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Bruce Lee once mentioned how the way martial arts were designed, you had to keep training or you lost your skill over a short time. As long as one trains, they can maintain their skill, but as soon as they quit, they immediately start to decline in their abilities.

And after two years of quitting, they are only a mere shadow of themselves.

For me, to stay on my A-game I need to constantly be pushing myself to learn new concepts and practicing those that I have already learned. This doesn’t mean I set aside time for practice like I use to do when I was a student of Kung-Fu, but it means my mind rarely rests.

The following are some techniques and good practices I use to maximize my potential. Many of them I don’t think about and thus my wife has pointed out to me that I do.

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I first began learning persuasive skills when I was 15.

I worked in a guitar store and sold, you guessed it, guitars. Rarely did someone walk in and say, “I’ll take it.” I typically had to do a little convincing to get them to buy. No wait, not just convince them to buy, the owner wanted me to sell them the most expensive guitar they could afford.

At the time, he was the entrepreneur, not me.

Since then, I’ve learned the value of being a persuasive person and how it relates to business. Whether it be content sales or face-to-face sales, there is an art to persuasion and there are key
components to the trade.

My 5 keys to being a persuasive person consists of being observant, knowledgeable, listening, timing, and making use of storytelling.

I’m really getting tired of hearing people say how much they learn from their failures and they don’t learn from their successes.

No. Don’t believe it. You DO learn from your successes. And you DO become successful by remembering them.

The first line of my popular post 8+ Ways To Train Yourself To Be Creative which landed me smack dab on the front page of del.icio.us was:

To be creative, you have to first believe you are creative.

To parallel that, I’d like to say:

Success breeds Success.

Personally, many times I learn nearly just as much from both my successes and my failures. My ways to train yourself to be creative article ended up getting the recognition I wish all my articles could get. Don’t even begin to think I didn’t go back and take a look at my article.

What was the first line? It must have captured attention. How?

No, it’s not a superpower, sorry.

The Art of Persuasion can be learned and simply needs a little practice. But practice doesn’t make perfect. We need to continually learn and practice what we learn to grow.

If mere repetition of something was all it took to get better, you’d think we’d get better at being only as good as we currently are.

I like real estate investing. It’s fun for me. My favorite part is where I get to be creative and find ways to make profit where most people wouldn’t think it possible. Most novice and uneducated investors only concern themselves with 2 things: buying low and selling high. While that is a great strategy, it’s not very creative and typically limits your playing field.

Unlike persuasion’s *evil* brother, manipulation, being a persuasive person can get you things you want while also helping others get what they want.

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In college I had to give a persuasive speech to 20 classmates for a communications course. My topic? I had to convince people there was life on other planets.

This can be a particularly hard thing to do being that there is no tangible evidence in support of it.

This was a great topic for me because I love astronomy and to me, life on other planets seems logical.

To prepare, my teacher told me I should brush up on the topic by reading what experts had to say about it and study the persuasive chapter in my over-priced shredding text book.

The Internet was somewhat new back then (1995ish) and with a 28.8k baud modem, finding lots of information on the sparsely populated Net and waiting a minute or so for a Web page to download was not an option.

The difference between a dream and a goal is a timeline.

To be creative, you have to first believe you are creative.

A short time ago I received an email from a young entrepreneur asking me how he was suppose to compete in a marketplace where the competition was high and more established companies had big advertising bucks. I mentioned a few ideas to him but the one that concerned him the most was creativity. Give him numbers and he’ll work them, but tell him to come up with some creative idea, forget it.

He said he doesn’t have a creative bone in his body.

People who tell themselves that have already lost unless they decide to do something about it.

The development of a creative thought process is no different than learning martial arts. At first, someone shows you how to stand, execute proper body movement, and teaches you a Kata (a.k.a form - a set of movements that help develop your technique).