Core Values And Your Future Success

Coming to you straight from SERPWoo studios, I'm your host Jason Brown, the co-founder of SERPWoo. I want to thank you for joining me on this edition of the podcast. I thought this podcast would be fitting since were getting ready to head into 2018. We've already geared up a blog post for SEO needs heading into 2018, so basically that blog post is about what you can do to gear up for Christmas, how SEO's going to change in 2018 and what is the hottest ranking factors right now in SEO.

I thought this podcast would be fitting, since we've already done a post to help you going into 2018, and essentially what this podcast is about, is your attitude. How to change your mentality going into 2018, so that you have the best business possible, you've got a forecast, you've got work that you truly enjoy and that you'll be set up for success going into 2018. Around this time there are lost of people who actually get depressed. The holidays are not a joyful time for lots of people in our country, or lots of people over the world.

They actually get depressed. Sometimes they're depressed before the holidays. You might be one of these people who are depressed or maybe not depressed, but not fulfilled with your work. You're just not happy. You're still yearning for more. You still have these goals and these bucket list that you want to achieve, but you're just shackled down by either your job or by other things in your life that are just pulling you down, like the crabs in the bucket type of analogy.

Essentially it's been proven that if you do work that are not aligned with your core values, that that leads to depression. Core values is something that I've actually talked about on other forums before, I've got an old blog that I used to write on called leanvertising.com, that I made a Dream Life series blog post about. It was a six-part series that touched on what I'm going to talk about today in the podcast. I've actually written about this on some forums as well, such as Builder Society. I've got a huge post there, where some people have gone through that activity and been successful as well.

But core values really defines who you are and it's really sad that in today's society there's not enough room and enough time and nobody teaching being able to focus in on yourself and who you are, I'm not talking about some New Age stuff. It's not anything to do with yoga or chakra's or all of those other type of stuff. It's just really finding out who you are, what you are, and what your core values are, and then building a life based around that.

It's very simple to do. This will be a little bit of a long podcast, because there's a lot to go through, but I'm going to try to break it down in steps. Hopefully you'll gain a lot of information out of this podcast, and we'll jump right into it. I'm going the share a little bit of a backstory for how I came up for this method, and why I think it's important for other people to learn it. Essentially years ago when I was struggling, when I was in my early 20s, mid-20s, I came to a point of realization that I was unhappy. I wasn't fulfilled, I was depressed. I kept asking myself, "There's got to be more than just this."

I look at people in my family, in look at friends, I look at co-workers, I see people on television, I read stories in the newspaper. There's a lot of people who you can tell, even though they might not outwardly say it directly, they're depressed, they're angry, they're unfulfilled, their two week vacation is never long enough, they are just looking for more. The bottom line is, they're just unhappy. This could be caused by lots of reason. Maybe somebody's sick with medical problems, maybe they've been dealt what some people would call a bad hand in the game of life, however, a lot of unfulfillment and depression and unhappiness comes from not being aligned with who you actually are and what you actually want to do.

If you're doing things that you do not like to do, they're not things that make you happy, you're naturally going to be depressed, unfulfilled, unhappy. This is kind of where a lot of people play on those emotions, and they offer maybe Udemy courses about, "How to travel the world as a digital nomad," or, "How you can make money on the side," and there's all these promises for kind of like these how to make money online and business opportunities, and they all focus on being unhappy and doing the things that you want to do.

That's kind of a play on what I'm going to teach you today. What I'm going to teach you today is actually finding out what you're supposed to be doing, and then actually get to that. Now I can't define what you as the listener should actually be doing within your specific life, but what om going to teach you helps get you there. When I was in my early 20s and mid-20s, I was doing work that I thought I loved, I mean I really did love doing technology and marketing, but I wasn't working on the task that I really wanted to work for.

I was working for an employer or employers actually, because I bounced around from job to, job, to job, which is a sign of unhappiness and unfulfillment. I was working on their projects and I was making them rich, and they were telling me what to do and how to define my day and when I showed up for work and what I did. So while I did love programming, technology, marketing, I was just working on the wrong task. I was kind of halfway there, but I was still unfulfilled, depressed, unhappy. That kind of spirals into other things.

That misalignment would fall over into my relationship with my wife and my mother and my brother and my kids, and it would fall and spill over into my hobbies and my relationships with friends. One day I remember coming home and I was driving an hour to work and an hour back home, and so it's two hours on the road, which if you do that for a long period of time is already frustrating. My car at the time was not always working correctly, there would be times I'd be stranded on the side of the road. There would be times that I take it into the shop and they'd say, "Oh, you need a $1,000 worth of work." Well, the car was only worth about a $1,000.

Then I had problems with bills. Sometimes I would be late on a bill, and that would stress me out. My wife would want to go on a vacation and I couldn't afford to take her on one. My kids would get sick or they would need braces and I would stress out about that. In the winter we would have to buy natural propane for our propane tank that sat outside, and you have to pay for that. Sometimes that's $700 or $800 just by itself, and you have to do that two or three times in the winter.

I just had a lot of this going on. At the same time this was all going on, I was trying to actually grow a business, so all the frustrations with being a new entrepreneur and trying to grow your business, and learning how to wade through those puddles of being an entrepreneur and the problems that come with it. I just had a lot on my plate, and one day I just had a breakdown. I thought, "This isn't what my life should be. I don't have a manual or guidebook, I don't know what I was born to do or why I as put on this earth, but I know that what I'm doing right now is never going to give me happiness."

I took a while to actually look at who it is I am, what's society tried to tell I should be, and where's the misalignment there? Basically what came out of that was digging into and finding out what my core values were. Core values are going to be different for everybody. When I say that one of my core values is stability, that's going to mean something different to me, than the person sitting next to me, or you the listener, or even my wife. Stability means something entirely different to me, than probably for you. There's really no right or wrong way to do this, and when you're going through your list of core values, one thing you need to remember is when you read these words, how you interpret these words are critical and they define you.

If you come across a word and you don't understand it, or you think possibly, "Well, this is what I think stability means. This is what I think individuality is," or, "This is what I think freedom is," that's the correct answer. It's not, "Well, I want to pick freedom, but freedom sounds like living in a democracy, that's not really me." No, freedom for me, Jason Brown, actually means having options and the freedom to pick which option I want to have. It has nothing to do with democracy, it had nothing to do with not being in prison, it has nothing to do with other similar related terms that other people comprehend freedom as.

What that word means to you, is important, and that's why you should pick that word, not what you think it means to society. When you're picking your core values, this is a pretty easy task. I mean some people might say, "Well, what are core values? I don't know what they are." I had the exact same question, so I had to actually Google multiple times what core values were, and you can get a list of core values. Some lists are only 30, some are 300, some are a 157. What I actually did was, I went to a lot of different websites. I'm a very thorough person, so I went to a lot of different websites that had lists of core values.

Multiple times I had to look up in a thesaurus or in a dictionary what this word actually meant, and then think about it to see if this was the right word for me. But you can literally just go and Google, you can find a lot of lists. I would recommend writing down the list, or at least copy and pasting in the notepad, and then going over these word. If there's a word that you don't know or you don't understand, quite possibly that's not going to be the core value for you, but feel free to look in the dictionary or thesaurus to find other related terms for it, and maybe you change that out.

But essentially what you're looking for is somewhere between five and 10 core values that really resonate with you. You might go through the list, let's pretend you've got a total from all of the tabs that you had open from all the websites, maybe you've got a total of 500 core values. You go through the list and you out a check mark to the ones that resonate with you, and you find out that you've got 80. Well, then you're going to go through that 80 and say, "Well, this is more important, this is more important," and you're going to go through that list again, and you might have 37.

You're going to keep going, keep going, until you whittle down what's really important to you, what really jumps out and resonates with you. There's going to be a lot of times that you're going to have a conflict, you don't know which one to pick and you're really going to have to think about it. This process really gets down to the core of who you are and the core of your belief system and what actually makes you the person you are. I got down personally to five. I remember I had a list of like 22, and then I whittled it down to 12 and then it was 10, and then it was eight, and then I really struggled to get it down to five.

This process didn't take an hour. I mean this took multiple days. It wasn't a full 24 hour day, but I would do it, take a break, come back the next day, do it for another hour and a half, come back. A lot of you, I know you're thinking, you're rolling your eyes, "I don't have time for all this." Well, if you don't have time to find out what's important to you in your life, you're always probably going to be depressed, or unfulfilled, or unhappy if you are right now. This is a very important activity, but I got down to five. I did this several years ago.

I did this recently, and my core values prior, I had came up with individuality, freedom, trust, simplicity and activeness. All those words mean something very important to me that might be different than you. These are the core values that I had several years ago, that I thought upon. When I did the activity again recently, because things do change, you do grow, you do mature, your situation does change, I reevaluated and my core values came out to be simplicity, creativity, entrepreneurship, stability, autonomy. There are some words in my new analysis that are very similar or same as my prior analysis, like for an example, simplicity was on there last time and it's there now.

Some people might look at individuality and say that's somewhat the same as creativity, which is my new core value, but each of these words mean something. It's going to means something different to you, so getting down to these five is very important. You might have to do this activity several times. You might want to redo it three months later or a year later. It actually took me about two years to reevaluate because my situation had changed, but going from prior core values to core values now, I'm able to look back and see this word meant something different to me, because I was in this situation, now my situation had improved or changed, and now I have a new vision of what these words mean to me and I have a new vision of where I want my life to go now, because I did get where I want to be in that time span between my first analysis and my analysis that I just did now.

Now that things have changed, my core values have changed, and I've learned and I've grown and I've matured. That's the first part, is really finding out five core values. You might struggle with it, so sometimes you can go five or 10, but you really want to get down to that base of five. Again, five's not a magic number. If you seven and you just can't get rid of two, that's perfectly fine also. Remember, there's no right or wrong answer, this is you, this is who you are, not society telling you what you should be, or your mother telling you how things ought to be, this is you. This is who you are, so own up to it, don't be ashamed of it. If you've got seven, seven's fine, but please don't have 20, don't have 15.

You cannot be somebody that has 15 core values, it's core for a reason. It's the foundation. Try to stick between five or 10, five is the goalpost here if you can do it. I'll tell you why you really need five. Now the reason getting to your core values and getting to five, maybe six or seven is so important is, because when you have five or six or seven, you can now take those core values and build a mission statement. A mission statement isn't just for businesses. You can have a personal mission statement. The purpose of a mission statement is to help guide you through decision and choices and goals, and moving to your future and moving forward.

This is kind of why it's important to reevaluate your core values, because as you grow, your situation will change. But when you have 17, 20, 30, you really cannot build a mission statement. You really can't guide yourself. You can try, it's not going to happen, I promise you that. When you really break it down to the core, to the foundation of who you are with those five core values, you can now build an easy mission statement, and that mission statement can help guide you. As entrepreneurs, if you're listening to this podcast you're probably an entrepreneur, because this podcast is usually geared to those topics more than it is marketing, which is what our blogs are for.

But if you're an entrepreneur, or somebody wanting to be an entrepreneur, you might have a problem or you get distracted with a new shiny projects all the time, with ideas, with information, and you get paralysis by analysis, because of all this information. This can happen at the beginning of building your empire, in the middle of it. This could be a reason why you're still at your sweet cushy executive job if you have one, and you haven't been on the course to becoming an entrepreneur yet. Maybe you make these rash decision where you jump from job to job, or city to city, or girlfriend to girlfriend, a mission statement can help ground you.

You can only build this mission statement if you truly know who you are, which is where the core values come into play. If you know your core values and you build a mission statement, you can now resists the urge for these shiny new objects and these rash decisions. To give you an example is, I took my core values and I made a mission statement, and my mission statement essentially says this, "To solve problems with simplicity, creativity, and entrepreneurship, while creating a full and stable life that provides autonomy." Now I told you what my core values where earlier in this podcast, and every single one of those words are in my mission statement.

I'm going to read it again, "To solve problems with simplicity, creativity, entrepreneurship, while creating a full and stable life that provides autonomy." I'll break this down real quick for what each of these words mean to me. Basically the word simplicity means I love solving problems as simple as possible. I don't want to spend days or weeks on a problem. I don't want to mentor somebody and give them a complex answer. Simplicity solves a lot of things. It's usually solution that are simple or quick, they're easy, they can be grasped easily by others, they can be explained easily. There's just really no need to have complexity.

I hate complexity, even though I am personally an INTJ and I love to analyze problems and data and look into things and spend time thinking about it, I want to take that analyze and create a simple solution. That's where simplicity comes into play. Creativity, I just told you that I was an INTJ, and those are usually the very analytical thinkers, they're the Spock's, they're just the strategists, the thinkers, but I've got a creativity side to me. I went to college to be an architect, because I loved to design stuff. I love to write. I love building things with my hand. I'm very analytical with my creativity though, but I still crave creativity, so that's kind of where I look at one of my prior core values, which was individuality. Me being me, me being creative, me letting my creativeness come through.

That's why creativity is important for me. Entrepreneurship I put in there because I really got tired of working for others. I loath having a job or having somebody above me, and it's not an authority issue. It somewhat is, because I am an INTJ, so I don't look at authority as your above me just because you have a job title. You actually have to prove your authority to me first, I don't care about your job title. But at the same time, I hated having my life dictated to me. One of the ways out of that was entrepreneurship, because even though I still have responsibility within my clients and within my own projects like with SERPWoo, I can dictate when that happens.

If I want to move to Miami and I want to be there for a full month and work on SERPWoo, I've got the choice to do that being an entrepreneur, whereas otherwise I would probably be working a job, have to work for a full year to gain two weeks of vacation and then when I take my vacation and I out in my request to ask, "Please, can I go on vacation?" I have to worry about somebody else in my department's going on vacation those two weeks. Then two weeks just isn't enough for me. What if I wanted to do more? I don't want to be limited to when I can take it, how I can take it, for how long I can take it.

Then there's kind of the financial side too. When you work a job, you have a ceiling on your income, and I just didn't want that. Entrepreneurship I had to throw in there because that reminds me daily that if I see something that pops up, like maybe I'm working for one of my clients and they get venture funded, and now they're looking for a CMO and my client reaches out to me and says, "Hey, would you love to be our CMO? Here's the package, please join us," I'm going to have kind of a hard decision to make. Do I take that job, or do I not? When I go back and I think about it and I look at my core values and I look at my mission statement, the choice is easy. The answer's no.

That also kind of conflicts ... the CMO position conflicts with creativity potentially, because I'm going to have other people to answer to, and it also conflicts with simplicity. As I moved along through the mission statement, we're now looking at stability. The word stability to me, I had a lot of times in my prior life where I was jumping from job to job, I was jumping from project to project. My finances were never stable, I never knew when I was going to eat next or be able to pay my bill next. Things at the last minute really irritate me. I mean I know in life things come up at the last minute, if it's truly an unpredictable event, I have no problem with it.

But just to give you a small example, if my son comes home from school, he's a senior in high school, if he comes home from school and it's 11:50 at night, almost midnight, and he comes to me and he says, "Oh, you know what? I had this huge project that was due. It's actually due in the morning at 8 o'clock, I've known about it for three months but I just didn't do it and I forgot and I'm sorry it's so late." That's what irritates me, because that's something that was known, things should've been handles differently, those last minute type things. Where it somebody else's emergency and then they put it on me last minute, those type of things I hate.

So stability, that kind of helps me with options and choices too. If I'm looking at ... a decision comes to me, I'm going to say, "Is the result of this going to be stable or is it unpredictable? Is this going to create instability in my life in other area?" That's where stability comes from in my core values and my mission statement. Finally autonomy, this is kind of an off word. I figured out this means a lot of different things to different people. To me autonomy means being able to do what I want, when I want, how I want to do it, without having to ask permission or validate it through somebody else. Now clearly that doesn't apply to my wife.

My wife is an equal partner in our marriage, so she gets say so as well, but like the job example, that's not autonomy to go on my vacation. I've got to ask permission, I've got to be forward with it, I maybe have to explain why I'm going on vacation because I've got a nosy coworker, or maybe there's a reason that you've got to put on the form. Autonomy to me means being able to do, again, whatever I want, when I want, how I want, and not have to explain it or tell anybody about it when I make that decision. Part of that also, you've got to have the finances for that. If I wanted to just up and sail the Caribbean, I've got to have finances for that.

That's kind of where entrepreneurship kind of ties back into that. That's where having a stable life kind of comes up into that, because I obviously cannot sail around the Caribbean if I've got this life that's just up and down and not stable, 'cause I've got other things that I maybe have to tie up the loose ends, or be involved in something because I have an unstable life. My mission statement for me, I just told you what that's about and the reason why I told you was so that you can understand how these core values tie into a mission statement, and then how that mission statement helps me make choices and decisions and guide me into my future.

There's other examples too, like I'm working on SERPWoo, I maybe helping a client, but I get this crazy new idea to build a shiny made for AdSense project. Should I work on this AdSense project? I go through my core values and I ask myself, "Is this AdSense project simple?" Yeah, it is. I mean it's freaking' AdSense. It's not like I'm selling weight loss pills, or trying to get somebody to hand me $4,000 for a coaching program. "AdSense is simple, yes, but is it creative?" No, not really. If you look at a lot of AdSense sights, they're not very creative. Somebody's done 500 words, 750 words and then they slap their AdSense on there, it's not very creative. Because it's no, the decision's easy.

I'm not going to work on this AdSense project. I got offered a cushy Vice President job at this company, just like the CMO example I just gave you, is it simple? It's probably not going to be simple. I mean being a Vice President, being a chief marketing officer, I've been those before. Those are not simple jobs. The answer to the simplicity is no, so that's why you chuck it. It's also not entrepreneurial so it's going to get chucked anyway. Maybe I found a new house. It's almost a half a million dollars in Scottsdale and in order for me to have that, I'm going to have a mortgage. I could sell my house, but I'm still probably going the have to come up with some extra money to get into this house.

Now that's my example, your examples might be, yeah, you definitely have to have a mortgage for a half a million dollar home in Scottsdale. You know what? That mortgage, that home, it doesn't fit autonomy. I'm going to feel obligated of course to pay my mortgage and do things to make sure it's paid, like take a job, or give up a trip that I really wanted, in order to pay the bill for the mortgage that month. That's not autonomy. That ruins my autonomy. But maybe though, now here's the twist, again, this comes down to you. The twist is this, maybe I do buy that house. It's half a million dollars, it's in Scottsdale, but I use my creativity and entrepreneurship, my entrepreneurial ways, to buy the house and then I live in it for six months, and I Airbnb it for the other six months.

Or maybe I buy it and I Airbnb it the entire time and it's just my second home. I come and live in it maybe two or three weeks out of the year. I do the same thing in another city, and in another city, and in another city, and I'm just traveling the whole time in these houses that I own, and they're just completely Airbnb'd the entire time, except for when I want to come and visit and stay. The mortgage one, that's the one I figured you would twist. Again, this is why it's so important you do this task related to who you are and how you feel, and what these terms mean to you within your situation, because for me, I don't want a half a million dollar mortgage.

It cramps my autonomy, to me it's not simple, 'cause id have to keep up with that payment, but for somebody else, you might look at it as, "You know what? I found a creative way to afford this home and I'm going to be an entrepreneur with it, basically renting it out to other people and they're paying the mortgage for me. I'm just living there when I want to, and traveling the world." This is why you want to do this exercise and focus on yourself. The next step in this process is figuring out your priorities. You know your core values now, you build a mission statement so that you can guide your choices into the future.

The next step is figuring our your priorities. What's important for you? What's a priority? These can be very granular or very high level. To me I like to stick to high level and what priorities do is, you know your core values, you know where you should be and what you value highly, you know your foundation, you've made a mission statement now that contains those words that can help direct and flow you into future choices, but there's going to be times where you might have three, four, five projects that align with your mission statement.

Now, if you want to never sleep and never have a social life or a family life, that's great and fine I applaud you for that, I've been there and done that, but as your life gets a little bit more complicated with a family or social life, you're going to have to prioritize things, especially if you've got projects or goals that align with your mission statement, but there's four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten of them. So how do you prioritize that? What gets worked on first, second, third? You've got to look at priorities and the way that I picked my priorities, just again to give you an example is, it was family, charity and faith, and then building my net worth.

Those were the three most important priorities for me. Now you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, how does family fit into your mission statement?" It doesn't always have to.im not saying that your priorities have to be in your mission statement, or be a part of your mission statement and align with it, your just looking at your priorities. Then comes charity and faith. Some people might think to themselves, "Well, how does that align with your mission statement?" Well, it doesn't. Building net worth, now that does fit, or align with my mission statement, because building my net worth is very important to me, it's very important to leave that legacy for my children, or for my wife if I were to pass on before her, but building my net worth is important and parts of my mission statement and core values align with that.

Now it's time to flip it. If I build my net worth, I can give more to charity, and usually my charity is tied to my faith, as far as the charities that I give to. For an example, I sponsor a little girl in Honduras, and that's actually through a faith-based channel. This girl is able to get all of her necessities living in Honduras, such as schooling, such as being taught faith, such as being able to have clothes. Her grandmother takes care of her, but her grandmother is very poor, her grandmother also takes care of her siblings. Being able to send money and sponsor her, is very important because I can help her grandmother out with clothes, with food, with necessities, with her schooling.

Also building my net worth does help my family. If I were to pass away, when my kids grow older and they need to go to college, or they need to have braces, or their first car, not that I'm saying that I would buy them a brand new car, that that's why I'm building my net worth, but there's going to be times in your life when your children are going to have needs. If you're a parent, you know exactly what I'm talking about. imagine yourself being 40, possibly your kids 20, let's say you have a daughter, she gets pregnant and she's in a situation where she needs medical bills paid, she needs stuff for the baby.

You don't want to be that parent that cannot help your child. No matter what your parenting style is, saying, "Oh, I would never buy a brand new car for my child. I would never just hand them money, they're going to have to work for it and earn it." Listen, that's great, that's how I am too, but there's going to be times where you want to help out, and your child's going to be in need and you don't want to be that parent that doesn't have the money to help them, 'cause that's an awful feeling, trust me. I've been there, I know how that is.

Let's just remove away the child, say it's your best friend, say it's your mother, say it's you really want to go on this conference that's in San Diego, because you feel you're going to learn something, but you can't afford a plane ticket. There's different things there, and so building my net worth, even though it's my third priority, it helps the two above it, the charity and faith, and the family. However, I'm not going to put my family over to the corner so I can build net worth. I'm not going to put my charity and faith in the corner so that I can build net worth.

That's why those are above my net worth. As an entrepreneur, sometimes it's very easy to be working on a project, it's very important to you, you have your own personal deadline for it, and maybe your friends call you up and say, "Hey, let's go grab a beer," and you say, "No, I can't." Turn that around to your family. Say your daughter or your son comes to you and they're like, "Daddy, daddy, let's go to the zoo," and you say, "Oh honey, I can't because I've got this deadline." You don't want to be that person, trust me. You just do not want to be that parent.

I'm not going to put my family to the corner, I'm not going to put my charity and faith to the corner just to build net worth. That's why those are above. Those are my priorities, I have three. You might have four or five, but you really need to figure out what's important in your life as far as priorities, because the now that you have these core values, and you have this mission statement, and you have these priorities, your life's going to be aligned to what you actually want, because you've decided it. You've decided what your core values are, you've build your mission statement to guide you in your decisions, you've got your priorities now so that when things conflict, you know exactly what's going to come first.

I mean if my daughters, or my son, or my wife comes to me and they tell me, "You know, I would really love to go to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade," I'm not going to say no, because I'm busy building net worth. Obviously I'm not going to let them tell me that they need to go on a vacation every week either, which takes time away from my company, takes time away from me building my net worth, but I'm going to do that. I'm going to make time for that trip and put building my net worth to the side, because it's very important. That's my priority, is my family.

It's not just material things either. It could be very much spending time with my children, spending quality time with my wife, going out on a date with my wife. Helping my mom with a problem that she has, helping my brother who might be in the hospital. Those things are always going to come first, and even though a lot of you are thinking, 'Well, yeah, duh, family always comes first," I'm going to be real honest, there's a lot of you that don't think that way. Family first, charity and faith second and then building my net worth. Those are my three priorities. When I'm going through life day by day and I'm making goals for the future, I know exactly what I should be working on. I don't have to worry about getting things done, or Pomodoro, or Zen Habits.

Any of this other stuff that you throw out there, I don't have to keep track of that. I know exactly what my core values are, I know what my mission statement is, I know what my priorities are. I know what I should be working on. It's that damn easy. That's how I've got it structure for myself. Yours will be totally different, that's fine, that's who you are and what you want to do. But those are probably the three cornerstones that are most important, core values, then the mission statement, then priorities. With everything I've taught you, you've got to be brutally honest with yourself. A lot of people just are newer with themselves.

They're too busy trying to please the world, be materialistic, they're off the world, they post things on Facebook and Instagram just for the likes, just for the shares. Personally I actually know people who, when they wake up in the morning, they think about what they're going to share on Facebook, and then they structure their day and their event based around that, and then take the selfie picture just so they can get a bunch of likes. That's somebody not being honest, in my opinion. But in order to do this exercise, you've got to be brutally honest with yourself, and this is why this task might actually take you 20 times to actually do it correctly.

It might take you a couple days, weeks, or even months to do correctly. I'm not saying you should stress over this, or fret over it and worry about it. Just do the exercise one time and see what you come up with. The after you do it for one time, the next day you might be in the shower, or driving to work, or just anything, sitting down at supper, and it hits you subconsciously that you need to change on of those words, or you need to change one of your priorities that this has come to light now. You've got to be brutally honest, because if you're not honest, you're not going to be in alignment with who you really are, and you're going to be unfulfilled, you're going to be unhappy, and maybe even depressed.

Being brutally honest is very important in this task and in order to be brutally honest, you might have to do this task several times to find out what the truth is. Also why this is important is that when you're making goals, your core values, mission statement, and priorities will help you with your goals, because ... I'll give you this example. I started thinking about my core values, my mission statement, my priorities, and I think to myself, "What should I be working on? Maybe I don't have anything to work on, let's skip SERPWoo, let's skip other stuff I'm involved in, what should I be working on?"

You might see an opportunity to write an ebook and you get to thinking about Amazon Kindle, and you say to yourself, "Does Amazon Kindle align with my core values, my mission statement, my priorities?" You realize it does, for an example, I've got to click down here a little bit ... for an example, working on Amazon Kindle projects for me would be very simple. It's not hard, for me at least, to write content. For you it might be, but for me it's not. This is why it's very important that you do things personally for you when you do these exercises, because it is about you.

Writing content for Amazon Kindle for an ebook is very simple for me. Creative, that's another one of my core values. Yeah, it's very creative. I can determine anything I write, what the subject is, who the characters are, I can write about any topic, I can add any amount of flair to it that I want. Is it entrepreneurial? Yes, it is. I'm working for myself, no one else can tell me how to do it, the sky is the limit when it comes to income. If you're very smart, eBooks can make you a lot of money. If you're just writing eBooks only and that's the only thing you do, maybe you won't make a lot of money and it won't be entrepreneurial for you, it'll just be a job.

But if you do it correctly as a marketing channel, it can be. Is it stable? I have a hard time believing that if you do things correctly with Amazon Kindle, that your income would be unstable. If you're always promoting, if you're always turning out new books, if you're always improving, it should be stable, because this is something people are buying over and over and over again, and you write it one time, you should get sales into future months as long as you are promoting it. Then you add another book and that just adds on and stacks on. Is it autonomy? That's another one of my core values.

Yes, it does provide autonomy. I have the freedom and independence and option to work on these project without getting permission. Now here's why these core values, these mission statement and these priorities are important, let's say okay, I've decided I'm going to do Amazon Kindle now. I set a goal for myself at a $100,000 a year. Now I know some of you are rolling your eyes who are publishers, but I'm just saying a 100,000 is my goal. I work for the full year, at the end of the year I've only made 45,000.now for some people they would look at it as, "Oh man, I missed my goal. I'm horrible. I terrible at this. I should just give up. I'm going to have to go find a day job."

That's not going to be true. That's not how you're going to feel. You might feel that you failed, because you've set a goal and you didn't hit it, and you know that you could've done better, but in reality you're not going to be that sad, you're not going to be that depressed and unhappy and unfulfilled, because you're actually doing something that aligns with your core values. You might not have hit your goal, and if you actually do goals correctly, you're always going to miss. If you're always hitting your goals, your goals are not hight enough, they're not tough enough.

If you're always hitting them, you need to make bigger goals. That's the whole point of goals, but you might have missed your goal of a $100,000 a year, but you're working on something and doing projects, aligning yourself with work that was really meant for you, because you dictated that out. I dictated out your core values, your mission statement, now Amazon Kindle fits my mission statement actually if you think about it, and you go back and look at my mission statement. It's solving problems with simplicity, entrepreneurship, it's given me autonomy and it's ... you know what? I actually have to scroll back up to read my own mission statement here.

To solve problems with simplicity, creativity, and entrepreneurship while creating a full and stable life that provides autonomy. Kindle can fit into that, so I'm doing work that fits my core values, my mission statement, and it does kind of fit into my priorities, because it's helping me build my net worth if I do it correctly. It could fit into charity and faith if I were to write a religious ebook. It could potentially help my family as well, of course that's side effects of it. But even if you miss your goals, you're not going to be unfulfilled, you're not going to be unhappy, you're not going to be depressed, 'cause you're actually doing work that fits you, that was what you wanted.

It's not going to be like a job. If your goal is to make a $100,000 a year on a job, and you go a full year working for a company and you don't become a director and you don't become a C-level executive, or even a Vice President, you're probably making $45,000 a year, you're going to be mad that you didn't hit your goal, but more importantly you're going to be depressed, unfulfilled, and unhappy because you're stuck in this suck job that you just don't like and you're doing work that you do not enjoy does not align with your values.

Now that you've learned all this, I want to tell you what to look out for. If you do this exercise and let's say you do it a couple of times and you feel that you really got it down pat, you've got these core values, you've got this mission statement, you've got these priorities, and let's say a month or two pass by and you're realizing that something still isn't right. You still are at a low point, maybe you're unhappy, unfulfilled, depressed, something just isn't working. It could be lots of external factors, but if I condense it down to what this exercise and podcast is about, more than likely you've picked the wrong values.

You've picked the wrong priorities. You didn't practice the alignment of your task and goals with your values. If you make these core values and you make this mission statement and you make these priorities, but then you don't change your task, you're still going to the day job, you're still doing X, Y, Z that you did before you made these values and mission statement and priorities, you're still going to be unhappy. Once you make these core values, mission statement and priorities, you've actually got to change your life. You've actually got to be active with it. Day by day once you do this, you're going to have to tell yourself possibly, "I have to quit this job."

Yes, there might be financial consequences to that. It might take you three or four months to be able to quit your job. You're going to have to change some habits potentially, and it might take you time to change those habits. You're not going to be happy, fulfilled, if you're still doing the old tasks, the old habits, that you had before this exercise. You've actually got to change your life, have time pass the day you do change your life, say it takes you three months to quit your job ... you did the task today, the exercises today, but it takes you three months to change your job.

Well, the day you actually leave your job, that's when you start counting, "Am I happy? Am I fulfilled?" You can't cheat the system. You might also still be unhappy, or unfulfilled if this works for you and it works for two years, and then you find yourself back at a low point. Well you need to redo this exercise, because in that amount of time you might have grown mentally into a new set of values, and your old ones are holding you back or hurting you now. We all grow as people. For some of us it might take a decade, others it might be a year, and for some of us it might be six months.

If you did this exercise today and in six months you won the lottery and you won $65 million, your priorities and your values and your mission statement will probably change. It doesn't have to be as drastic as the lottery, you can become a new parent, you could've landed a new job, circumstances might have changed. You might've had a death in the family, and that death made you realize certain things about your life. At any type of big life event, or even just as time passes, you're going to want to redo this exercise because your values will probably change and you need to now make new values and new mission statement and new priorities.

The last tip that I have is choosing your core values. I'm circling back to the core values now, because I know a lot of people will have trouble with this. The core values is the cornerstone of this whole exercise. It's that important. Being brutally honest, being true to yourself, so the last tip is about core values. For those that are having problems with core values, now you really need to ask yourself why this value resonates with you. You might find several values and they sound good, they sound great, you're happy with them, you need to ask yourself why that's important.

Because sometimes asking yourself why leads to a revelation that the reason why you like this is actually based on another core value. To give you an example, one of my old core values was individuality. I was really happy with that, I loved it. I thought it was excellent. That's really what I wanted to have. I even made a mission statement that included individuality in it. I had to ask myself, "Well, why is individuality important to me?" The thoughts that came out of that were I don't want to be another sheep. I don't want to have to do things just because other people said so.

If I can't genuinely be me, I'm not an individual, I'm just another part of the crowd. As I went through that exercise, I asked why four or five times. Each thing that came out of that, I asked why about that specific outcome. What I really learned about myself was it really wasn't about individuality, it was about being creative. That's why creativity is now one of my core values and individuality is not, because at the root of it all, if I am creative and I let that creativity out, I'm an individual. You cannot be an individual that has individuality if you have no creativeness, because otherwise you're copying somebody else and you're copying their creativeness or their creativity.

A lot of you might argue with me with that, and try to come up with examples, but again, the root of this exercise is what it means to me and how I perceive it, and how I understand the word, not how somebody else understand the word and its meaning and its value. It's how I interpret it. For me, being an individual or having individuality, the root of that was having creativity. If I don't have any creativity and I don't practice it and I don't use it and I don't express it, I'm not an individual. I don't have any individuality. When you're going through these core values, whether you're having trouble with them or not, you actually have to ask why.

Once you ask why, you need to ask why again, and again, and again, and if after asking why several times doesn't change you, that's the value you need to stick with unless there are values that have more priority or they resonate more with you. That's the value you need to stick with. If you realize after asking why several times that another value is actually what fits in there and that's the root, that is the value that you need to go forward with, just like I did with creativity over individuality.

As we wrap up this podcast today, I hope that you have learned some very important information to help guide you into 2018 and to help guide you for the rest of your life. Again, I feel that this is very important. People are just kind of out there robotically going through the motions and not really living their life. I'm not saying that this is the cure all or solution for all of your problems, but if you don't start somewhere and you don't be true to yourself, you're always going to have problems being depressed or unfulfilled and unhappy. You are not going to have this marker to help you, guide you through life to make decisions and to improve yourself.

I really would love that if you've listened to this podcast that you actually do this exercise, maybe you need to listen to this podcast two or three times, but do the exercise today if possible, because if you're like most people, you'll say that this is great, that this is a good idea, you'll make a plan to do it, and then it just doesn't happen because life gets in the way. It's going to be the life that you hate right now that gets into the way. You're going to kick yourself a year from now or two years from now when you realize that you're still in this life, that it's unfulfilled and you're unhappy and you're depressed, so do the exercise today.

If you want to get more information, you can find a post that I did on buildersociety.com, you can look at other people's experiences and result. You can actually learn a little bit more than what I can fit into this podcast. Again, it's at buildersociety.com, they've got a search function, you can just type in "alignment." You'll find my post if you use that keyword there. You can also go to leanvertising.com, which is an old blog that I have. I haven't wrote their since 2016. Most of the posts are from 2015 and 2014, but if you search through that blog, you will come up with my Dream Life series, which also touched on this, it's a six-part series.

But you can go to any one of those websites to get more information, but the most important thing is I would actually do this exercise today. I would actually listen to this podcast a few more times, maybe repeat the exercise a few times, maybe over a week time period so that you get the true core values. From that point, once the core values are done, you can do the mission statement and the you can do your priorities. I'm telling you guys, this changed my life, I know it has changed other people's lives.

Again, I'm not saying it's a cure all or solution for everything, but it's definitely going to make you think and rethink what's important in your life and how you achieve that and how you build the roadmap to get to your happy life, to the life where you're fulfilled, and you're being true to yourself and doing everything you can to make yourself happy and achieve your goals. Again, my names Jason Brown and I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. If you have any questions, comments or concern, leave them below and we'll get back to you next week. Thanks. Bye bye.

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