1 Million Dollars in 365 days…

 Tonight at 8:30pm, New Zealand is supporting Earth Hour to raise awareness for the impacts of Global Warming. In just over 30 minutes, I will be turning off the computers, tv’s, fish-tank (they’ll be fine!), lights and pretty much everything else electrical.

It’s a beautiful evening and we’re going to spend the hour outside, talking and enjoying the peace and quiet. I think it’s a great initiative, and apparently if everyone in NZ turns off their appliances and lights, there’s a lot of money to be saved too. It just goes to show what a little bit of vision and passion can achieve.

Speaking of achievements, today was a monumental day for me! I ran a half-marathon! It wasn’t  an official half-marathon, but as I have my full marathon coming up in 5 weeks, I thought it was time to push the boundaries!

I left at 7am this morning and ran a long, long way from home. Then I ran all the way back! 21km later, I collapsed on the floor after stumbling in my front door, 2 hours and 15 minutes after starting my crazed journey! After a few minutes of rest and water, I was able to hobble around for the rest of the day! I am so proud of myself, that I have completed this monumental task. I believe the mental part of the marathon is going to be the toughest, and after today, I KNOW that I can complete it, AND finish raising the $10,000 for STOP THE TRAFFIK!

All around the world, people are making a difference. It seems that this is the age of the philanthropist. The world is in one of the of the most challenging economic times ever. One would think that anarchy would rule and people would only care about themselves. I believe the opposite is happening - people are becoming more aware of “giving” as a way to heal the world.

If you have something you believe in, something that you want to see changed for the better. Perhaps now is the time to come out of the woodwork and do something towards your cause. Don’t be afraid as you have nothing to lose. The worst you can do is raise awareness, experience massive amounts of personal growth, and ending feeling like we can all make a difference.

Happy Earth Hour. Make your hour next.

Being in sales for a number of years, I have seen many different strategies designed to get the best “outcome” for the salesperson. They are usually designed to meet a sales target, keep management happy, and make you feel good about yourself.

There are always many other factors that can influence your success in reaching your target. To give you an example, if you have a monthly sales target of say, 10 complete systems of whatever it is you sell, then the month usually goes like this:

The month starts off great - you are motivated, you’re getting leads from all over the place, surely this month you are going to smash the target! Week two is more of the same, lots more prospects in the pipeline, it’s going to be a good month. Week 3 and - hold on - we’re almost half way through

the month and I haven’t even closed any sales yet! Mad rush to get some sales under my belt. Before you know it, it’s week 4 and you are wondering where the time has gone!You are pulling out all the stops to close those sales, extra discounts, help from your colleagues, etc etc. This last week has been pretty hectic - but you manage to scrape by.

If you analyze what just happened, when was your time most productively spent? I mean, when did you take more action than any other week? In what week did you achieve the best results? - The 4th week! The very last week of

the month (for the purposes of this experiment, we are talking about February in a non-leap year, for all those folks who feel it is their duty to correct me and say there are more than 4 weeks in a month:-))

So what was different about Week 4? The pressure was on - that’s what was different! If you didn’t make something happen then the proverbial sh** is going to hit the proverbial fan!! After a few months on the job, acting like I described in the example above, I had a chat to my manager. He has a lot of experience in all types of sales roles, including commission only, management etc.

He posed the question -”What would your results be like if you acted like every week was the last week of

the month?”

I thought about it for a while, and then said I would give it a go. I haven’t looked back since. It basically boils down to me taking the actions needed to exceed my results, every week. Actually every day! The crazy thing is, I still manage to do all the other things non-sales related, admin tasks every week too. I used to use these as my excuse for why

the month got away on me!

I guess the lesson that I have taken out of this, is that in order to achieve drastic results, you need to take drastic action. I have a goal of exceeding my sales target every month, and for the last few months, that’s exactly what I have done.

The great thing is, I can now apply what I have learned to my newest goal - to earn $1 Million dollars in 365 days. So, on that note, I’m off to take some more action!

One of the most important things we can focus on in today’s economic environment is cash flow. It’s all good having customers, but if those customer’s aren’t paying you immediately, then you have to worry about recovering those payments so that you don’t go belly up and become an all too familiar statistic.

 As part of my goal to achieve $1 Million dollars in 365 days, I have had to come up with a range of different strategies and projects to contribute to my ultimate goal. The interesting part of this journey so far, has been that, while my ultimate goal remains the same, the ways I want to achieve it have changed.

When I started I wanted to make a Million Dollars by any means possible. Now, I want to make a Million Dollars by helping other people achieve success in their lives. Some may think that this has made my goal even more difficult, however it has actually done the opposite. Now I have more passion, more reason to achieve my goal, and I’ve never been so excited to achieve it!

One of the challenges I came across, is that I needed capital, sometimes only small amounts, to get some of my ideas off the ground. As I was working a day job, I had to think f another way to get some more money on a regular basis.

How to Generate Cashflow:

• Blog. It’s the way of the future. What are you good at? What do you know everything about? What do you want to achieve. Just visit wordpress or an associated blogging platform and sign up - it’s free.Then start blogging and soon your style will evolve and you will capture your niche audience. Then you can start making money with a whole host of activities such as Adsense, Affiliate marketing etc etc…
• Start a business. Now this doesn’t need to be anything too technical or complex. I’m talking something here that will generate sales and cash flow from day one. For example, say you purchase macadamia nuts in bulk, then package them into smaller bags and sell them for a profit. Now maybe you already have a day job - so you employ someone else to sit on the side of the road with a sign and sell nuts. If you can make the numbers work, you could potentially be earning a few hundred extra every week. Now maybe you could use that money to invest in your next, bigger business idea and so forth.
• Sell stuff. I mean your stuff. Have a garage sale - C’mon - you never really liked that couch anyway!? We all have something lying around home that we don’t use anymore and it’s probably worth something to someone else. You can hang on to it for that day when you might decide that you would like to use it again - I guess it all depends on how much you want to get your ideas into action. If you can sell Late Aunt Betty’s Silverware to better your future and that of your families - I’m sure she would be proud!
• Get an Investor. If you don’t have the money - find someone who does! Find someone you can trust and who has money, and tell them about your idea. They could invest a certain amount in return for shares in the company, or you could loan money from them to get started and decide to pay it back by a certain date, with interest.

“Sometimes it’s better to get a small percentage of something, rather than 100% of nothing”

 

 So go and get stuck in! If you have an idea that you want the world to know about, there’s no excuse not to go ahead and do something about it right now! You’ve got some ideas on how to get some cashflow happening so that you can invest in your idea on a regular basis and bring it to fruition.

Today is a milestone for me - only 200 days left until I achieve one of the biggest goals I have ever set for myself! Even more exciting than that - it’s my son’s 2nd birthday today! While he’s having his morning sleep, I thought it would be an opportune time to update everyone on the life of the Kiwi Millionaire! It’s quite an exciting time, especially when I look back and see how far I have come since I started this, only 165 days ago…

To wake up every morning and look around, and see this lovely new home that we are living in…it takes a while to get used to! But I am sure I won’t have any problem getting used to this, especially the views! Every time I look out to the distance, it honestly takes my breath away. I am still struggling to come to terms that I actually achieved this goal, in record time and almost 6 months before I had dreamed of owning our own home (more detail on our home to come in a future post!)

I must apologise for my lack in posts over the last week. I have been so ecstatic since we purchased our new home, and have spent the last week finishing off the move and all the things that go along with it.

One of these trivial tasks was to get our phone line and internet connected at the new house. Now I had already imagined sitting on my deck, looking at the amazing view in the evening, with my latop, writing my latest post while watching the sun set. My vision was cut short, after calling my ISP for the third time in as many days to check on the status of my connection, only to be told “we are sorry, we are unable to provide you with broadband at that address, so have only organised connect up a phone line”.

I would love to spend the next 37 hours discussing the government’s plans to bring broadband (and fast broadband) to homes across the country, but I think I have better ways to spend my time So today, 1 week after moving into our awesome new house, we got an internet connection via a wireless provider which is working absolutely superbly!

It fees good to be connect again. It just shows you how we can so easily take things for granted. In hind-sight - it was really a fantastic thing that I had no internet, as my evenings were spent unpacking and finalising everything with the move. If I had internet access, I dare say that we would still have a boxes scattered throughout the house!

So with my new found connection to the world, I have lots of exciting things to do - writing new posts, finishing my book, raising $10,000.00 for charity, completing the next stage of my new success project, and keeping in contact with people from all over the globe, that share similar ideals and feel that success in life, is something that should be shared and encouraged - so I better get cracking! A big thank you to all those people that have sent me emails and posted comments, I will be replying to you all very shortly.

Have an awesome day!

The Story So Far…

This weekend is going to be flat out - we’re moving into our first home! While this is very exciting, it’s also astounding as to what we’ve actually achieved in such a short amount of time.

One of my Grand Dream Goals was to buy a new house for my family and I to live in. I wanted a new home in a safe area, in an excellent school zone and a house where we could entertain friends and family. Oh, and I also wanted it to be a great investment. I even went as far as deciding that I wanted to make $80,000 profit on this property!

My goal was to purchase a house that would fit the above description on or before the 17/09/2009. I wrote up this goal and placed it on my dream-board. We were always on the look out for properties of interest in our local area with the hope to make one of these homes our next home.

I thought I was well on track with my goal, taking lots of action in searching and finding suitable properties, driving around and looking at open homes to get a feel for the market. I kept an eye on the finance markets and other developments that I thought could affect the housing market.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I made a massive commitment to achieve this goal within a single month! The pressure was on - I was excited, but also lost as to how I was going to achieve this.

How to buy a house in 30 days:

Ok, so maybe it took me just under 60 days before we actually moved in, but we had the contract signed in 28 days! Some people might think that it was a strange and lucky series of coincidences that helped us get into our first house - I think it was faith. Faith that what’s meant to happen will happen.

1. Believe. Somehow, somewhere, deep inside of you, you have to know that this is going to happen. From the moment I made the decision, I knew that it was going to work out. I didn’t know how, but I had no doubt in my mind. It was the same feeling I had when I said that I was going to make a Million dollars in 365 days!
2. Prepare yourself. You know that this is going to take some extra work & commitment to achieve and if you know what to expect, then you’re more prepared to take action. How badly do you want this? You need to decide that you are willing to do everything that you can to achieve this goal.
3. Live like you’ve already achieved it. From the moment I made the decision, I came home and told my wife, I rung my parents and told them. I told everyone I knew, work mates, that we were going to buy a house. Then, every time we moved forward another step, I told everyone all over again. “We’ve found this house, we’re going to put in an offer”. This continued the whole way through the process -telling everyone when we put an offer in, when the offer was accepted, I started telling everyone that we had bought the house and even gave them the day we would be moving in! Even though our offer was subject to a number of factors, I focused my passion and desire on the end goal, and didn’t worry about any potential challenges, as I knew there would be a way around them.
4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 until desired outcome is achieved!
   

Then something strange happened…

By focusing my mind on the end result, things seemed to fall into place. It was like I could see into the future, I imagined the day we got the keys and walked into our new home. I imagined, sitting on our patio and watching the sun set. I imagined my son running around the garden. It was all so real.

There were certainly challenges that we encountered during this process, however we always overcame them, and they never seemed impossible. Things just happened when they were supposed to - at times, it was difficult to believe!

Our offer was subject to a number of conditions. One of these was that our finance would be confirmed by 26/02/09, otherwise the vendors could get out of the contract. This was an area of concern because we weren’t able to confirm finance until about 1 week later.

The vendors rung us a week before the end of our finance condition to ask if we would mind extending the finance clause and asking for an extension - that is what we needed! But why would they ask us to do that?

Turns out that they had purchased a property subject to the sale of their house becoming unconditional on 26/02/09. They had since discovered that the area they were about to buy into, was not what they originally thought. They tried to get out of the contract but it was water-tight - apart from if the sale of their house fell through…

If we asked for an extension for finance then they would be able to avoid buying the house they didn’t want and we were able to buy the house we wanted! Funny how things work out, aye?

Today we bought a house… This is our first house and part of me is still struggling to understand that we own this house, that I won’t have to talk to a landlord for a really long time. I have always dreamed of owning our own home, however the picture I had in my mind until about 6 months ago, was a run down, dreary, home, waiting for me to spend massive amounts of hard earned money on it and lots of blood sweat and tears in order to get it up to scratch.

I better tell you how this happened. Almost two months ago, I was driving to a nearby city, listening to an audio program that I purchased a few months prior. This was by Kurek Ashley and is part of his Life Success Club series. This is one of the things I have chosen to invest in for my personal development.

On this particular audio program, Kurek was talking about Grand Dream goals and an exercise he carried out with a group he was working with at the time. He asked them to write down their grand dream goals on a piece of paper, and then circle one of them. Remember, a Grand Dream Goal (GDG) is one of your life ambitions, it’s something massive that when you’ve achieved it, you can look back and be amazed!

To cut a long story short, Kurek divided the group into pairs and told them that they each had only 1 month to achieve that GDG, or their partner would be fines $5,000.00! What an incentive. At the end of the story, he talked about how people grew during that process, whether they achieved their goal or not.

Next he told us (the listener), that he was laying out the same challenge for us. We had to choose one of our GDG’s then and there and commit to doing everything we could to achieve it within 1 month! I thought about it for a few minutes and decided that I was going to focus on achieving those goal with everything I had.

I chose my GDG about owning our own home. The goal on my dream board reads:

“We have just bought our first property on or before 12/06/2009″

It was January 2009….even if I could have pulled this off by the 12th of June 2009, I would have been over the moon! I had no idea how I was going to make this work. That was the last dis-empowering thought I had about my goal.

I immediately decided that I was going to achieve this goal within the next month. I decided that I would get up 15 minutes earlier everyday for the next month, and spend that time figuring out how to achieve this awesome goal. When I got home, I wrote up a new goal and pinned it on to my dream board:

“What am I going to do today, to ensure that we own our own home on or before 15/02/2009?”

That note stood out everyday when I walked past my dream board. The end result - I didn’t achieve it within the month. We had an offer on a house that was accepted on 13/02/2009. We move in to the house next weekend, so we’re living in our house 1 month later.

What an amazing journey. This was a goal that I thought would take many months, if not years, to achieve and here I am - less than two months later, about to move into our new 4 bedroom home! What other things have we been telling ourselves, are difficult to attain? Maybe it’s time to readjust our expectations and make our dreams a reality.

Below is a photo of our new home - it’s absolutely beautiful. The best part is that my wife loves it. Months ago, I planned on finding a cheap 2 bedroom unit that we would have to renovate and do-up over time. Instead, we are moving into this luxurious home - our first home!

Over the next week, I will talk about how I achieved this great success.For now, I am going to practice another one of my favourite past times - celebrating our successes. It makes you crave more of them

There is an old saying “Charity begins at home”. While I always thought this to be true, I now believe the opposite. Charity begins with Charity. If you wait until you have enough spare cash to give to charity….I think we can all agree that you may be waiting a long time.

“But how can I give money away when I can’t afford to pay all my bills?” Well, there’s really two solutions here:

1. Reduce the number of bills you have to pay!
2. Give something - it doesn’t have to be 50% of your income! Maybe start off with 5%? Chances are that you won’t even notice it’s gone, but I bet you the people that you are helping will surely notice your contribution.

I think this goes back to being grateful for what you have. No matter what is happening in your life right now, I bet you can find people in this world that are a lot worse off than you are. If you are reading this blog, then you should be counting your lucky stars because you obviously have power and Internet access! Some people don’t even know what those things are!

My goal is still to make a Million Dollars in 365 days….and I have some exciting developments that I will share with you over the next couple of days with regards to my progress However, during this journey so far, I have discovered some other opportunities out there - and one of them is to challenge myself.

And that I did, by committing to running a marathon! Not only did I commit to running a marathon, but then I publicly committed to raise $10,000 for the charity - STOP THE TRAFFIK! Do you have any idea how great I feel? Not because I think I’m doing this great thing, but because I have no doubt that I will complete both these tasks - I have to - there are people counting on me!

If I just kept these goals to myself, how easy would it be for me to decide that things were too tough and make a bunch of excuses and then quit? It would be pretty easy. Now, there’s no way I can quit!  I’d be getting emails and phone calls from all over the globe! If that’s not a great form of motivation then I don’t know what is.

I have been training since the 23/01/2009 and just last Sunday I managed to run 15km’s which made me feel like I had accomplished a major feat! It was fantastic! A lot of people asked me how difficult it was to run that far (it’s far for me okay!). My reply was simple, I didn’t find it difficult.

Why not, you ask? Well, like a lot of things, it comes back to perception. What am I comparing this marathon to, or at least this training to? If I’m comparing it to sitting on the couch at home watching TV then hell yeah - it’s painfully difficult!!

I’m not though. I’m comparing this marathon, this training, with an average day for some of the people out there, that are supported for by the charities I am raising money for. STOP THE TRAFFIK does a lot of work to stop people trafficking - can you imagine what it would be like to be sold to someone? When I’m running, I think of what someone else might be going through, how they might feel and what they would do if they were offered the chance to live a day in my life….now those are some powerful perceptions.

Now I’m not doing anything overly special here, I’m simply trying to raise some money for these guys. The question is, can you help? Maybe you don’t want to donate to this cause, maybe you can’t afford it. I’m sure you can come up with more creative excuses than that! However, the point is that this is not the only way you can help.

I challenge others out there to do also take on a marathon, and raise funds for a charity of your choice, get your community behind you, get the world behind you. Do it for yourself, do it for others and do it for the right reasons.

If you’re not in the mood for a marathon, then luckily for you, I have another solution - you can contribute to my Marathon by donating directly to STOP THE TRAFFIK, through my page at www.justgiving.com/ryankilfoil

I have set myself a big goal, and I’m confident that with your help we will be able to achieve it. Whether you can afford $1 or $100, please support this worthy cause right now. I truly appreciate you reading this entire post, and even more so for making a difference for this Charity. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly, especially if you have any other ideas on how to help raise even more funds for these guys.

Thanks again readers, for your amazing support and I look to keeping you updated with my progress. Have a great day and I hope you have gained something positive from this piece.

All the best - The Kiwi Millionaire