L.T. Dravis asked:




                                    

WHAT DO YOU THINK? CAN YOU REALLY ACHIEVE SALES SUCCESS SIMPLY BY VISUALIZING SALES SUCCESS?

Or is this visualization business just wishful thinking? If you could succeed by visualizing success, would you? Of course you would. So why not take a look?

Everything in the man-made world exists because someone had the good sense, the wisdom, the insight, and the willingness to visualize something that didn’t exist.

That’s true of aspirin, The Great Wall of China, Pizza, the iPod, polio vaccine, satellite TV, the Space Shuttle, or the X-Box. So, we know that visualization works.

We’re not saying that all you have to do is visualize a check for ten thousand dollars and it will magically appear. We are saying that the first step toward success is to visualize that success.

Let’s say you need ten thousand dollars. Think about it. Create a mental image of a check made out to you for $10,000.00. See it as realistically as possible. Imagine that you’re holding the check, feel it, run a finger along an edge of the check, and turn it over and endorse it.

Allow yourself to enjoy the check. Imagine yourself depositing the check and paying for the things you needed the money for in the first place.

Your subconscious mind will begin to process the fact that you have the money because it accepts what you sincerely imagine to be real. If your subconscious mind believes you already have the money the same way it believes you can ride a bike decades after the last time you rode a bike or it believes you can tap accurately on a keyboard without looking, your belief system, your behavior, and the way you talk will begin to reflect that fact.

Events will begin to occur as the result of that subconscious belief. Perhaps you’ll  connect with someone who can help you avoid putting yourself in a bad financial spot again; or, perhaps you’ll read something about money management you might not otherwise have noticed; or, perhaps you’ll be freed up to be more productive, sell more, and earn more.

What’s happening? Simple . . . since you’re no longer preoccupied with getting your hands on that ten grand, your subconscious mind has enabled your conscious mind to focus on using your education, experience, insights, and talents to improve your life.

Like you notice red cars with chrome wheels after you buy a red car with chrome wheels, this is not complicated.

Because your subconscious mind is no longer blocking positive input, your brain has been freed up to process new information, accept new ideas, and handle new challenges. You are now able to establish positive goals and create the strategies and tactics you need to achieve those goals.

Still skeptical? Good . . . we encourage healthy skepticism.

Let’s take an empirical look at Donald Trump, world-famous author, businessman, and celebrity. His ability to succeed is legendary: He’s Chairman and CEO of the Trump Organization, his real-estate development company, founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts which runs some of the most popular casinos and hotels in the country and, of course, star of NBC’s The Apprentice.

What some folks may not remember is that in the early 1990s, because of a severe real estate recession, Trump faced $3.5 Billion in corporate debt and $900 million in personal debt. By his own account, Trump had to sit down and manage those daunting economic realities the same way he managed all his successes.He identified each challenge separately, evaluated the true scope of that challenge, and visualized resolving the challenge successfully. He sat alone at his desk and visualized how to successfully handle each impending conversation with banks, bondholders, and vendors.

The Donald visualized success to achieve success and by 1994, had eliminated most of his personal debt and cut Trump business debt significantly.Whatever challenges you face, whatever your goals may be, do what Trump did and does . . . visualize the challenge, visualize the solution, and visualize winning. If visualization works for Trump, why wouldn’t it work for you?

By the way, in October, 2007, Forbes Magazine estimated Donald Trump’s wealth at $3,000,000,000.00 . . . if you don’t want to count the zeroes, that’s Three Billion (with a ‘B’) dollars!

Not bad visualization, huh?

“Visualize Success To Succeed?” Copyright © 2008 by LTD Associates West, Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is excerpted from the new book, BOTH SIDES NOW©, Sell Like Professional Athletes Win by LTD Associates West, Ltd., available online at BOTHSIDESNOW.BIZ and at Amazon.Com

 If you have questions, comments, or concerns, Email me at LTDAssociates@msn.com (goes right to my desk) and since I personally answer every Email, I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards,

L.T. Dravis

Copyright © 1999-2008 LTD Associates, West, Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Robin

Your Financial Resource asked:


We received our Trump University Newsletter in which it was headlined “My Top Ten Rules of Success by Donald Trump” and so upon reading it, we felt that it was imperative that our readers have a chance to also read it and comment where necessary.

At www.financialresource.org, we follow Mr. Donald Trump as he is a very successful businessman and we all have a lot to learn from his experiences. So without any bias or further comments…

Here’s the complete top 10 list Donald Trump gives when he speaks at colleges:

1. Never give up! Do not settle for remaining in your comfort zone. Remaining complacent is a good way to get nowhere.

2. Be passionate! If you love what you’re doing, it will never seem like work.

3. Be focused! Ask yourself: What should I be thinking about right now? Shut out interference. In this age of multitasking, this is a valuable technique to acquire.

4. Keep your momentum! Listen, apply and move forward. Do not procrastinate.

5. See yourself as victorious! That will focus you in the right direction.

6. Be tenacious! Being stubborn can work wonders.

7. Be lucky! The old saying, “The harder I work, the luckier I get” is absolutely right on.

8. Believe in yourself! If you don’t, no one else will either. Think of yourself as a one-man or one-woman army.

9. Ask yourself: What am I pretending not to see? There may be some great opportunities right around you, even if things aren’t looking so great. Great adversity can turn into great victory.

and….(DRUMROLLLLLLL)

10. Look at the solution, not the problem. And never give up! Never never never give up. This thought deserves to be said (and remembered and applied) many times. It’s that important.

Please tell us what you think and should you have a Top Ten Rules that we can learn from, please do let us know. Visit us at http://www.financialresource.org/blog/top-ten-10-list-for-success-by-donald-trump/ and drop us a note or give us your feeedback



Darren

Donald Mitchell asked:


New breakthrough solution cost reducers often lack confidence when they begin. As a result, they pick some area of glaring inefficiency as an easy target.

In such activities, it’s not unusual for a breakthrough solution to be possible by simply applying methods known since the 1920s. That approach is unfortunate because the solver often gets a sense that breakthrough solutions for cost reductions only exist in a few places where horrible results are occurring.

However, move this attention into an organization’s most important activities, and you can have more impact with one solution than with a thousand small activities.

Think about the toy industry as an example. A new breakthrough cost reducer might focus on locating lower-cost suppliers for low-volume toys 20 times faster. If the toys account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of an organization’s sales, these savings might only succeed in eliminating a few salaries.

Compare that potential to making the sales of new toys 20 times higher from the same development efforts, and you can see the point about how much more valuable such a focus would be.

A recent example among dolls impressed me with the availability of better development methods in what seem to be mature industries. Barbie dolls had dominated the U.S. toy market for over 50 years.

These dolls were made to look somewhat like Donald Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples. If scaled up to adult size, Barbie would have been about six feet, two inches tall. Her measurements on an adult woman’s scale would have veered towards the unrealistically large for chest and bra sizes with a waist that barely existed.

If you saw someone in real life like Barbie, she would have been in danger of falling over frontward. Clearly, that version of Barbie didn’t look like any little girls anyone had ever seen. Girls tended to play with Barbie like they would have with a pretty Mommy doll.

MGA Entertainment was a small factor in the toy business but was on the lookout for ways to grow. The company’s owner noticed that his not-so-young daughter didn’t find Barbie dolls appealing when she wanted to play dolls with her friends.

At the 7 to 11 age level, girls more often like to pretend that dolls are friends who are doing activities together. Barbie clearly looked like a Mommy, not a friend.

MGA decided to bring out a line of dolls that would facilitate this friend-oriented play. Bratz dolls have huge heads, teenager-like bodies, and lots of teenage clothes. They also come in all hues of skin color and hair, just like real girls.

Girls in the “tween” stage, between being little girls and teenagers, quickly adopted these Bratz with a vengeance. Within three years, Bratz became the number-one selling doll brand in the United States, and annual sales exceeded one billion dollars. That’s quite a hit for the tiny toy company.

By shifting its focus from developing toys like other toy companies did to studying what children found lacking in current dolls, MGA Entertainment was able to reduce its cost of developing a new toy by more than 95 percent as a percentage of sales. Notice that by making such a critical activity more effective, MGA also expanded its revenues so much that other cost-reduction opportunities are much larger now, as well.

Observe, too, from this example of improving product development that not all breakthrough cost reductions entail spending less for something. You may spend about the same amount, but accomplish more than 20 times as much. In the case of MGA Entertainment, the shift allowed the company to accomplish over 50 times as much.

As you can see from this example, making new product or service development more productive can be one of the most highly leveraged areas for breakthrough cost-reduction solutions. Yet most organizations seldom look at becoming more effective at developing new offerings as a cost-improvement opportunity.

Traditionally, most people think of cost-reduction opportunities as being most concentrated in operations that provide offerings, in initiating outsourcing, and in improving information technology. Those initial reactions of where to focus attention for cost reductions usually reflect stalled thinking.

Here are the highest potential places for cost reductions in most organizations I’ve studied:



-Developing new offerings



-Accelerating customers’ trial of offerings



-Expanding awareness of offerings



-Increasing availability of and access to offerings



-Reducing capital intensity of offerings



-Raising low cost capital



-Eliminating flaws that harm customers and other stakeholders

As a result, I encourage you in establishing your checkup scheduling to be sure that all of these areas receive breakthrough solution cost-reduction attention on a frequent basis. Naturally, you should add other areas that might be more important for your organization than for most other organizations.



Diana

Daniel Massicotte asked:


When I first heard of Donald Trump’s financial success it was in the context of the word “millions.” Not because he earned millions of dollars but because when he first started playing the game of deal making, he decided to raise the stakes to the millions, instead of the thousands or just hundreds of dollars.

As he explains in Think Big and Kick Ass, Trump quickly found that working with millions did not make much of a difference to him. Be it millions or billions, it all came down to the same thing to him. He could also handle a lot of stress which helped him tremendously.

Putting all the big numbers aside, I would like to discuss experience. We will come back to Trump.

Let us imagine that you are graduating from college with nothing to lose. You have no assets, no property and no collateral. You have taken the habit of asking yourself: What is the worst that can happen in this situation? This is a great question to ask when you feel things really could not get any worse. If your situation has hit rock-bottom, then take comfort that things will not be getting any worse.

For the purpose of this article (and Trump’s situation), the worst that can happen is that you have to declare bankruptcy.

Intend it.

If in 10 years you will be declaring bankruptcy, I would think you would want it to happen with you owing millions, instead of thousands. No? You cannot get any lower than zero when you are bankrupt, and the effects are the same. Someone once told me that in life, I should be bold and courageous, because when I look back on it, I will regret the things I did not do rather than the things I did.

If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, you would do everything between now and then to make sure you lived your life to the fullest until you died.

Similarly, Trump has always taken his business to the top level by working with big numbers and big challenges. Last I heard he declared bankruptcy three times in his life. Most people only go through that once. Yet Trump has experienced far more than just bankruptcy. His persistence is amazing. He describes himself as living on the edge all the time, since that is where the excitement is. It is also during these times that things tend to happen.

For all the books Trump has written and the infrastructural work he has done in New York City, he certainly is not getting very much publicity. This man should be far more in the spotlight than he currently is.

Living your life to the fullest will mean that you will have to take chances and listen to your gut. Forget about the numbers and simply do what feels right and make it big.



Raul

Whatever asked:


He says that the price of oil barrels will go down.

And besides, congressional leaders want this bailout to pass just to cover their own investments.

Billy