by Dan Meredith
What a dick, eh?
Coaches and mentors. I attribute a huge part of my success wholly to having coaching and mentors.
But, I believe there is a difference between a coach and a mentor.
I’ve found that coaches are extremely useful for up-levelling a skill, helping you get through a particular period in your growth, or providing a sounding board and subsequent advice for what you are doing.
A mentor is someone who has a ‘30,000ft view’ of you, your business, your life and your overall growth as a person. I’ve found coaches useful for three–six month stints. Enough for me to get through the hump or master/develop the skill I was trying to develop. When it comes to mentors, I believe they should be with you for one year+ as they have a longer term vision, extensive experience and might need to guide you through areas that are somewhat tricky.
I want to make one thing clear, though: no one, and I mean no one, makes it on their own.
Every successful person I have met has had people around them who have offered guidance, support or, in my case, a metaphorical ‘slap down’ (I get very excited and want to do all the things). If you think you can make it on your own, my response is simple.
You won’t.
So, as well as potentially upgrading your friends to include more people like you and getting among your peers, investing in coaches and mentors is, in my opinion, crucial.
No money?
Well don’t let that stop you. When it comes to people teaching you their skills for free in a coaching capacity, that’s solely going to be down to whether you can offer them something of value in return. Maybe you can do some grunt work or help them in some way, or perhaps you can give them a percentage of what you generate – or perhaps you are just likeable as shit!
Either way, it will be up to you to do your best.
When it comes to mentors, I have had great success with people who do not in any way advertise themselves as such. They could be a successful businessperson in your local community, or maybe someone you have seen online and you really identify with who is doing what you would like to be doing. You have nothing to lose by asking. Write them a letter. A real one if possible. Trust me, this works, and effort goes a long way.
In this letter, outline your thoughts and feelings about why they would make a good mentor. Make them an offer. It could be dinner, or to travel to see them. Be creative – what can you offer to them in return?
If you get nervous about doing this, I want to tell you a story from my recruitment days. I was due to interview an industry titan as a mere twenty-one-year-old. He was in his early forties, slick, handsome as fuck, had all the monies and was industry-wide renowned as the best in the business.
He rolled up in a red Ferrari.
As I introduced myself and sat him down, I was clearly nervous. It would have been easy for him to dominate the meeting, bully me into doing what he wanted business-wise and generally make me his bitch.
But he didn’t.
He said, ‘Dan, I can tell you are nervous, but I want you to realise I’m a guy, like you. Just older, and a bit more successful. If this helps, I want to tell you something that my first boss told me. He said that everyone sits down to take a shit.’
Then he said, ‘Imagine me taking a shit.’
Ridiculous image, isn’t it?
I, of course, pissed myself laughing, but it’s stuck with me ever since. We’re all human, all have the same wants, needs, and desires, and we all shit. Next time you meet someone who you think is a player – just remember that.
I couldn’t give a toss if someone has no money or a golden space yacht – I treat everyone the same. I’m respectful, of course, but they are not better than me, and I am not better than them. I might be a bit further ahead, or vice versa. It doesn’t matter.
Treat people as you want to be treated. No one is special. They are just a person, and if they make you feel like crap, fuck ’em off. They aren’t worth knowing in the first place.
Pay to play. I have touched on this before.
One thing I have realised is that once you invest in someone, they take you more seriously. It’s all too easy to shoot someone a message asking to pick their brains without thinking how that makes you look. If you want people to value your time and abilities, it starts with you valuing (and being prepared to pay for) theirs.
One thing I learned early on is that if you want someone’s attention or time, you pay. It’s that simple. Every time I made a few quid, I would immediately reinvest what I had spare in coaches and mentors – they’re that powerful. Because not only do you get their wisdom and skills as they’ve done it before you, but if they are good, you get access to their network too. They can make introductions, create opportunities and deals that would take you ages to crack.
Like anything, though, don’t take the piss. But really, this is an area you should invest in and, like I said, it doesn’t always have to be about money. Learn what value you can add then pitch away to your heart’s content.
This may all seem a bit nuts, especially if you are from a small town like me. But it’s so important to get out of your comfort zone, connect with people who are on the same path as you, spend actual time in person to cultivate and develop relationships that can last a lifetime and provide crucial support when you need it the most.
Really, don’t overlook this part. Find a mentor. Get coaches. Make some new friends and crack the fuck on!
BE AROUND LIKEMINDED PEOPLE TO DO/ACTION STEPS
Surround yourself with likeminded people. When I say this, I don’t just mean the ones you look up to, but some who are further along the line or maybe slightly behind you. Find a group that fits your ethos (Facebook is a good place to start). Join groups and start adding value. Don’t be a lurker – you know, the one who sits at the back, reads and never interacts. Boring as balls. Be active in the group and introduce yourself.
Fish where the fish are. I did this with my copywriting business and you could say it worked out pretty well. Instead of going to events that other copywriters attend, go to events your audience is going to. Then through organic conversations you can build quality relationships. It’s not a pitch fest.
Put yourself in a place to win. Sometimes it’s not people but places that inspire you to get shit done. Start living and going to the places you want in your lifestyle. This is what your life could look like.
Start paying to play. Stop asking to pick people’s brains and start investing in people. Invest your time and maybe a little bit of money, showing that you respect their time and abilities. They’ll teach you the skills you want to learn as well as opening you up to their network – this is massive. It is that powerful. They will be able to introduce you and create opportunities. That’s why it’s so important you get out of your little bubble of comfort and start connecting with people. Meet people face to face and get the hell off Facebook.
10
BE RELENTLESS
You must be passionate, you must dedicate yourself, and you must be relentless in the pursuit of your goals. If you do, you will be successful.
STEVE GARVEY
If you think that becoming successful is a piece of pie, you are deluded, my friend. It takes balls/ovaries. Because it includes failure, pain, hard work and fucking relentlessness.
Oh, and a healthy dose of ‘stick-to-it-iveness’.
You’ll have to be disciplined to make the changes, and trust me, that’s where most people fail. Miserably.
They think they’ll get some silver bullet of info from a book or course which will make them millions overnight. The truth is much more boring and unsexy than that.
It’s being consistent, working hard, and being relentless as fuck to make your dreams a reality. And that is what I want to talk about in this chapter. So brace yourself for some bitter truths. Which hopefully will help you get outta the rut and into the A-game.
I hope I have made it clear by now that if you want to make positive changes in your b
usiness or life, it’s going to take effort, and it’s going to take work.
In a nutshell, anything that you want – and don’t already have – is going to take discipline.
Nothing is easy.
Nothing happens overnight.
Getting good at your shit takes time.
Building an epic network takes time.
Growing a business takes time.
In fact, anything awesome takes a combination of time, effort and discipline. Fuck it, I’m going to invent a cool little formula:
Time invested + effort expended + disciplined behaviours = success (eventually).
Wow, that’s not what you’re usually fed by books like this, is it? Unfortunately, that’s what works for the majority of folks. Not some sexy button-press formula.
Sorry. (Of course, if you’re a freakish genius, crazy talented or can do stuff that we mere mortals can’t do, then the whole experience can be far simpler.)
I want you to consider right now what you really want. How far do you want to take this? What does success actually look like for you, and how much time, effort and discipline are you willing to invest to make it happen?
I want to stress that there is nothing wrong with wanting a simple life or working a steady job. Absolutely nothing at all. In fact, it pisses me off when I see people slagging of others who have done that like they are fucking idiots for not going for it. If you are calling people like that idiots, you are calling my mum and dad idiots. Therefore, I want to slap you.
You can call those people idiots, though, if they complain and moan about their job every day. ’Cause then they need to change and choose the path that makes them happy. Lol.
I digress.
Not everyone should go for it. Launching a business, chasing your dreams, quitting your job and going ‘Fuck it, I’m going to do my own thing’ is not right for everyone. Some people either don’t have what it takes to make it or don’t truly comprehend how much time, effort and discipline it actually takes.
Anyone who is pitching you the concept of having it all, right away at least, is selling bullshit disguised as chocolate. I’ve fallen for that crap myself, and I see people falling for it time and time again.
Yes, in time you can have it all. But, as I have said quite a few times now, not only does it involve effort and discipline, it also involves a degree of sacrifice. You have to be comfortable with cutting back, letting go or losing something for a period of time at the start of your journey to get what you want.
There are only so many hours in a day, there is only one of you, and you can only be stretched so thinly if you want to go all in.
Let me explain what I mean about going all in.
I was offered an opportunity after what can only be described as the selection process from hell. Quite frankly, I was worked like a dog, and every single day I waited for an email to see if I’d made it to the next round. My fitness business had spanked me, I had no cash spare and I really needed this, I might add.
Anyway, I was presented with an opportunity – but that opportunity (although totally legit) would cost me the grand sum of $1,000.
I did not have $1,000.
If I converted my Great British Pounds, I think I had about $30 spare.
Now I had flirted with risk before, but although I had pushed the envelope, I had never really gone balls deep. The little voice in my head kept telling me this was a huge mistake; I was going to fail; I would end up in all kinds of trouble if I did it.
So – and this is not advice I recommend – what happened was I took the bottle of twenty-one-year-old whisky, a birthday present which I’d been saving for special.
I drank the whisky.
I took my AMEX (which I had applied for in case exactly this opportunity came up), and apparently – because I have no memory of this – silenced the annoying voice and paid the $1,000.
Waking up, I felt like death – and looked at the notification on my screen. It was an introduction. The gentleman – Ryan, whom I have spoken about previously – had had it planned all along. In fact, there had been two of us in the running for this opportunity.
I was the one who took the plunge.
He knew that I was poor as piss, so he had arranged for me to do work on his behalf that would cover the cost of the coaching. But I wasn’t told this until after I had invested, and here we are now. Just taking that risk and deciding to go balls deep allowed me to get the best marketing, sales funnel, and business mentorship ever.
Plus Ryan (now a good friend of mine) opened me up to his network. Which in itself has been worth much more than I paid.
That incident gave birth to my legendary ‘AMEX gamble’. Which is where I make a calculated risk, invest, have no idea how I’m going to get the money and simply make it happen!
Of course, it could have gone completely nipples north, but it didn’t. And if it did? Well, I have learned to embrace failure. Not in that stiff upper lip way, pretending I don’t care but really wanting to have a little cry. But in the way that, if I fail at something, I have simply given myself an opportunity to learn and do better next time.
History is littered with examples of people who have failed over and over again but didn’t give up. These folks became people who have changed the world. Yes, they were stubborn, probably didn’t listen to advice and were no doubt told to quit time and time again. The difference is, instead of doing the same things, they learned, adapted, improved, and went for it again.
I love that shit!
A harsh reality is that, although you may think people are waiting for you to fail, laughing at you, saying things behind your back, most of the time they are too concerned with their own problems to be bothered with you and yours. That may be hard to take, but please do – because it’s awesome!
Think about it for a moment. If you could try something new – let’s say, launch a business that you have been itching to do and not a single person would know if you fucked up – would you?
I bet you would.
People are so worried about what other people think of them that they simply, time and again, do nothing. You need to get it into that noggin of yours that you are not on people’s minds as much as you think.
So set your goal.
Be relentless.
Go for it.
To hell with what anyone says.
Show up every day. This one has been a recent epiphany for me, as it’s only in the last year that I have done exactly that.
Rain or shine.
Happy as a clam or hating all of the peoples.
Every day – for my clients, in ‘Coffee With Dan’, my team – I show up. Whether I want to or not. I have made a commitment to my audience and clients, and I serve them whether I am in the mood (I usually am, btw) or not.
I’m going a little cheesy here, but think of the story of the tortoise and the hare. I’m not going to go over it again, but consistent, steady daily progression – over time – tends to yield success. The bands of yesteryear that are still massive now, spent years in shitty little vans, touring grotty pubs and playing to an audience of three who didn’t want them there in the first place. Or were too drunk to notice. Bringing it up to date, there are multi-millionaires on YouTube, for example. Did they make their millions overnight? No. What they did was consistently put out content, over and over again, for years.
So yes, the people in both these examples, and all the other individuals who have time served in their craft, deserve their success. There was absolutely zero guarantee that they would ever make anything from their efforts, but they were consistent. They showed up every day.
Being relentless, again, is key here to getting the results you want. When you are starting out in whatever you are doing and you get no likes, no views, no comments, no enquiries, it can be utterly disheartening. The thing that will differentiate you from the others is whether or not you give up.
I’ve stressed before that you do need a degree of skill, and you have to have a p
roduct or service that people actually want (and enough of those people to serve). But if we say you do have all those things in place, or are at the very least aggressively working your way towards them, then being a relentless little shit and refusing to quit is the small difference that makes all the difference.
Channel your inner terrier and don’t give up.
Be pleasantly annoying. This one is tricky to explain, and I’m going to be upfront and say that occasionally you will piss some people off. The good news is you can always get out of that, as I’ll explain in a bit.
I’m going to go back to my headhunting days to illustrate this exactly.
My job was to make calls. Lots of calls, every single day, to try and find open vacancies that I could fill.
One huge company, one of the biggest employers of the candidates in my niche, was obviously a good target for my efforts. First time I called, I was hung up on.
I tried again a few days later.
This time I got ‘We don’t deal with people like you’.
So, I thought I would have fun with this. I set a reminder in my diary and, every Tuesday at 11am, I would call. I was always polite, always courteous. I would introduce myself and be promptly told to, ‘Do one’.
Now I wasn’t being an annoying little shit just for the sake of it. I had actually sourced some of the most highly skilled people for my database, and I knew this company had vacancies. The key thing here was that I knew they had a need, and I knew I could fulfil it. I had done my homework – and I suggest before you pleasantly annoy someone that you make sure you can actually help them or what you are offering is of value specifically to them.
Anyway. All I needed was one chance.
This went on for months. It went from them answering and hanging up to slightly longer conversations. Then the recruiting manager started joking with me that no matter how hard I tried, she would never work with me, and I joked back that I would never give up.
Over time, the conversations became longer and longer and we got to know one another. In fact, one Tuesday I missed the 11am call (I was sick as a dog) and she actually rang me asking where my call was!
