Want Ridiculously-Big Success? Write a Fantastic Testimonial For Yourself, Then Earn It. Here’s How.
A refreshing way of approaching success.
For the first time, I’m creating a high-ticket coaching package helping others create a million-dollar online business.
One of the best ways to get people to follow you is by showing them others who have followed in your footsteps and achieved their dreams by doing so. In other words: testimonials and endorsements.
I was browsing one of my favorite authors Ryan Holiday’s website. He has a list of testimonials. Honestly, read this stuff:
“Ryan Holiday is one of his generation’s finest thinkers…” — Steven Pressfield, author of the New York Times bestseller The War of Art
Ryan Holiday is one of the most promising young writers of his generation.” — George Raveling, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, Nike’s Director of International Basketball
“I don’t have many rules in life, but one I never break is: If Ryan Holiday writes a book, I read it as soon as I can get my hands on it.” — Brian Koppelman, screenwriter and director, Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen and Billions
I mean, are you kidding me? Look at those reviews!
I don’t have those testimonials (yet). You probably don’t yet, either.
But imagine what your life would look like if well-known, powerful, successful people said those things about you.
“[Your name] is one of the most brilliant thinkers you’ll ever meet.”
“I immediately buy whatever [your name] is selling. That’s how good she is.”
“If you ever wondered about hiring a coach, [your name] is worthy every penny, no matter how much she charges.”
If people said that about you (and meant it), you’d be able to live life entirely on your terms.
You could name your price, or just not work at all.
You could work with whomever you wanted, whenever you felt like it.
You could say no to anything that didn’t really interest you. You could travel the world. You could be anything and do anything.
But you need that testimonial first.
How do you get ridiculously big success?
Write out the most fantastic testimonial for yourself you can write, then earn it. Here’s how.
Begin With the End in Mind
Getting from where you are now to where you want to be isn’t always clear. It’s murky and difficult to find out what to do next.
That’s why you must begin with the end in mind: identify the final step of your success, then work backwards to make a plan to get there.
For instance: let’s say your ultimate goal is to be making $10,000/month selling your products or services. That’s the last step: pick a deadline, then work backwards from there.
The second-to-last step might be to make $5,000. Make a deadline for that. A few steps behind that might be a goal as simple as selling your first $100 online course or hour or coaching. Very do-able and not too hard.
Keep working backwards. Go all the way back to day one, to the very first step: buying a website domain, making a phone call, buying a book, asking for help.
The most important step is the last one: your ultimate goal. Once you have clarity, spend your time thinking about how to get there. Make a concrete step-by-step plan to get there.
If You Want to Truly Make a Difference, You Need to Raise the Stakes (and Your Prices)
In his book The Four Hour Workweek, best-selling author and entrepreneur Ti Ferris described what made him incredibly motivated — and what made him want to fall asleep out of boredom.
When the stakes are low, it’s much harder to put in your best effort. If something doesn’t really matter that much, you’re unlikely to put in anything except the bare minimum.
But if you raise the stakes to an incredibly high level, you kickstart your body and mind into hyperdrive. You can tap into incredible energy and focus, and quickly accomplish an enormous amount of high-level work.
What are you stakes right now? What happens if you fail? What would happen if you succeed?
Is that motivating enough for you? If not, it’s time to raise the stakes.
Back in the day, I used to work as a telemarketer for an online, for-profit university. Unfortunately, a lot of students who enrolled decided to drop out of college.
Many of my coworkers didn’t really care — they just wanted to make sales and get paid. But I wanted to make sure every student I enrolled had the highest chance of success.
I discovered one of the best ways to do this: during our initial call, I made sure my students had a crystal-clear picture of what their life would look like if they dropped out, or didn’t go to school at all. In most cases, they’d be stuck in the same rut with nothing to really show for it except being one year older.
That was really motivating for a lot of them. That’s why I had one of the highest student success rates in my whole department. My students stayed in school, because failure was very real and painful for them, while success — being the first person in their family to graduate college, to finally get paid what they’re worth, to be a good example to their children — was very motivating.
Raise the stakes. High-level rewards will bring out high-level work from you, which is exactly what you need to succeed.
Another high-level strategy to start raising the stakes today:
Start charging 10x more for your services.
If you want a truly glowing testimonial from high-level people, you need to be offering bigger solutions to bigger problems. If you charge someone $100 to solve a simple problem for them, they’ll probably be grateful. But their testimonial won’t be as big as you need it to be for truly big success.
You need to charge more to solve truly big problems. Because if someone pays you $5,000 dollars and finally achieve one of their most important goals, it’s only natural they’re going to leave you one of the best testimonials you’ve ever had. Those are real stakes. You should spend your time learning how to solve real stakes.
If you’re charging 10x more for your services, you better be able to back that up. Which forces an important ultimatum on yourself — get better, or go broke.
And that changes everything.
It can change your life. It can change your family’s life. I’m not being cute about that — I’m dead serious. It changed my family’s life.
See, making a few extra hundred bucks probably won’t change that much in your life.
…But making a few extra thousand dollars? That’s real money. For many of us, that’s total life-changing money. If your services are that good, you’ll quickly get more and more testimonials that bring in more and more clients and followers.
Invest 100 Hours Learning a Rare Skill That People Need, and You’ll Start Making Money Instantly
Marketing guru Seth Godin once wrote:
If you invest 100 hours in a rare skill, you’re likely to acquire it. If you could learn to sharpen a tool better than your peers, organize a high-performance database, see the nuances in some sector of cryptography, know how to build a pretty-good WordPress site or really understand the arc of a particular writer’s career, you’d have something of value. Something that anyone who was focused enough to invest 100 hours could have, but few will choose to commit to.
String together a few of those, or dig deep and develop a 1,000 hour asset and now you truly have something.
If you really wanted to, you could probably invest 100 hours into learning a new skill in just a few months. After that, you could start selling your services for a high rate and get testimonials, opening enormous possibilities for you and your success.
But that’s the point — most people simply can’t do the work yet. They haven’t learned the skills necessary to solve high-level problems.
Here’s a little exercise. Let’s pretend I just became your number one fan. I’m hooked. I’m ready to buy, right now.
What’s the most expensive product I could buy from you?
$50?
Maybe $100?
Do you even have a product?
If you don’t have big-ticket items and are only selling low-priced products, how do you expect to earn a serious income and get raving testimonials? If you want big money, you need to sell big things.
Part of the problem is that many people simply aren’t thinking big enough. “Success is determined not so much by the size of one’s brain as it is by the size of one’s thinking,” wrote Dr. David Schwartz. Deep down, if you don’t believe you’re the kind of person who could make a million dollars a year, you certainly won’t be making that kind of money — even if you claim that’s what you want.
It’s time to upgrade — your mindset and your products. Stop spending energy tinkering with low-level problems that aren’t getting you the testimonials and endorsement you need anyway. Increase your prices and upgrade your services and products.
In Conclusion
A while back, I made an online course about behavioral change. It was cheap ($27) and not too big.
Happily, I noticed a bunch of sales coming in. Over the next several months, I was getting nearly a customer a day who bought it.
I decided I wanted to start getting some testimonials for the course. So I emailed everyone who took it, and asked for stories and reviews of the course.
No one responded.
After doing some more research and talking to a few customers, I started to realize the course wasn’t big enough; it wasn’t solving big problems, it wasn’t really moving the needle for most people.
So I re-did the course. I made it bigger, and set it up to actually solve big problems.
Now, I’m getting far more testimonials from people saying the course actually did something in their lives. I’m using those reviews to sell bigger and better things, making more money and seeing more success than ever before.
If you want ridiculously high-success, write a raving testimonial for yourself.
Then earn it.
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