Mindset – Breakaway Consciousness

5 Lessons From Owning & Operating Businesses In The First Year [Part 2] | #Business | #Finance | #Investing | #Growth | #Mindset

“Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”
– Conrad Hilton

“Who you are tomorrow begins with what you do today.”
– Tim Fargo

Zy Marquiez
July 27, 2019

The previous write up discussed 5 lessons from the first year of business of my close friend and business owner Hussein Jabai and me. The lessons bellow will continue along the same lines with 5 additional thoughts that could prove valuable for those starting their own business.

#6: Know Your Customer Base

Are your primary customers middle-class consumers? Are they individuals concerned with health? Are they parents searching for entertainment options for their kids? Are they females? Males? Moreover, what’s the age range of your customers? Those two examples (of many) dovetail incredibly closely, for they allow you to know how to tailor your business model for your customers.

Social media analytics and other tools help with this. Figure out how to ascertain the demographics of your customer base, and you’re one significant step closer to success towards knowing whether your products will appeal simply to parents, techies, gamers, intellectuals, or any other type of individuals.

#7: Don’t Be Afraid To Go Against The Grain

Though Jabai’s business model and myself each go against the grain in their own ways, we will focus on what he is undertaking because the scope is much larger and intriguing.

Jabai is an individual who is in the discipline of health and wellness. For business, he could have simply stuck within the run-of-the-mill health and wellness strata of society, and found incredible success. But he’s in the process of expanding way beyond that. His passions are filtering not only into helping individuals with personal training, which he thoroughly enjoys, but into his Fighter Training Systems (FTTS Project), which aids in Injury Prevention for First Responders. But there’s more, he is also undertaking a personal initiative to create a program that strives for a much larger scale regional (and perhaps global reach) that could help individuals not just locally, but in various global regions.

The above example is the type of mindset that doesn’t settle simply for success, but reaches into making a difference, which is what ultimately changes lives.

#8: Always Strive To Continue Learning

Whether in life, business, personal relationships, or anything else, learning can take place reactively, or proactively. Though lessons in each can provide incredible depth, reactive lessons (and insights) are simply lessons that come when the tide brings them, whenever time provides them, rather than you venturing into the ocean to seek your own veritable treasure. In other words, you can wait for treasure to arrive on the shore of a beach brought about by waves, with that treasure brought to you, or you can venture into uncharted waters like a treasure hunter, and seek treasure of endless types. Self-directed education is one of the ways that individuals can find treasure within the field of business.

A wiseman once said, learning from your mistakes leads to knowledge, while learning from those of others, leads to wisdom. Always seek to learn from the footsteps provided from those before you, and even if you can’t because you happen to be doing something that’s brand new, you can still learn laterally from other individuals and their businesses in this respect.

In conjunction with that, one of the books that provided great insights into learning proactively is the book Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies. This is an excellent crash course into possible avenues for individuals seeking how to expand their awareness of marketing, all the while offering pragmatic examples of what can be undertaken.

#9: Find (and Construct) Mutual Support Mindset Networks

It’s my estimation that the vanguard reason that Jabai and myself bonded so quickly wasn’t simply because we were business owners, but more importantly, our talks, whether business or personal, were based around the same type of mindset. Each of us employs a mindset that doesn’t simply seeks success, but seeks to go beyond that into creating something unique and far reaching.

Where I myself seek to help individuals express their creative desires through the medium of LEGO in multifarious way which helps bring people of all ages joy in countless ways, Jabai is seeking to help people well beyond the scope of individually tailored health.

Jabai doesn’t simply strive to stay in a comfort zone and be only a personal trainer, he seeks to expand his health and wellness business well beyond the scope that most people within the health and wellness area do.

While individuals can truly do most (or possibly all) things in life alone, one need not go at it alone when there are people of the same type of mindset out there, you simply need to find them and grow those relationships, whether it is in life or business.

Mutual mindset support networks aid in significant ways, from learning how to streamline your approach, having open-minded brainstorming sessions, to proactive seeking to not only to learn lessons from one another, but from others as well.

Each of us is seeking incredible distinct dreams, but with the mindset of empowering others, whether it is creatively or through health, and to buttress that with relentless passion to grow not only as a business, but as individuals as well.

#10 – Do Not Throw Away Time By The Wayside

Mincing no words, the average person spends time inefficiently by the truckload, it is a problem we all have, and its unfortunately a growing trend.

According to an article from New York Daily News penned a while ago, the average person spends 5 hours watching TV daily with some watching even more than that. At 5 hours per day, that amounts to 1,825 hours per year. That is 18250 hours per decade, and 91,250 hours per 50 years. That’s a lot of time! Over the course of 50 years, the total amount of time spent watching TV daily amounts to 3802 consecutive 24-hour days over that span. Or “just” 5 hours a day, for 50 years.

For the sake of simplicity, let us assume most of us happen to get 8 hours a day sleeping. In an entire 168 hour work-week where the average person spends 56 hours a week sleeping, and 40 hours a week working, that leaves one with 72 hours free. If one were to spend 35 hours a week viewing television, then that would leave 37 hours of free time. That’s nearly half of all of one’s available time spent watching television. That doesn’t even count social media! That seems ludicrous, does it not? That also doesn’t even begin to cover other activities individuals may carry out that don’t yield growth, whether in life or business.

Those are just some statistics of how much time is wasted, and there’s a lot more. The main point is that time is wasted by everyone including myself to varying extents. With modern media, it’s easy to spend countless hours on various apps and websites.

The best way to get around to creating time templates is simply to watch how much time you spend on social media and websites. There are apps that help with this. Once you do this, you will be downright shocked at how much time you spend on certain apps per week.

As you realize where those time vortexes of yours are, you will be able to adjust accordingly, hopefully slotting something productive in those areas like self-directed learning, business analysis and forecasts, etc.[1]

Final Thoughts

In modern times, success in business is not as complex as it was in the past. With the rise of the internet, social media and online social network, there are literally countless resources at hand, and a lot of those are free. However, if you can learn (proactively rather than reactively) from the mistakes and footsteps others took in a way that it can prevent you from making the same mistakes yourself, thus helping you forgo unnecessary hardship and time waste, you will be quite a few steps ahead of the competition.

Seek to push your business beyond the boundaries of comfort zones, but first, seek to push yourself beyond what you think you are capable of. What you do personally within your life, the mindset you employ, will inevitably seep into that of your business and your employees and will become the template for success in your future.

In life, individuals often surprise themselves of what they are capable of doing once they employ a can-do mindset, rather than a can’t-do mindset, and in business it’s not different.

Don’t wait upon the shores of life for treasures to come to you, veritable life insights that could also be applied to business; that is simply wasting time you could be using to venture on into the unknown seeking the treasures that life and business provide. And you never know, when seeking those very treasures, you might just run into a life-lesson or insight that changes your life forever.

One can’t put a price tag to life-altering life-lessons and wisdom that come about which help you not only in life, but in business as well. Those can only usually be attained by venturing beyond comfort zones.

Life happens to everyone, but unbounded success happens only to those that keep persevering beyond their comfort zones and into uncharted waters, even if they face a storm. And just like those storms within the seas help provide the circumstances that create master navigators able to steer their vessels in any way, within any storm, the metaphorical storms life and business provide will make you capable of navigating through various circumstances be them economic downturns, personal plight, or anything else.

Such is the mindset of a proactive individual; such is the mindset that makes unbounded success inevitable.

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Author’s Note:

[1] Time efficiency and inefficiency will be something discussed in the future and extrapolated upon at length given the incredible ramifications it has for business and success. This is only covered in this article in a cursory manner to give an individual a morsel of how significant time loss is within our lives.

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About The Author:

Zy Marquiez is an an author, business owner, CEO, avid book reviewer, inquirer, open-minded skeptic, and writer who aims at empowering individuals while also studying and regularly mirroring subjects like Consciousness, Education, Creativity, The Individual, Ancient History & Ancient Civilizations, Forbidden Archaeology, Big Pharma, Alternative Health, Space, Geoengineering, Social Engineering, Propaganda, and much more.

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#Quote Of The Day | #Mindset | #Business | #Success

“Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”
– Conrad Hilton

#Quote Of The Day | #Mindset | #Change | #Life

“Changes are what make life interesting. Overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.”
– Joshua J. Marine

#Quote Of The Day | #Acceptance | #Mindfulness | #Mindset

“The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.”
– Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Poker, Writing, And Life – Seeing & Accepting Things As They Are | #Mindfulness | #Life | #Writing | #Poker

“Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.”

“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. ”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

BreakwayIndividual.com
Zy Marquiez
June 19, ,2019

Poker and life share many commonalities, as previously discussed.

That said, in this particular piece, we will also couple writing to it since this also shares many commonalities with the aforementioned, and in the original conceptualization of this write-up, writing and self expression were the main focus. Given the poker theme that gets addressed in this blog at times, I chose to merge all of these to expand upon the ideas a bit. Essentially, we are going to explore some of the commonalities that self-expression has with poker, writing, and how that delves into viewing things at face value and accepting things in deeper ways from a subjective level.

One vanguard commonality that poker shares with life (and writing) is the expression of an individual in the way they play their game. Just like an individual in poker expresses themselves with what they wear, how they speak, how they act, and how they ultimately play, in writing, as in life, it is no different.

In writing, however, the individual uses a different array of tools for self expression. Writers can employ themes, diction, metaphors, arguments, insights, and much more. Tempo, imagery and reliability are also things that can create a huge feeling of kinship between the writer and the reader. All of this allows for thoughts and emotions to be conveyed in countless forms, and for self expression to take place.

In my personal case, I find that when I subject myself to certain emotions conveyed through writing, or even news, and videos, my emotions can get quite affected. Not always, but enough that I have been cognizant of this for a very long time.

Now, allow me a quick aside that merges into what will follow thereafter.

Throughout the full latitude of my life, I have had certain issues with reading thoughts that people share which are negative (or could be seen as such) in nature. These types of feelings and thoughts people share that have a certain ‘negative’ vibe to it are merely individuals expressing themselves. And I say negative loosely, because perhaps a person is simply expressing themselves, and they are misunderstood. Some people might only want to express thoughts on a darker subject, not with the intent of creating a negative vibe to it, but perhaps in a cathartic way. And just because a reader (such as myself in this instance) takes it negatively, doesn’t mean the aim of the piece was to create negativity in its intentional nascent conception.

Though this above example talks about reading from my subjective point of view that stems from my willing exposure to those who express themselves in writing, the same can be said for poker and life in my personal case.

Instances where a player berates another at the tables, or a person mistreats another with disrespect and so on, have always bothered me at a deeper level. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t be affected, only that allowing your emotions to run you over if such is the case with me, isn’t exactly healthy. One can be bothered significantly by an issue without letting that issue overrun them.

Now, if you think about it, an individual’s ‘self expression, whether it stems through the medium of writing, in poker, or in life, that expression is simply one side of the polarity of positivity and negativity, albeit, through the gateway of emotions and the mind.

That a negative circumstance or thought (or my misperception of it) bothers me so much says a lot about me on many levels. Though, what I think it says more than anything is that, even if I have always found such things stressful since my youth, that doesn’t mean I need to let it affect me, if that makes sense. In other words, while every single person has the freedom to express themselves as they so desire, I also have the freedom to accept that in its totality, and NOT let it affect me, and even learn from it if possible, as I am attempting to do now.

I say this because I’m trying significantly to take a slightly more Zen-like mindful approach to reading certain things in particular, which I usually avoid in general due to it causing stress.

Then a thought struck me: just like I can lockdown my emotions in a game of poker and keep them in check, as well as the stress involved in it, why couldn’t I do that in reading or seeing something that bothers me? This doesn’t mean I excuse poor treatment of another human being in any way shape or form, if such has taken place. I am merely stating that I should not allow my emotions to override my logic center, which is something that can easily take place and it’s a social engineering weapon employed often by the mainstream media.

Why do you think the mainstream media nigh always appeals to emotions and nigh never to logic, or even better, a holistic approach? Ponder that one.

Individuals that are highly emotional are much easier to manipulate than those that have a sound and holistic mindset. But just like too much emotion can affect a person, too much logic can as well, which is why a delicate balance has to be struck.

Seeking a delicate balance and a more mindful Zen-like state of being coupled with acceptance of what I s taking place is the approach I have been slowly taking the last few days, and I am appreciating it because one thing I learned a long time ago is that, anything that bothers you says something about you. Anything that bothers you a lot, says even more about you. While obviously, this can be positive or negative, the point is that our emotional response to a situation has endless ways in the way it can play out, and being able to come to terms with it is incredible for seeing the world as it IS, rather than how you think (or wish) it could be.

The world, just like individuals, simply are. And just how I am okay accepting myself for me, as everyone should accept themselves as well, I should be cognizant of others and their thoughts, feelings, and so on.

That need not mean that I need to agree with them, not at all, or give a pass to something that’s downright wrong that goes against what I feel is right. It’s just that seeing things for what they are is one of those obvious, and yet, not so obvious subtleties life offers. It’s not unlike the sky, it’s there, but most people don’t pay attention to it. Not seeing the subtleties in life, is not unlike having a kaleidoscope at hand, and not seeing the countless intricacies that it offers due to its unique perspective. That’s missing out on a LOT of things one could see, and even learn from if exposed to such.

Is the glass half full or half empty? To me, that doesn’t matter.

What matters is what is inside, and what you can learn from it.

In this case, my cup has been half full with fear of myriad things, which has historically affected how I see and accept the world for it is, which is why my stress increases proportional to my inability to accept things, and which has undoubtedly has affected my health throughout my life.

But at least I am coming to terms with it. Hopefully, that’s a big first step in the right direction.

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Author’s Note:

[1] I know I meandered a bit hither and thither, but, there was just a lot I wished to address, and I just took a more instinctual way of constructing my thoughts, rather than a logically structured way in which I aim to follow at times, so if this seems like a lot of spaghetti got launched at the wall in order to seek what sticks, it’s EXACTLY THAT!

[2] I have posted an iteration of this elsewhere in the form of a letter, or perhaps, journal entry might be more precise. I have opted to share it here, though in a significantly more fleshed out way because I think the topic deserves some serious consideration.

This started simply as me putting my thoughts to paper based on many things I had been thinking about of late, with what is shared being that which I thought most noteworthy.

I find it highly fascinating how many points of views different circumstances can offer. Not learning from them when you can if you simply make an a proactive effort is leaving life lessons by the wayside. At least, for me that’s how I feel.

And what’s life about, if not about growth, to a certain extent?

Hope you all have a great evening.

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About The Author:

Zy Marquiez is an avid book reviewer, inquirer, an open-minded skeptic, yogi, and freelance writer who aims at empowering individuals while also studying and regularly mirroring subjects like Consciousness, Education, Creativity, The Individual, Ancient History & Ancient Civilizations, Forbidden Archaeology, Big Pharma, Alternative Health, Space, Geoengineering, Social Engineering, Propaganda, and much more.

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#Quote Of The Day | #Desire | #Drive | #Perseverance | #Mindset

“The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small fire makes a small amount of heat.”
– Napoleon Hill

Note: I wonder whether Hill would see desire as interchangeable with drive or perseverance? What do you all think? Still though, amazing quote and analogy.

#Quote Of The Day | #Obstacles | #NapoleonHill | #Mindset | #Limits | #Breakaway | #Life

“Our only limitations are those we set up in our own minds.”
– Napoleon Hill