Nick: Young Entrepreneur Lifestyle Podcast Episode Number Six
Hello and welcome to the Young Entrepreneur Lifestyle Podcast, the show where we help you build a life and a business on your terms. I’m your host, Nick Palkowski and in each episode, we’ll be learning from mentor, speaker and serial entrepreneur Peter Voogd. Peter, thank you so much for joining us on this brand new episode of the podcast.
Peter: I am fired up. I am excited and ready to just freak out right now, so I need to stay in the zone, but I’m pumped up Nick.
Nick: Oh, me too. I’m super excited. And I know this last episode, you mentioned that this episode we’re going to be talking about six musts to extreme achievement, and I think that’s a big promise. You’re promising extreme achievement for everyone. So let’s dive right into what are those six musts. I know they’ve got to be dying to know what they are.
Peter: Yes, I’m excited and I want to tell people before, I was at a [mastermind] and I have something that I just want to share with you. Stop doing dumb crap. Just, I just want to tell everybody. Everyone does dumb stuff that, just as a habit, stop doing dumb stuff doesn’t help your business.
All right. Anyways, up to that point when I was broke and stressed in my business, and I mean I wasn’t broke where I had some money in the bank and I couldn’t buy nice clothes. No, I was broke to where I was getting pissed off, Nick, but I kept getting negative, like, emails from my bank. You have another charge. You have another charge. And I couldn’t even afford food to go to the drive through.
And up to that point, I was blaming my company, the economy, my lack of resources, my location, I wasn’t trained properly. But I realized that my focus was kind of jaded, and I needed to change myself and my attitude and my intentions first. So the moment I got clear on that is the moment my life shifted from complexity and stress to simplicity and motivation.
So the first must to extreme achievement is clarity, and they’re the six Cs. Clarity is the ultimate power. And if you want results you’ve never gotten, you’ve got to get 100 percent clear on what you want. And I wasn’t taking full responsibility, Nick, so right when I did, I started to change my current reality.
So the first thing was I got clear on what I wanted, and I’ll tell you, I didn’t know exactly how to get out of it, but I got clear that I was sick of living that way and I was so frustrated in letting people down and not having money that that was enough to make the change. So the first thing was clarity, okay?
And an interesting thing happens when you gain clarity. Your confidence follows. So what I’m going to do that I decided was best for our audience was I’m going to go through the six right here simply, but then on the next couple podcasts, I’ll dive into each one in detail and give actionable, tangible steps for them to follow that will increase their results at a pretty big level. And if they continue to master these, it’s guaranteed the six figures will come. Does that sound good?
Nick: Yeah. That sounds perfect because that goes exactly with what we were talking about on an earlier episode about actually mastering one thing at a time, and I think that’s going to be great. That’ll allow us to really go deep into some of these six musts. So let’s do it.
Peter: Got it. So, the second one I said is confidence. Here’s a crazy thought. If you don’t have confidence, you’re always going to find a way to lose. You know those people that something good happens to them, but then they go back to being average or something happens, they get money and they go back to being broke, it’s because the confidence isn’t matching up with their accomplishment. So everything that you’re accomplishing right now is based on the confidence you have in yourself and your ability to make things happen.
So here’s what you’ve got to realize. The bigger the goal, the bigger the challenges. The moment you set bigger goals, obstacles will show up, and they’re there to really test your character and faith to see if you’re serious about those goals. If there were no challenges, it would be easy and it wouldn’t take much work and everyone would be doing it.
So the second thing I did was I made sure that every choice I made was helping my confidence, Nick, because you’re either helping or hurting your confidence every choice you make. There’s no in between. So if you think about people that are accomplishing a lot, they’re just continuing to make the choices that are better in the moment, that are harder in the moment, and they’re choosing growth versus choosing what’s easy.
So let me give you an example. If tomorrow, you choose to sleep in verses wake up early, does your confidence go up or down?
Nick: It goes down.
Peter: If you choose to party versus studying and really share your goals or look at your goals or read, you feel good in the moment but what happens the next day?
Nick: You’re going to be stressed about the test or the class that’s coming up.
Peter: Exactly. And obviously, you’ll be stressed that you spent money versus invest it. And let’s say you have a chance to go to a seminar or go to the beach. Now, in the moment, the beach, it’s like, oh, the beach, it sounds amazing. But the really serious entrepreneurs, they think about what’s better long term and they have delayed gratification mindsets versus instant gratification.
So, for me, I started basing things off my future and my vision versus my current feelings. And once I stared doing that consistently, my confidence went up. And John Maxwell says a great quote. He says, “It’s not what you do when you’re at the top that makes you a great leader. It’s what you do when you’re at the bottom that determines your leadership ability.” So when I was at the bottom, I started doing things when no one was watching. I started reading and sort of investing in myself. I started going to seminars or reaching out to people and my confidence grew. So, that’s the second thing.
Third, once your confidence grows, this is crucial, you have to reevaluate your circle of influence. Because if your confidence grows, Nick, but you’re still hanging out with people that are average, your confidence could be amazing but you’re not going to have the right steps or the right guidance. So you’ll just be like someone flailing around with a lot of confidence but not having the guidance to know exactly what to do next.
So, I evaluated my circle of influence. Jim Rohn says, “Who you associate with is who you become,” and I didn’t want to be like the people I was around. And to be completely blunt with everybody, everyone I was around was struggling, and some of them were okay with mediocrity, and I wasn’t.
And I don’t think anybody listening to this is happy with mediocrity, where they come home, “Hey, how you doing, I’m average. How about you? I’m average too. Yeah, high five.” Right? No one thinks that way I don’t think.
So I started reaching out to those who had the success I strived for. And I’ve said this many times, it’s going to be in my book, it’s a very big key to my success is, I was looking at my notes and I was in my 400 square foot apartment and I was on my mattress. I didn’t even have a box spring and a quote came up and it said, “If you want to be a millionaire, talk to billionaires because you’ll get there quicker.” And I realized, oh my gosh, I need to reach out to the top, top, top in my industry.
So I did. I spent time with those people. I got to know them and what happened was, I started shifting my standards, they gave me actions to take, they told me the mistakes they made not to make, and all of a sudden I had a clear path. So third is circle of influence.
Fourth, consistent energy and motivation. When you have your circle of influence shifted, your confidence is up, it’s not sustainable unless you really focus on consistency, right? So I started seeing, I like to learn from a lot of other people’s mistakes sometimes. It’s cheaper that way than making your own, right?
Nick: Exactly.
Peter: So, I stared seeing other entrepreneurs get pumped up about new goals and achievements and they would kind of get excited and get pumped up, but they’d never stay consistent. Or they’d get pumped up and build momentum, then take a vacation. Then they get excited and do well, then they’d take three days off. And they had this up and down results and I wanted consistency.
So I made a commitment to really stay consistent, and that gave me the competitive edge. And once again, I’ll give you specific tips for these, but I’ll tell you, lack of consistency is subtle, but it’s a very big stealer of a lot of people’s dreams and desires.
So I consistently improved my mindset, my emotional intelligence, my perspective, and really how I viewed myself, not just when I felt like it, Nick, but consistently. So this brought a very powerful force on my side and it was momentum. Once I saw the progress, I started feeling the consistency elevate and nothing brings more excitement and confidence than seeing you progress towards your goals. So that’s the forth thing.
And the fifth thing was I created result rituals. Once I learned where my results were coming from, I created rituals that moved my business forward. So every single week, I made sure I did the high value activities that I knew was creating results.
And when I was working my first summer, when I failed and struggled, I was working 60 or 70 hours a week, but it’s not the hours you work, it’s what you put in the hours. So I stared focusing more on being more intentional and where I got being more intentional from was the circle of influence.
So what’s cool is, following these will give you the answers you need. So I started scheduling my priority, or I started organizing my schedule around my priorities and visions versus the other way around and doing things based off feelings or things like that. So that’s the fifth one.
And the last thing, I think, to real extreme achievement was once you have the consistency, the right circle of influence, you have result rituals where you’re building momentum, your building momentum, the fifth is, or the sixth, sorry, is continual growth and learning.
How do you really reach new heights in your life and business? Well, you continue to grow and learn and you continue to start mastering the skills that you need to be the best at what you do. And this is the main reason I think 95 percent of people aren’t performing at a higher level. Once they reach a certain level, they stop performing or they stop growing, right?
Maybe they perform, but they get complacent and they stop growing. When you focus on growth and reaching out to even higher level people, it keeps you motivated. So my learning, Nick, didn’t stop when I became successful. That’s when it started.
So if you consistently reach out to people who are playing the game at a higher level, you stay with your result rituals, you build your character, you develop more skills, you continue to add more value to others, you’re going to start seeing yourself expand your mind so things that were hard for you earlier isn’t hard anymore.
You learn about leverage and scale and partnerships and sponsorships and really how to take your business to whole new levels. So those are the six things that I did and I’m excited to go deep in with each of those to really help people make their first six figures and beyond.
Nick: Oh, Peter, those are definitely some big musts and, like you said, I’m very excited to kind of dive into those. And I know we just went through them really rapid fire here, but what can our listeners expect in the next episode of the podcast?
Peter: So, we’ve already talked about clarity, in the first one, and a little bit in the second ones, so we’re going to start with the confidence account. How to really make sure you have top notch confidence and you have the competence of an elite performer, of an achiever, of an Olympian, of a top C.E.O., so you can make sure you get all of your biggest goals done.
Nick: Are you committed to being your best? Are you looking to make a difference in your life and the lives of those around you? It’s time for you to become a game changer. The Game Changer’s System for Excellence is the premier community for young professionals and ambitious entrepreneurs created by Peter Voogd.
To learn more about the Game Changers System for Excellence, go to youngentrepreneurlifestyle.com/gamechangers. The world has enough followers. Be a game changer.
And now it’s time for this week’s five star review. This week’s review is brought to you by QueenCoach and it’s titled, “Peter Voogd Sets the Standard for Young Entrepreneurs. I highly respect Peter Voogd and his ongoing leadership for young entrepreneurs and ambitious future millionaires. This podcast sets the standard and provides exactly what you need to know to be successful, play at the highest level possible, and be a true game changer.”
Thank you so much QueenCoach for your review. If you would like to leave a review for the podcast, all you need to do is go to , and you can subscribe to the podcast there. Leave a review and you will possibly hear yourself on next episode’s five star review shout out. So thank you so much for doing that and we really appreciate you.
And thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of the podcast. Hopefully you got tons of great value and now you know the six musts to extreme achievement. And now you can actually go out and start putting those musts in place in your life right now, today. Don’t wait. Go take action on some of this stuff immediately.
But before we wrap up I just have a couple quick announcements, and I want to encourage you to go check out the show notes. You can find kind of a detailed, brief description of the musts, what they are, you can leave a comment, if you have any questions for Peter, you can leave a comment there. And all you have to do to check out those show notes is go to youngentrepreneurlifestyle.com/006 for episode number six.
And if you have a question for Peter that you would like answered on a future podcast, all you need to do is go to youngentrepreneurlifestyle.com/question, and you’ll be able to record an audio question directly from your computer. No need to pick up a phone to call in or anything like that. You can just record using your mike on your computer.
And lastly, if you have not done so yet, please subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. The reason? It makes sure that you don’t miss a single episode, plus you also help us spread the word about this podcast to other people in the iTunes directory. So until next time, it’s time for you to go out, time for you to take action, and truly live life and business on your terms.