Conclusion

Don't Lose Sight of Your Success

Enjoy the wonderful journey you are about to embark upon. It is the most wonderful ride I've ever been on, and I think most of the consultants I know would say the same. Follow the processes I've outlined for you in this guide, interact with other consultants for additional support and education, and just keep walking. Remember what I said earlier: You can't control the sale, but you can control your activity. With sufficient activity—will come sales. I promise!

My closing comments to you are this. After you've established your business, after you've secured several paying clients, make sure to not lose sight of your happiness.

I think it's important to point out that just because I've chosen to focus on becoming profitable doesn't mean that profits alone equal success. In my last book, What's Your Genius, I interviewed a lot of very successful people in multiple industries. All had reached the pinnacle of success in their chosen fields. One question I asked each interviewee was “How do you define success?” The answer I got is important because in not one single case was that answer what the general public would have expected.

Most people would have expected that answer to be “the money, fame, power I've achieved.” What I heard, however, was far from that. Their definitions had nothing to do with financial success, power, control, or personal fame. In case after case, what I did hear was that their greatest success was the relationship with their family, their health and wellbeing, the feeling they received from helping others, the security they'd been able to provide their loved ones, or that they worked in their passions each and every day.

The message they send is that money can't buy happiness. I can think of lots of people who have loads of money, tons of fame, piles of achievements, and tremendous power and authority—but who are still not happy. However, all the people I know who consider themselves truly happy also consider themselves truly successful.

Therefore, it is my belief that happiness is the key ingredient in defining your success, not the result of it. I guess you could say that happiness is the DNA of success. All roads branch out from this, and all lead back to it.

Just think about it. You desire success so that you can have lots of money so that you can be financially secure—which will make you happy. You want to win the competition because you feel the need to prove yourself and have others admire you, which will make you feel better about yourself, which will make you happy. You have a desire to be in charge, on top, the big boss, to have control and prestige, to prove your worth—all of which will make you really happy.

The key is, everything is really driven by happiness, and so success at its most basic level is built on being happy, not on being successful in and of itself. The trick is figuring out what will really make you happy, because when you know this, only then do you really know what success means to you.

It's unfortunately easy to get caught up in chasing a means to an end, spending a life pursuing the trappings of success, not the happiness itself. We get easily confused about what the true objective is and many times end up sacrificing our true happiness in pursuit of some objective that was supposed to deliver our happiness in the first place. In such cases, the means actually become the end itself, and the end of our happiness as well.

Whatever you do, don't get so caught up in creating a profitable practice that you lose sight of why you wanted that practice in the first place. I've seen many a consultant work so many late hours, travel so much, and ignore those they loved so much that when they eventually reached their business dreams, there was no one left to share that success with—which made them unhappy.

The vital lesson that I would leave you with, above all others, is to make sure you're chasing happiness, not just success or the means to it.