Passion, Expertise and Authority by Christopher Tracy

As with many business stories we hear about in Success magazine, and Inc Magazine, the word “passion” is thrown around as if it’s the very foundation for business success.

“Passion” is the media darling for successful startup stories. We hear people like Seth Godin talk about it. Brian Tracy swears by it. Tim Feriss thinks it’s a bonus to have.

Imran Md Ali, who is our featured guest of the month, shares with us his understanding of the word “passion” in the context of entrepreneurship.

Imran is a co-author of Kaizen Business Principles with the legendary Brian Tracy (www.BrianTracy.com) and also author of 2 other books, The 10 Step Marketing Formula and Creating Marketing Breakthroughs, which are available at Amazon and also Barnes and Noble.

In an interview with Imran, he shares with us why passion is the core foundation for business success, and why passion alone will not be sufficient to ensure success.

There are two things which he says are needed, on top of passion alone in order to succeed. The first, is Genuine Domain Expertise.

Genuine Domain Expertise is simply being a real expert in whatever niche or industry you’re in. So if you’re in the restaurant marketing industry, the definition of an expert in Imran’s dictionary, is “someone who is in the top 5 percentile in terms of knowledge in restaurant marketing.”

It simply means that you have to keep learning, and gravitate towards the top of your class (or niche)

This, according to Imran, will give you a platform to operate from. People prefer to work with experts, and experts get paid more for less work too. The reason for this is because we are living in world where expertise is rewarded, and generality is punished with mediocre pays and prospects for jobs.

Here are 2 tips Imran gives to establish instant expertise.

1) Read up for one hour each day, about a topic in your market. At the end of the year, you’d have read about 400 hours worth of material and this should allow you to establish your expertise.

2) After reading, aim to apply your new-found knowledge for free as practise for clients. So if you’re a relationship guru, give away your advice for free in the beginning to practise what you have just read. This concretizes your new found knowledge.

Another aspect of passion would be authority.

Now, in a world where everyone claims to be an expert of some sort, you’d have to climb further, harder, and longer than the rest to establish yourself as a real authority in your marketplace.

Imran Md Ali shares some of the things you can do to establish authority

1) First, get some media coverage. Media coverage is a quick path to endorsed authority. Why? We have, as consumers, been trained to trust the media. How do you get media, you might ask?

Imran advises you to create a newsworthy angle. Get a PR expert to write up a press release, and send it out to all local news channels and magazines/papers. A reporter would inevitably find your story interesting enough to feature it.

Once you have gotten this initial exposure, snowball it by approaching other media sources and showing that you have been featured before. Keep on creating news angles that the media would love and try to be a media darling, and this would pay off in the long term.

2)Secondly, create a blog or website that showcases your past and current work. This is a site that allows you to store your bragging rights. State your achievements on this page and don’t be shy about it at all.

This way, when someone Googles for your name, your blog will appear and they can find out more about you- And the best part is, your website says only the good things about you!

That’s it then. Two things accompany passion, and those are 1) Expertise and 2) Authority

Apply what you have learnt and you will soon be on your way to dominating your industry or marketplace.

Guest Interview written by Christopher Tracy, CEO of CLT Holding and Imran’s marketing client in 2011.

2013 3 Ways To Prepare For a Financial Disaster

So we’ve survived the Mayans’ apocalypse predictions and 2013 is looking rosy, except that is, for the dreaded bank balance. It’s especially necessary to focus on getting this in order for 2013, as banks are less and less likely to bail people out if financial problems are growing. Tackle your financial worries early and follow these 3 steps to prepare for a foreseen financial crisis.
1) Get Your Finances In Order
First things first, you need to know what you’re working with, so getting your finances in order is essentially the first order of business. Start with your bank balance now and work out your monthly and weekly expenditures. Look at your income too, what are you earning and what are you spending, this will help you work out step to, which is of course…
2) Cutting Back
No doubt you’ll have noticed some things which don’t quite tally up in the way they should, perhaps you’re spending money on a gym membership you no longer use, or the odd £20 0r £30 spent on nights out, clothes or trips that you could really do without, yes clothes are things you can live without! Why not try a month on month off trick of the mind, so you’re not actually forced to give up everything all at once, because we all know that if forced to give something up completely in one go, we’re exceedingly likely to fail – remember chocolate at lent? In the first couple months of the new year why not try going a month without buying anything material – this could mean clothes, cosmetics, jewellery, games, you name it, but you can purchase nice food and dinner out, all be it occasionally. Next month try the reverse, sparingly of course, once you’ve got the hang of this little alternating trick it becomes much easier to cut back all together in the following months – it’s the best way to wean off shopaholics for sure.
3) One Day Work
There’s always something you can do to make money if you have a bit of spare time, so why not dedicate an evening or two to mystery shopping, where you could be paid to go to a restaurant and write a short review or the food and service. There are also on-line surveys that pay cash and lots of websites where you can offer up your skills on a daily basis to make a bit of extra cash, all it takes is a bit of spare time.
You never know when a financial disaster could hit in 2013; make sure you’re prepared by reading these four tips to staying on top of your finances and avoiding a financial melt down.

Author Bio | Geoffery is a personal finance blogger in the UK. He specialises in the short term loans and finance market, he works closely with sites like Wonga (wonga.com/about-us) – a digital finance company in the UK.

Attraction and Swag

by sirkonstantine

Stop for a moment and look around your house. Think of all the things you recently purchased and think of the reasons why you purchased it. For example, I needed something that would cook my steaks evenly so I purchased a cast iron pan. I wanted to give my girlfriend a nice gift so I purchased a PINK POCKET KNIFE
All of these things, pans and knives, are in a tight and competitive industry where people are always trying to get more of the market than the next guy. A producer must try really hard to win over consumers–several million in ads hard.
None of this should be new to anyone who has been around business for a minute but, if we step back for a second, we will noticed that Apple is a little different: it produces stuff that no one asked for, that solve no problems, and, at the same time, people love to these novelties.
10 years ago, if you asked anyone if they wanted a device that is not quite a laptop and not quite a cellphone, what would they say? You can’t type on it like a laptop and you can’t make calls on it. It really doesn’t fulfill a real need.
Now, if you go ahead and make a product that people said they didn’t want or need, the product will most likely fail… unless you are Apple.
Even if you found out that people wanted it (but don’t need it), the product can still fail. For example, consumers told industry experts that, yes, they wanted 3D televisions at home. That was a few years ago and 3D televisions sales right now are terrible.
Don’t believe me that there are no needs for iPods, iPhones, and iPads? Before the iPod, there were still other music players that were small and portable. Before the iPhone, there were still cellphones and smartphones. Before the iPad there were phones, laptops, and tablets.
The need were already being fulfilled but, somehow, Apple launches a product and people realized that their regular MP3 player, phone, and laptop are now all obsolete.
So, how does Apple do it? Keynesian economics would shudder when I say this but people are not rational. People do not maximize utility all the time and, if we were 100% rational, wouldn’t learning things like math or physics be much easier?
In the non-rational part of humans resides things like love, hate, and attraction. It is in my firm belief that Apple sells its products based upon attraction. The design is cool, the UI is cool, even the packaging is cool. Remember back in the day when all headphones were black? Remember how cool those white headphones that came with iPods were?
Big business is taught in schools were logic and the scientific method reigns supreme. Things like attraction and swag are hard to study scientifically because it is very subjective. Attraction and swag are not learned in a lab but by personal experience. Don’t expect an academic to produce the next big thing but do expect a smart person with swag to.

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