Pushing Through the Obstacles That Keep You From Your Dreams
Back when I was in Special Operations, I had a drill instructor say, “Some of you will not negotiate this course. Not that you CAN’T, but that you WON’T.”
I’ve found that success in life and business is about overcoming obstacles. If you have a big goal, you can guarantee there will be things that get in your way.
How you deal with them is what determines your level of success.
I call them “attrition gates” or “swing doors”. If you’re in business and you’re stuck, that’s a swing door you need to push through.
If you are hesitant, you can’t get through the gate. Simple as that.
But my secret is my attitude that “everything is knowable.” Find out who knows how to get through that obstacle, and learn how to overcome it. Then, get ready for the next one. The more attrition gates you bust through, the more successful you become.
Lessons from Navy Special Operations
Back when I was in the spec ops, this concept of “swinging doors” or “attrition gates” was very vital for me.
I’ve talked a little bit about “attrition gates” before, and what I mean by attrition gates is something that blocks a person and they can’t quite push through that gate.
There are, in my opinion, attrition gates in almost everything we do.
A person has to decide to go to school and that is a gate. Then they decide which school to attend, and that is an attrition gate too. Next is to decide what their major will be. Each one of these decisions is a gate.
But it doesn’t stop there. There are more gates. Do they show up to class, can they study, can they understand the material, etc. Each one of these things I’ve witnessed in life, as an attrition gate.
This really became a major thing in my life in the US Navy Special Operations, when an instructor was standing there and we were all eager students and wanted to pass, but a lot of people didn’t quite make it through.
I remember the instructor standing up there with a megaphone, talking, and he said, “Some of you will not negotiate this course. Not that you can’t, but that you won’t.”
I never forgot that.
There were phases to that training. During Phase One, we had different jobs to do. We had to do push ups. We had to do sit-ups, etc. That was the exercise. We also had to understand diving, and certain parts of diving. People would end up quitting or failing to do it properly along the way, and they would be gone. They wouldn’t make it to Phase Two and Phase Three and so forth.
These were the attrition gates. I’ve named them “swing doors” because as I look back on my lifetime of experience, the same is very fitting.
Obstacles Are Like Saloon Doors
These swing doors or gates are as easy or difficult to pass through as somebody views them.
Here is an illustration of something like one of those saloon doors. The actual torque weight would be, let’s say, five pounds in order to push through that gate, but based upon your decision that hinge torque is anywhere between zero and 50,000 pounds.
It just appears as though it is a big, big obstacle, but it just takes you pushing on it a little bit and you’ll go through it.
If you are afraid of the gate, if you are hesitant, then you can’t get through that gate.
I found most of it was in my head. Was it difficult to do the pushups? Yeah. It was difficult to do the pushups. So what? It was difficult for all of us. I don’t think that the instructors were necessarily counting.
A lot of the times guys were quitting just because the instructors were continually yelling for them to do more pushups. But if the guy had looked around, he would have seen that none of us were doing any more pushups. We were just sort of torquing on the ground, trying to do a pushup.
Why Prospects (or Reps) Are Unwilling to Push Through
I look back and I see so many people in network marketing who have failed, not because they couldn’t push through the swing gate, but because they couldn’t confront the swing gate.
They could fall through that gate. It was just that easy of a move if they would just go through it.
If they couldn’t get through the gate, then that was an attrition gate.
That goes back to the breakdowns I did, doing comparisons between real estate, YouTubers, and network marketing. The most success comes out of network marketing over all of the other independent types of businesses, but still we have attrition gates.
Every industry, everything has attrition gates.
Attrition Gates At Each Step of the Pipeline
Swing Door: Look at a presentation
Let’s say you contact them and you say, “Hey, take a look at this presentation.”
They don’t, or they couldn’t get it to work. They didn’t do it or they watched three minutes of it and couldn’t get through it, or they watched 50% of it or 99% of it. Well, that’s going to be an attrition gate. They’re out.
Another example would be when I run an advertisement. The potential lead scrolled right past my ad. That’s an attrition gate. It didn’t hit. No interest.
Swing Door: Do research
And then if the person says, “Oh, that’s one of those,” or, “That’s a scam,” then they’ll have to do the research if necessary, but they are unwilling to do that.
They have this little thought, “Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. It’s probably this or that,” and they won’t do the research. That’s an attrition gate.
Swing Door: Do comparisons
Or how about when prospects do comparisons to other businesses. For example, “What if I had a franchise? What if I do affiliate marketing? What if I sell on Amazon?” It’s an attrition gate.
Swing Door: Learn what they must do for success
That’s the simplest of all questions that everyone should be asking, because if they did, they would come to the same realization that I’ve come to, which is that every business in the world does the Pipeline.
If you want to quit network marketing, you’re basically saying that you’re going to quit any kind of business, because the Pipeline is the requirement for all businesses. In Network Marketing, we just have the benefit of having additional people doing the Pipeline together as a team.
Swing Door: Learn how to do what must be done
The next is learning how to do what must be done, which is different from learning what must be done.
There are three gates to this:
- Learning what must be done for success
- Learn how to do them
- Doing those things.
Those are the swing doors of a prospect coming through. It doesn’t start until they hit the step of doing, that they are actually starting.
Once they start, now we’re into the Pipeline. The very beginning is the steps I just talked about:
- Will they watch the presentation
- Will they get through the presentation
- And then will they do the research
- Will they learn what must be done for success
- Will they learn how to do them
- Will they do those things
Are You Willing to Learn?
Once they start, can they get through that first step, which is generate a lead? A lot of times, it’s merely looking at your phone and saying, “Hey, my best friend, we’ve always wanted to be in business together or wanted to do something together. Let me just call him.”
There’s that step. But let me just explain something here. If you have the idea, “Oh, I can’t generate leads,” then that’s all it takes. That’s a 50,000-pound-torque door you can’t go through.
In fact, you won’t even be able to see a door because it will be closed for you.
But if you can just get the idea, “I can know this,” that’s all you really have to have.
I never thought that I could do the number of pushups that they wanted me to do, but I said, “Maybe I’ll build up to it. Maybe my body will adapt to it.” That’s what I was willing to accept. That’s the same thing.
When I got into network marketing, I didn’t know anything about generating leads. I just said, “Well, somebody knows it, and if I can find that out, then I can move through that gate.”
On contacting people, somebody says, “Oh man, I remember that time when I’d try to ask that girl out, and she said no. Man, I’m no good at that.” Well, there you go. You’re not going to be able to go through that door.
It’s the same with every single step of the Pipeline. If you saw my first presentation, you would wonder how in the world I got here.
Then it was follow up and the proper way to do a follow-up and then you get a customer and the right way to serve that customer, and then you get a rep and the right way to serve and train that customer or rep.
That’s the way. That’s it. That’s the whole game.
The Secret to Creating the Life of Your Dreams
When that gentleman said, “Some of you will not negotiate this course, not because you can’t, but because you won’t,” that gave me this high-altitude look across all of life.
It’s all a series of swing gates, all of it.
As an example, you have to get the idea that you want to be married, then you have to get the idea of who you want and then how to make it all happen, and how to create a life where two of you are trying to jam through that door, instead of just yourself being “free.”
All of that is a negotiation. There’s a bunch of swing gates, there are attrition gates involved in that.
Whatever It Takes to Win, You Can Learn It
The last thing I want to share with you is that there was a point in time when I wanted to make more money. I’d been in the military for 11 years, and I said, “Man, I want to do more. I want to make more money.”
I was looking at various things that I could do. And when I went into a business opportunity meeting there was a gentleman in the room from the National Institute of Health in Washington, DC, and he was making $88,000 a month.
You’ve got to understand this little boy that was sitting there thinking, “Man, I make $25,000 a year diffusing bombs underwater, and this guy is selling products and he’s making $88,000 a month.”
I thought, “If I can learn everything that I had to learn in the Navy, I can learn whatever this takes. I know I don’t know it now, but I know I can know it.”
That’s the single secret, and it’s the main message that I want to get across to you.
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