Graham McGregor: Looking for an 'easier way'

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I read an interesting book a while ago called Living the 80-20 Way by Richard Koch (Richard is a successful consultant, entrepreneur and bestselling author.)

In his book Richard explains that there is a difficult way and an easy way to create success.

The difficult way is to study hard and for a long time, work hard for 60 hours or more a week for several decades.

In other words you sacrifice a pleasant life now in the hope of a much more pleasant future life.

The easy way is quite different and open to everyone.

It requires you to make a great mental leap and forget the idea that reward comes from long hours. The easy way to success is to focus on the outcomes that you want and then find the easiest way to achieve them with the least effort, least sacrifice, and most pleasure.

Be efficient but relaxed. First, think results. Then get them with the least energy possible.

Richard Koch gives a good example of this in his book:

Imagine you're a caveperson in the town of Bedrock, home of The Flintstones. You need to get to the other side of town in a hurry. Your alternatives are to walk or run.

Walking will take forever. Running is quicker, but requires a lot more effort.

To run would be to make the popular option of trying to secure a better result by working harder.

The easy way is different. We look for a much better result with far less effort.

How can we get across Bedrock much faster but without the slog of running?

Like the waitress at the prehistoric diner, we could roller-skate with less energy than it would take to run, yet still arrive quicker.

Or we could go one step further and jump on the back of a friendly brontosaurus.

That's a much better result with less effort.

Now this easier way strategy can be used in any area of your life that you want to make important changes in. These could be money, health, relationships and many more.

Here's a sales example you may find useful:

A while ago I created several marketing programmes to help real estate sales people improve their sales results. My problem was that I knew very few real estate sales people yet I still wanted to make a lot of sales. So I looked for a way to get great sales results with very little effort. The solution was easy. I contacted a real estate trainer who already had a great database of existing real estate clients. I made this real estate trainer an attractive offer where we could sell my marketing programmes to his clients and we would split the revenues from sales. We sold tens of thousands of dollars of my marketing programmes by using some simple emails combined with easy to read sales pages on our websites. This was super easy to do and produced great results for both of us with very little effort.

It's corny, but the best things in life are free or nearly free, giving a fantastic return on effort.

Saying thanks, showing appreciation, displaying affection, watching a sunrise or sunset, caring for a pet or a plant, smiling at a casual acquaintance or stranger, committing a random act of kindness, enjoying a walk in a beautiful place.

These are all ways of getting great results with very little effort.

The reward from doing any of these things is out of all proportion to the effort.

If you look for an easier way to create more success in any area of your life you will often be pleasantly surprised at what you will find.

'Efficiency is intelligent laziness' - David Dunham

Action Exercise:
Write down ten things you could do this week that would create more success in your life with very little effort. Then spend five minutes each day doing some of these things.

Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage Report.' www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com (This is free and has now been read by business owners from 27 countries.) You can email him at the link above.