Your Need For A Sense Of Security, Comfort, And Relaxation Is Holding You Back From Greatness!
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It may not seem possible to a lot of people these days but there is a growing culture of affluence that is coming from a not so familiar demographics, – this is the poor, the disadvantaged and the basic middle class. Long gone are the days of being born into a rich family (though it’s still viable) being the only way to experience true success and wealth in this world. You could fill a library with tails of untold fortune that were acquired by a kid that came from a broken home, the ghetto streets, or just an average middle-class family.
Many people are still clinging to the old way of thinking that the only route to fortune and wealth is either to be born into privilege or that some average person just got lucky but, that doesn’t explain the fact that now more than ever, more and more average middle class, not formally educated people are hitting it big in the business world and accumulating vast amounts of wealth. I could go into a long dissertation about the power of being broke or what being treated with inequality can actually do for you but instead, I want to tell you about a trend that I have been seeing in the pre-entrepreneur world that is getting some serious traction with amazing effectiveness.
A trend is developing that average to above average income people that are not really struggling and live a pretty good life are purposely putting themselves in the position of disadvantage and struggle to try and access the side of their brains that will create a “wounded animal-like” hunger for survival and success. You might be thinking this sounds a little ridiculous and why would you put yourself purposely in the death-blow position of life when you’re already reasonably ahead of the game? The reason for this is because most people are comfortable, and… there is no bigger killer of innovation and creativity than someone that is comfortable. Comfort is holding you back because it’s giving you options. Options are providing a contingency when things get hard. Sometimes you need to run your ships aground and leave yourself only one option, – success or nothing!
I have discovered a strategy for positioning yourself on “Death Ground” call the death ground strategy. This strategy is explained in detail in Robert Greene’s Book, 33 Strategies of War and was derived from Sun Tzu’s book, Art of War. This strategy has been something of a study for me through my own business development and exploring it myself has reviled an incredible level of success and wealth into my life and for my business. Before I go into the details of what the death ground effect has had on my life and business, I have to warn you that is can be quite controversial. If you are willing to put this strategy into your life like a lot of new entrepreneurs are doing, you will be proving what a lot of what people think it takes to become successful, is wrong!
The 6 steps to positioning yourself on death ground.
The world is ruled by necessity and will only change if it has to. Deliberately putting yourself with your back up against a wall will force you to fight like hell for survival and success and will kill all notions of comfort and security. These 6 steps to intentionally place the wall to your back on death ground cannot be studies or just leisurely read, it must be physically practiced to experience the true effect it will have on your success! I feel it’s important to tell you that most people would not intentionally do any of these steps because the risk factors are very high. Please, do not try this at home if you truly believe you cannot commit yourself to this level of pressure. These 6 steps are not really a strategy but rather a principle of success that you would tailor to your own circumstances and interest. I am cautious to use the word ‘strategy’ because it lends itself to give you an illusion that this was a step by step method for success. These 6 steps are very high-level entrepreneurialism that one will need to practice over a long period of time, maybe even years! But if you are interested in finding new enlightenment into what it takes to be successful, read the following steps and enjoy at your own distance. If you can for just a few minutes while you read, remove all thoughts of comfort and security out of your mind and let’s turn up the pressure and let the bloodbath begin, – if you dare!
1. Stake EVERYTHING on a single throw
Entrepreneurialism is more popular than ever before and it seems everyone wants to be an entrepreneur these days. Social media and easy to use technology interfaces has allowed more and more people to become quite entrepreneurial or maybe even just quasi-entrepreneurial. Just look at the bio of most anybody’s Instagram or Twitter account and you will see many, many people these days are calling themselves entrepreneurs. Even though everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, very few are willing to actually be “entrepreneurial.” That’s where the rubber meets the road in the entrepreneurial world. A real entrepreneur has to create an unrealistic sense of urgency for creating action and actually execute on an idea rather than just putting the word in your bio. All too often in this world of, finding a secure lifestyle, we are being taught to be cautious and plan for our futures so to be comfortable and secure rather than taking a calculated risk and working tirelessly to accumulate wealth and value. This has led to the “day job side gig” entrepreneur. This is the pre-entrepreneur that is working their day job 40 hours a week and hustling their side-gig new business during their off time. The reason they continue their day job is to maintain the feeling of security through a steady paycheck and benefits while developing their new business. They hope that someday the side-gig will eventually develop into a fulltime business but only when the side-gig is making as much money as their day job and then they can quit and be a fulltime practicing entrepreneur.
This is the smart and responsible way of becoming an entrepreneur but fundamentally it’s not the right way to become an entrepreneur! Remember that I said, “Most people are not willing to be entrepreneurial?” This is it right here, most people want to become an entrepreneur with comfort and security of their day job and then seamlessly and smoothly transition into full-time self-employment. There’s nothing wrong with this strategy but it’s far from the death ground effect!
You must act fast and quit that day job even before you’re ready to. You have to create a feeling of desperation to survive and stake your whole future on this single throw. You are losing valuable time and energy by staying at your day job and what makes this even more compelling is the fact that there are others out there that are willing to do this. They are your competitors and they are willing to risk more than you and they are taking all of your customers, contacts, connections, and networking while you are waisting the day at your day job. They are already beating you, – once you enter the game! This is the brutal side of the business. No one owes you anything and everything has to be earned. There are no regulations, rules or laws governing innovation and creativity and you are never penalized for hustle. The ones that are willing to out-work you, out-hustle you and out-innovate you are going to be the ones that out-entrepreneur you!
Purposely place yourself on death ground and feel the spirit and ebb of fierce competitive business by not being distracted by thoughts of comfort and security. Use your 6th and 7th senses to sniff out opportunity and aggressively guild success into your direction by leveraging your own advantages and opportunities into your favor. Try viewing the world with an open perspective while your stomach growls with a new kind of hunger you’ve never experienced before. People have achieved amazing and unthinkable acts of survival when they haven’t physically eaten food for many, many days. Starve your brain of thoughts of security and comfort and embrace the risk side of entrepreneurialism and achievement. You just might be surprised how good you are at this, (I know I was!!!)
2. Act Before You Are Ready
In your subconscious mind, you keep an escape route or a contingency plan that you keep as an ace-in-the-hole in case something goes wrong or if you fail. This insurance policy in your brain may seem like a smart thing to have but in reality, – it’s a curse! It divides you because you think you have options. Options create a sense of security and comfort resulting in you not immersing yourself thoroughly in the endeavor. It is always good to plan and strategize before acting but try and not plan for too long, act before you are ready! The initiative is right before you. So many people wait and plan for too long and generally over thinking the opportunity and talking themselves out of it. Better to act and fail, than to wait and regret! Acting before you are ready will force you to be resourceful. Making the most of your available resources is an incredibly cunning skill and is a skill that will produce fruit long into the future. Exercise this resourcefulness muscle and tone it up for the battles of business to come. You have to remember that problems don’t go away once you are successful, and in fact, many problems get accentuated with success or new ‘success problems’ and growing pains you’ve never had before begin to emerge. The problems don’t go away with success but the reason you’re successful is that you are getting better at handling them!
Acting before you are ready is committing yourself to the point you can’t turn back. Once you feel this kind of pressure, your brain will access the creative side of itself. Hunger and a little bit of desperation will stimulate creativity to flourish! Ideas will be coming at you with breakneck speed and you will have to find ways of controlling them.
3. Enter New Waters
The number one thing that is holding most people back is the need for comfort and security. This is why we stick to the things we are familiar with and have the most experience with. Keep in mind that specialization is only for insects. We as humans were given the natural gift to be explorers and tame uncharted lands and waters. Tap into the primitive side of your brain and be an explorer into new waters. This is an incredibly exhilarating feeling and cannot be just studied or read about. It must be experienced! Step into the endeavors’ new territory and take in the environment just as your ancestors did. Point your eyes and ears forward and begin to hunt, look for water and find shelter to begin your strategies.
Force yourself into new waters and cut the ties of old stale relationships of the familiar. Keep in mind that this can be a lonely adventure as family and friends may draw back from you or warn you of the dangers but, by being the one that enters the uncharted arena, you get to be the one that forges the new roads and paves the way for others. Don’t worry about your own inexperience with this new area, be the boss and hire competent subject matter experts to handle the workload and consult you to success.
4. Make It You Against The World
When venturing out onto Death Ground your enemies and competition will wait and applaud your failure, your friends and family will pull back from your relationship with them and your customer base will only want the very best from you without excuses for non-delivery. Death Ground is inherently a lonely place so you must get a little primordial and raggedy and take on the world, all on your own. Taking on the world by yourself is not what it used to be. Hatred and resentment can now be a fuel source for success but the world is now very much connected and any hint of an undesirable demeanor will run like wildfire through social networks and destroy you.
It’s best to make it you against the world by way of interest. Even though most of the people in your life are turning away from you, you can counter and beat them by expressing much more interest in them and other people, rather than expressing your own self-expression. Kill them with kindness and catch more flies with honey rather than being the dreadful nonconformist. Irritate people and intentionally create enemies with kind words of interest from the perch of a place they themselves wouldn’t dare to be. They are already jealous of your courage to be an independent entrepreneur so now show them that you are a cut above the fray and are willing to do even much more than they are to retain the relationship. Make them hate it that they like you! One of the greatest indicators of success is having haters.
5. Never Let Them See You Sweat
Since you are now on death ground and people are watching you and how you are going to perform in this economical unholy land, you might as well have a power play at hand. Those that have warned you and are watching for your imminent demise need to see that what you have done, wasn’t really all that hard. Even though you were a nervous wreck the whole time and you busted your ass to get there, you must put on a front that this was not all that daunting of a task. You must appear that you arrived at a place where only eagles dare and that the work wasn’t that hard and in fact, you could do even much more if you wanted to!
Make all of your achievements on Death Ground look as though it was just another day at work and you are just strolling through the day’s tasks to complete them. All the hard work, toil, and worry must be done behind closed doors, out of public view! Your late night strategy sessions and 4:00 am wake-up alarm must be out of sight and earshot. Never let them see you sweat about anything. Problems to you are now but mild, mere irritations and are simply fixed with attention to details. Your frontage needs to radiate that failures are just another opportunity to achieve greatness and going broke means you have the ability and the freedom to retool and restructure to make more money as easily as you did the first time.
Keep your hands clean and become a paragon of sophistication and easy living. You can never look too busy to handle anything. You must always have the time to give attention to anything at any one time. Prepare diligently behind the curtain and walk out into the open public as if the world is your oyster for your taking by means of your own doing. This will create a god-like aura around you everywhere you go!
6. Keep yourself restless and unsatisfied
When we are tied, it’s often because we are subconsciously unchallenged. Comfort and security make us lazy and lethargic because we don’t have to work to sustain or improve. Also as we get older, we begin to get more conservative and we start to give up on the spirit for competitiveness. We often times find ourselves living on past successes where we have triumphed greatly and years later continue to try and reinvent that same one-time greatness rather than put the past behind us to move on to the next great thing in our lives. You can see this in many movie stars, musicians and professional sports athletes. At one time Mike Tyson was on top of the world with vast riches and fame as boxing’s heavyweight champion but has since managed to burn through a half a billion dollars leaving him essentially broke comparatively. While at the same time, Floyd (Money) Mayweather has amassed an amazing net worth of nearly $1 billion dollars by staying restless and unsatisfied with being “just” the heavyweight champion of the world.
You must keep your mind and your body energized with a rush of energy by continuing to take another risk and challenge. Leave past successes as stepping stones and experience to your next and even greater triumph, and then do it again! Do not get stuck in the rut of living off past triumphs. It’s tiresome and begins to be dis-interesting to others. Show others that past successes were just the beginning and that where you are and where you are headed, is the overall master plan. Make risk a common practice in your life. Remember that even a master fisherman will tell you there is no luck in a successful fishing trip. It takes the skill and practice of those skills to be successful. Risk needs to be practiced as well to be mastered. You now know that problems don’t go away just because you are rich and successful. You have practiced risk for so long now that you have just gotten better at handling problems to the point they are merely mild irritations that get managed and handled swiftly and effectively.
Fight the effects of time on your mind and body and extinguish the stodginess of old age with never being satisfied with your current accomplishments. Make it so the achievement is never a destination and become hopelessly addicted to what comes next!
Daniel J Bockman
