Daniel Dessinger

Month: September 2016

  • The Entrepreneur’s Hierarchy Of Needs

    I’m halfway through Module Two of Jeff Walker‘s Product Launch Formula class online. We’re elbow deep in product testing at the Dessinger homestead, and Jeff is helping to frame the launch we will undertake in the very near future.

    During one of the first videos of PLF Core, Jeff introduced a chart he called the Entrepreneur’s Hierarchy of Needs. If you’re unfamiliar with the original hierarchy of needs chart by Maslow, it’s structured to show the order of needs which people are driven to satisfy. You don’t attempt to facilitate world peace, for example, when you haven’t had enough food or water to keep you alive. So basic survival comes first, and we work our way up from there.

    The Entrepreneur’s Hierarchy of Needs looks a little different, but if you’ve ever tried to venture out on your own, I think you might identify with this order.

     

    The Entrepreneur's Hierarchy

     

    Show Me the Money

    When starting a business or launching a product, you start to meet a core need: You gotta make some money. Maybe you lost your day job. Maybe you’re adding children to the family and yesterday’s income doesn’t cut it anymore. Maybe you moved from Fort Worth to Los Angeles and you can’t even afford to eat anymore. Whatever the case, you launch your first product or business to earn money. To stay alive.

    You might put in 17 hour days to build that first launch. You might work for 2 years straight with no days off. But eventually, you launch your product and you start making real money. Check.

    Redeeming the Time

    It’s great to not starve or get kicked out onto the street. So earning money from your own business feels great for quite a while. The sense of accomplishment is palpable. But eventually, the long hours required to maintain the income you’ve acquired takes its toll. There are missed playdates and holidays and family dinners. You realize that if something doesn’t change your children will grow up without knowing you. So you look to redeem your Time.

    Some people solve the problem of Time by choosing to earn less. They see how much they can make in their current state of endless frenzy and they decide to make less by working less often. In a best case scenario, this works, and you can eek by on a lower income and get back some of that sanity you surrendered when you started this whole thing.

    Seriously, Time is important. Without time, you lose mental bandwidth to process information and think clearly. Without personal time, you miss out on feeling human, which accumulates until your health can become the biggest issue in your life.

    So you adapt and change. You start thinking about delegating, hiring employees, and passive income. Your effort shifts from simple but grueling product creation and support to legitimately sustainable offerings.

    Relationships

    Hopefully you haven’t lost all your friends by the time you get to focus on reestablishing relationships. Children and spouses are usually first, but close personal friends, siblings and parents rank up there too. No one is an island. We each need other people to balance us out, help us connect, and allow us opportunities to care and to give.

    Reaching the relationship stage is key for long-term quality of life. Until you have people you can count on, EVERYTHING is harder. And I mean everything. Until you begin building relationships, you’ll have less support, less fulfillment, less feedback, less encouragement, less connection, and less motivation.

    Purpose

    If all goes relatively well and your business is thriving under your management, you have personal time to feel human, and you feel close to the people you love most, it’s time to address your purpose.

    Making money is great, but financial gains rarely satisfy anyone. Having BFFs is also amazing, but friends are people you walk shoulder to shoulder with, toward a common goal. What do you hope to accomplish? Not just in earnings. What mark do you want to make on the world?

    Your own personal needs come first. You can’t save someone else if you’re drowning. So you take care of you. Then you take care of others.

    Maybe you want to teach younger adults to do what you’ve done only faster. Maybe you want to adopt animals that need to be rescued. Maybe you shape your business into a mechanism that causes social change. Maybe you use your success and reputation to influence CEOs, politicians, or celebrities.

    The possibilities are endless. But the entrepreneur isn’t done until he or she is fulfilling a purpose greater than themselves.

    Food for thought. Thanks to Jeff Walker for the inspiration. Hopefully you’ll find it useful as you navigate your own path.

     

  • We’ve Been Too Hasty To Dismiss Critique

    Have you ever heard someone say, “Don’t bring me problems. Bring me solutions”?

    It’s always easier to critique old traditions than to establish better and new traditions. That should be our ultimate goal. But let’s not err on the side of dismissing critique simply because the critic has no solution to the problem. The critic and the pioneer may come as two separate messengers. And neither carries the other’s message.

    We’ve got to stop throwing out the baby with the bath water. We’ve grown comfortable with an illogical standard that says, “If you don’t have the solution, stop complaining about the problem.”

    But what if critique’s deconstruction isn’t supposed to take place at the exact same time as rebuilding? What if we abort the process of revolution because we dismiss critique that isn’t accompanied by solutions? How many messengers have we turned away because they were “disqualified”?

    “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away, a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.”

    ‭‭Ecclesiastes‬ ‭3:1-8‬ ‭NIV‬‬

    http://bible.com/111/ecc.3.1-8.niv

    When critique comes, it may just be “a time to tear down.” That doesn’t mean a time to build isn’t coming soon. And it doesn’t mean you should ignore the time to tear down just because it doesn’t present itself simultaneously as the time to build.

    We’ve cost ourselves many opportunities for growth already. Let’s move further in and higher up.

  • 60 Day Update On Intermittent Fasting

    I shared with you a couple months back that I was beginning a new diet known as Bulletproof Intermittent Fasting. You can read my post here.

    60 days in, and I’ve lost somewhere in the ballpark of half a pound each day. Weight really wasn’t my greatest concern, except for how it demonstrated that I crossed a line somewhere back in 2006. Truly, quitting smoking was the most difficult change I’ve ever made, and I ballooned while eating everything in sight.

    My wife insists that our scale is garbage. So I stopped using it. But I can still tell as major things change. Even without numbers, running my hands over my sides tells me a lot. When the bumps disappear, that’s generally a good sign.

    So as strange as it sounds, I’m tracking progress by the noticeable feel of my belly’s shape changing from day to day, but more pronounced from week to week.

    Shedding excess fat wasn’t my only goal. It was a primary goal, but there were a couple supplementary goals attached.

    Secondary Goals

    1. Reduce joint and foot pain
    2. Increase flexibility
    3. Accomplish more productive work
    4. Give a better first impression
    5. Reset my system so it works better

    Number five there is a big one. I’m not sure how to know if I’ve accomplished that goal without someday quitting the process and eating more carelessly.

    Regardless, one of the goals is to reset my system, so that I’m burning fat as a primary energy source rather than sugar (carbs).

    The goal in everything is to live in abundance. To maximize quality of life. To excel at stewardship. To not miss out because I can’t move.

    Life is about baby steps of progress toward abundance. Abundance in everything God created and called good.

  • 6,288 Pages A Year

    What you fill your mind with will control you.

    I popped a sermon tape into a portable cassette player and took it with me on the road. It was a recording of my grandfather’s radio show, and he was telling a story about how an old lady accurately prophesied his wife’s death six months before she passed.

    But that’s not the focus of today’s rumination.

    I’ll expound upon that another day. Today I want to focus on something else Grandpa Lennard said that rocked my world. He confessed to reading the entire Bible SIX TIMES per year ON TOP OF his regular daily Bible study. SIX TIMES!

    If you, like me, have read the entire Bible once in a year, you know how much perseverance that takes. Wading through the legalese of Leviticus and Numbers can be excruciating.

    But six times??? I can’t even imagine how many hours that took each day. I mean, is that even humanly possible? If he had used my exact Bible, he would have read 6,288 pages. And naturally he did other Bible study. Naturally.

    Imagine how that would change your thinking.

    I’m imagining it. If I read that much Scripture, I would eat, sleep, drink, and breathe Scripture. There’d be no room for anything else in life. And yet… Grandpa Lennard traveled the world preaching the gospel and healing the sick for decades.

    I can’t let it go. It feels like a gauntlet has been passed.

    We’ve all binged on a show here and there. The age of Netflix and DVD sets is upon us, and it’s way more compelling to follow the storyline in a short period of time than to wait a week or two or twelve between episodes (LOST anyone?). And I must confess, when I’ve binge-watched a show, it seeps into me. It alters my dreams. My precious sleep time forms storylines that relate somehow to the story I’ve watched hour after hour after hour.

    Which reminds me of a quote I can’t escape:

    You become what you behold.

    Whatever you gaze upon most often has the greatest power to shape your thinking, expectations, beliefs, and behaviors. It’s so subtle we sometimes don’t recognize it happening, but it’s happening. Music, movies, songs, videos, gossip, and social media all worm their way into our psychological DNA. They influence who we are.

    We typically don’t WANT this to be true, because it calls us to a higher level of personal accountability. But knowing that what we behold shapes who we are empowers us to decide whether we actually want to keep choosing to be the same person. If you don’t like who you are, look first at what you behold. What do you most often watch, read, listen to, eat, touch, and daydream about?

    You are forming reactions to those stimuli. You are compensating for their messages. You are adapting to make room for their truths.

    And if that’s true about less than ideal inputs, it’s true about ideal inputs. Which brings me back to Grandpa Lennard.

    The Call to Action

    I’m not pretending to try to read the Bible six times this year. C’mon, man! I got three kids, two businesses, a homestead, goats, chickens, cats, dog, and a garden. I shut down and crawl into a fetal position sometimes. But reading once a year again might be worth it.

    There are mindsets I’ve never attained, levels of faith I’ve never acquired. And I can’t help but attribute this to the quality of my inputs. I’ve dreamed of a version of me that sees the world differently. That Daniel sees into the spiritual landscape of a geographic area and calls that which isn’t into being, somewhat like lassoing a unicorn.

    But you don’t lasso the unicorn by sitting on a couch eating Cheetos (or non-GMO potato chips made from avocado oil).

    I want to elevate my thinking.

    So I’m stepping up my game to read the Bible in one year. And that’s on top of other reading I do to better myself, including poetry, audiobooks, and podcasts.

    What are YOU going to do to be a better YOU?