Your Mental Shelf Space

How to stop focusing on the good things, so you can grow the great things. ---Transcript--- Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you to "Marketing in Your Car". All right, guys and gals, I'm actually driving right now in a brand new Lexus. Not because I bought a new Lexus, but because I took mine in for an oil change, and it turns out something was jacking it, and so they wouldn't give me a loaner car. Then Brent that works with me told them, "You know Russell's in the market for a new car. You might as well give him something nice. He may come and buy from you guys," and so they gave me a brand new Lexus. I'm driving a pretty sweet car right now. Today, it's about seven in the morning. I've been awake for three hours so far. I got up early this morning for my accountability call, which again, I've mentioned this to you guys multiple times, and I encourage you to do this if you haven't done this yet – find an accountability partner. The way we do ours is I write him a check, he writes me a check, and every two weeks we meet together. We have some goals and if we don't keep one of our goals – if he doesn't keep his goal, then I cash his check, and vice versa. Right now I'm doing that with him, and I'm doing it with someone else in a spiritual standpoint. I have some spiritual goals, and I have a buddy who does, too. We did the same thing. We wrote each other checks, and if one of us screws up, we cash the other person's check. It's amazing what happens when you do this. I'm going to write a book about it someday, because I'm making huge strides in my business, and in my personal life, so I'm going to try to find another couple of accountability partners. Maybe I'll do a weight loss one as well, and a couple of other things. Today I want to talk about the entrepreneurial – I don't even know what the right word is – ADD, right? Something we all get. We get into these shiny object syndromes, and the guy I had my meeting with, my accountability partner, today we were talking about stuff and I was showing him our businesses and how we were doing. I showed him our supplement business, which is blowing up and growing faster than anything I've ever had, and faster than I probably want it to be [laughs]. It's a business that scares me. There's liability that makes me nervous. There's inventory management. All of these things that I haven't done in the past, I can learn, and we're learning and we're doing, but it's not my core competency. We're making good money on it. He asked me an interesting question. He said, "If you were to get rid of that business, Russell, how much money do you think you would make focusing on your core passion, your core business?" which is our marketing and Click Funnels and some of the other stuff that's coming out in the next couple of weeks. I sat back and I thought about it for a while. He said, "You know, Russell, you're struggling right now because this business is netting you whatever each month, but what you don't understand is that that business may be costing you even more in your focus. You look at retailers like Wal-Mart. They have all of this shelf space, right? They look at every single SKU on the shelf, and if something's not performing or making enough, they get rid of it, right? Their shelf space – they've got to be very protective of it. Entrepreneurs like us, our shelf space is between our ears, in our mind, and we've got to be very, very aware of it, and be very careful. If something's taking up a lot of shelf space, and if it's not making as much money as it should, you've got to take it out, because it could be suffocating other parts of your business." I was thinking about that this morning. I was thinking about how, whichever part of the business I focus on starts growing, so when we focus on supplements, "Boom," it starts growing and growing and growing, and then all of the sudden, everything else starts hurting. All of the sudden we'll look and say, "Hey, the coaching business is hurting," and I shift my focus over there, and "Boom." It starts growing and growing and growing. Then I look back and the supplements are suffering, and everything else is suffering. Whatever we're focusing on is growing. So, what's the opportunity that you have and that I have that's going to make us the most amount of money? Let's focus a hundred percent of our time and effort there, and let it grow. Don't let these other good things suffocate and kill the great things. This is stuff, obviously, I know and I've heard before, but it was a good reminder for me this morning, and it made me start thinking about some of my side projects, and made me start thinking about what I can sell, what I can kill, what I can give to partners, what I can do and where I can do it to get to the point where I can focus on the great things, and so that's my focus for today. I just got home from the gym, and I'm going to go see my kids and play with them for a little bit, and then I'll be in the office to go try to accomplish that, so it should be fun. I hope you guys have an awesome day. I hope you guys can do what I do and take some inventory of your mental shelf space, and make some good decisions so that you're focusing on the great things and not the good things. Thanks guys, and I'll talk to you soon.