bye.
THANKS FOR LISTENING!
To share your thoughts and comments:
- Join us in our Facebook Group!
- Share this show on social media!
To help out the show:
- Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.
- Subscribe on iTunes.
Join us again next week when my guest will be Serena Carcasole: How to Become a Published Author and Get More Credibility, Expert Status, and Exposure Without Writing a Book (The. Power of Collaboration)
0 Comments