The Common Path to Uncommon Success

A Roadmap to Financial Freedom and Fulfillment

John Lee Dumas

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400221103
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

It's time to achieve your financial dreams with a 17-step roadmap to guide your journey to financial, location, and lifestyle freedom. Get rid of fear and doubts and say hello to your version of uncommon success!

Based on thousands of interviews from John Lee Dumas' highly acclaimed podcast, Entrepreneurs on Fire, this revolutionary step-by-step roadmap provides a proven path for entrepreneurs like you to achieve the financial freedom and lifestyle fulfillment you are capable of. Let The Common Path to Uncommon Success show you how.

The Common Path to Uncommon Success will:

• Reveal the critical steps successful entrepreneurs take to achieve uncommon success.
• Dispel the doubts and fear you're currently facing while providing a clear path to financial freedom and fulfillment.
• Ensure you avoid the pitfalls that have tripped up countless entrepreneurs.
• Provide a "Well of Knowledge" section for you to tap into anytime you're in need of inspiration or motivation!

JLD's 17-step guide will help you accomplish your #1 goal in life by showing you how to properly focus on your vision of success until it becomes your reality.

Hard work and persistence are only two of the ingredients. This book is the third.

CHAPTER 1

Identify Your Big Idea

Everything begins with an idea.

—EARL NIGHTINGALE

PRINCIPLE #1: Your common path to uncommon success begins with an idea. A big idea.

There are two mistakes people make when trying to identify their big idea.

MISTAKE #1: They believe their big idea can be something they are just passionate about. I love muffins! I’ll open a bakery!

MISTAKE #2: They believe their big idea is something they just have expertise in. I know how to code; I’ll build websites!

Your big idea is not either/or.

It’s not something you are passionate about or something you have expertise in. It’s both. Your big idea needs to be a combination of your passions and your expertise.

Let’s look at scenario one: just passion. Having passion for your big idea is important. You need to be excited to work on your big idea every single day. However, if you just have passion and you’re not providing a needed solution to the world, your idea will not gain traction.

Every human is tuned into the same radio station, WIIFM. What’s in it for me. Sure, people will be happy you’re pursuing a passion, but unless they are going to benefit directly from your passion, they’ll never become a customer, you’ll never generate revenue, and your big idea will become nothing more than a hobby.

Now let’s look at scenario two: just expertise. It’s great to be great at something. It’s wonderful to share your knowledge with the world. However, if you’re lacking passion, excitement, and curiosity for your area of expertise, you will never achieve fulfillment.

The common path to uncommon success is a simple one, but it does take time. If you’re lacking passion for your big idea, then one day you’ll wake up and realize you’re no longer enjoying what you’re doing and you’ll quit. Also, you’ll have competitors who are passionate about the area of expertise you’ve chosen, and they’ll win every time.

Now that you can see the flaws in the above two scenarios, let’s talk about the final scenario.

This is where you have both passion and expertise for your big idea. Your idea truly excites you and provides real value to the world. That is your big idea.

That is your zone of fire!

Now it’s time to take you through the exercise that will get you to your big idea so you can live every day in your zone of fire.

Sound like a plan?

Your Zone of Fire

For this exercise, you’re going to need a piece of paper.

Draw a line down the middle, and on the left-hand side write the word passion, and on the right-hand side the word expertise.

Set a timer for five minutes and press start.

Spend the entire five minutes writing down everything you are passionate about. What excites you? What fires you up? What were you passionate about as a kid, young adult, adult? What would you do tomorrow if you had a completely empty schedule and zero responsibility? Write down everything that comes to mind.

Ding!

Okay, now it’s time to move to the right side: your area of expertise. Once again, set a timer for five minutes and press start.

Spend the entire five minutes writing down everything you are an expert in. What skills have you acquired? What are you good at? What experience have you gained over the years?

Ask your family and friends how they would respond to the question: What does (your name) do well? You might be shocked at what others consider you an expert in that you thought was “normal.”

Ding!

Now it’s time to start identifying where your passions merge with your skills—where your curiosity commingles with your expertise.

Start drawing arrows that connect your passions with your expertise. These connections are your zones of fire. This is where you will choose your big idea!

I’ll be sharing my story in the next section, but a quick spoiler to give you an example of one of my zones of fire.

On my passion side, I had written down “having conversations with successful entrepreneurs.”

On my expertise side, I had written down “facilitating conversations and public speaking from my days in the US Army and corporate finance.”

I realized this was a potential zone of fire and drew an arrow connecting the two.

I asked myself what opportunities existed that would allow me to combine this passion and skill set. That’s when the a-ha moment came. A podcast!

I loved listening to podcasts that interviewed successful men and women. I had experience conducting interviews in my previous careers. Why not launch my own podcast where I would interview successful entrepreneurs and share their stories with the world?

My big idea had formed and now it was time to act!

My Big Idea

I looked in the mirror.

“Thirty-two years old.”

I said those words with a twinge of disgust, even though I had lived a pretty good life. Part of it I’ve told you about already: Eighteen great years in a small town in Maine with a functional family and plenty of fond memories. Four amazing years at Providence College in Rhode Island as an ROTC cadet and American studies major. Four tough years as an active duty Army officer.

At twenty-six, I transitioned into the Army reserves and took a year off to learn Spanish in Guatemala. I explored the west coast of Costa Rica and prepped for the LSATs (law school entrance exam). I did well enough on the exam that I ended up heading back to Rhode Island to attend Roger Williams Law School and was very excited for the next chapter of my life to begin.

It wasn’t immediate, but after a few weeks I knew I had made a grave mistake. Something was off, and I was 100 percent miserable in law school.

It was a strange feeling. I had never been so miserable before, not even during the worst moments in Iraq. Looking back, I realize now I was dealing with PTSD, but at the time I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was unable to focus on anything, which made the endless hours of law school studies torture. I gutted out the rest of the semester, but I knew I wasn’t coming back.

I booked a long trip to India and Nepal, had one of the most difficult conversations I’ve ever had with my parents (and I’ve had a few), and went off to find my version of eat, pray, love.

India was amazing. It was exactly what I needed: an escape from the “real world.”

I enjoyed the noise, the heat, the culture, the food, and the mass of humanity as I explored both India and Nepal, culminating with an epic twelve-day trek way up in the Himalayas, to the base camp of Annapurna, the tenth-highest mountain in the world. But I knew I couldn’t hide out in India and Nepal forever, and after four months of zero responsibility I was ready to give my career another go.

For round three, I decided to give the world of corporate finance a try. My thought process was fast-paced, lots of money, lots of respect. I landed a job with John Hancock in Boston and the first year was quite enjoyable. I learned a lot, made decent money, and felt like I was on a solid career path.

Then, the 2008 financial crisis struck. I watched people from Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers walk out the front door with boxes in their hands. My company also had a wave of layoffs, which I survived, but my passion for corporate finance was fading fast. I’ll never forget the day when the remaining employees were herded into a large conference room and the CEO proclaimed: “Everyone in this room is here because we want you here, but if you are not 100 percent with us till the end, now is the time to walk out the door.”

Those words hit me like an anvil.

I realized in that moment I wasn’t even close to 100 percent in and that I owed it to myself and John Hancock to walk out the door.

After that meeting, I walked back to my desk, googled boilerplate resignation form, edited a few lines, and printed it out. I signed the dotted line and handed it to my shocked manager, who I’m sure was saying to herself, “Is this kid crazy? Quitting during a time like this?”

I’ll speed the story up a little bit to get to the good stuff, my big idea.

My next step was a sales position at a small tech startup company in NYC. I enjoyed living in the Big Apple, but the job turned out to be a bust and after six months I handed in my boilerplate resignation form once again.

At this point, I was sick of the living through the cold and long winters of New England and decided what I really wanted was to live in San Diego and sell real estate.

Why? I still don’t really know.

However, I was nothing if not an action taker so I jumped in my car, drove cross-country, and settled into a studio apartment in Pacific Beach San Diego, one block from the Pacific Ocean.

I had some success in real estate over the next two years, loved the SoCal lifestyle, and met the love of my life, Kate! (Everything happens for a reason.) With my moderate real estate success in San Diego, a relative back in Maine caught wind and offered me a job.

The job was with the second-largest commercial real estate firm in Maine and came with a five-year partnership track. I had not lived in Maine for more than ten years and the thought of returning home to be close to family was quite appealing. I accepted the job, made the move, and settled into a cozy condo in Portland, mere blocks from my new job.

I really thought I was settling in for the long haul, which is a bold statement for somebody who in the previous five years had left the Army, traveled through Central America, tried law school, fled to India, tested out corporate finance, attempted to make it in NYC, and headed west to San Diego.

I loved my place, I was enjoying reconnecting with family and friends of old, and I believed my career prospects were bright. Then, Maine went into its worst commercial real estate slump in decades.

It was a brutal year.

I remember working so hard on a deal, closing it, then getting a commiss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. Identify Your Big Idea
• 2. Discover Your Niche
• 3. Create Your Avatar
• 4. Choose Your Platform
• 5. Find Your Mentor
• 6. Join or Create a Mastermind
• 7. Design Your Content Production Plan
• 8. Create Content
• 9. Launch
• 10. Pinpoint Your Avatar’s Biggest Struggle
• 11. Prove the Concept and Craft the Solution
• 12. Build Your Funnel
• 13. Diversify Your Revenue Streams
• 14. Increase Your Traffic
• 15. Implement Systems and Build a Team
• 16. Create Affiliate Partnerships
• 17. Keep the Money You Make
• 18. The Well of Knowledge
• Epilogue
• Index
• About the Author