 Hey, John Crestani here, and today I'm going to go over the number one success secret that nobody shares. So, get prepared, strap in. I'd have a pen and a notepad ready to take notes, because this is going to be a whopper. Now, barely anybody takes time to reflect. Most entrepreneurs get lost on the hamster wheel, and really never get off to look around. We're talked to hustle, hustle, hustle, and we're never talked to take time to reflect. Now, if you only hustle and you never reflect, you end up hustling on the wrong thing, and you end up using your time inefficiently. You'll also ultimately get burnt out, because you'll get worse results since you never take time to look up or look from down on yourself and reflect and analyze the activities you're doing and the results you're getting doing them. If you take time to reflect, you'll see what's going wrong. You'll start spotting patterns, and you'll be able to address them and analyze them, be aware of them, and fix them. You can also see the bigger picture to actually know where it is you're ultimately going. This not only helps keep you motivated, but it helps course correct yourself along the way. You can also focus on how what you're doing fits out with your overall goals in life, whatever those may be. I've spoken many times before on how important it is to have specific goals. And you might just find out that what you're doing doesn't work out, and it doesn't fit in with your bigger goals. And you might have to get rid of it and switch paths. Only reflection will show you this. From a personal point of view, I really differentiate reflection versus emotional reaction. And there's a big difference. Now, emotionally reactive approach to something is very different than acting based on reflection. One area which I was able to reflect on myself and what I was doing wrong was I was in Santa Monica. I was drunk at some party with a bunch of fellow entrepreneurs. My friend was driving me from whatever, we're at some bar and we were going to a cigar lounge. And this was a very successful man worth over $10 million, you know, lots of money in a big family, big houses. And I went downstairs into the parking garage to get in his car and he was driving a minivan. This guy worth millions of dollars over $10 million drove a minivan, but not just any minivan. When I got in it, he said, oh, I've put special modifications in this minivan to make it go much faster. It's like it's a sleeper. And while that was kind of cool, it was still a minivan. And I asked him, why don't you drive an Aston Martin? You can drive any car you can afford any car you want. Why not an Aston Martin or something like that? And what he told me was he said, well, I can't fit my family in there. And I thought to myself, hmm, this is his priority in life, is to have family. And I thought about what my priority in life was, if it was to be a single, to be a bachelor, maybe have a girlfriend or something, to be a bachelor with an Aston Martin, with a Ferrari, with a Lamborghini, or if it was to be a cool dad in a minivan. And I realized that the way I was living my life was I was trying to be the bachelor in the Aston Martin. When really my goal was to be the cool dad in the minivan, or in my case, a truck. So I course corrected. I spent a lot of time and I course corrected. I ended up proposing to my girlfriend at the time, Sarah. And now I have two beautiful daughters and a wife. And I hope I'm the cool dad, but I'm not sure, but we'll see. But that was deep reflection. And I looked at things in perspective to my goals. And I looked at the pattern of what I was doing and where I was headed. Since that time, I also started saving more money. And I started doing a lot of things differently in life, all because of the cool dad in the minivan. But reflection doesn't just pertain to life go-holes or life direction. It also pertains to your specific numbers in business, in marketing. Whether you're doing free traffic sources or paid traffic sources, because you want to be able to identify and cut the losers and scale the winners. I reflect on my numbers regularly in business, so I know what's working and what's not. In fact, before I even start doing a marketing campaign, I already know what numbers I'm trying to hit. I already have an idea of what numbers my competitors are looking at. Now, the more I reflect on numbers in business, the better my campaigns, my advertising campaigns, and my business does in general. You can only manage what you measure. Now, entrepreneurs who know their numbers end up doing very well. Entrepreneurs who don't care about their numbers and are just looking at everything from a very short-term, day-to-day basis. Always end up floundering. I've seen it over and over again. I've been doing business for a little while. Most people are short-term thinkers. I see 99% of you out there are short-term thinkers. Now, if you don't know what numbers you need to hit, you just kind of endlessly drift along from business opportunity to business opportunity. And you may even make a little bit of money. But you never make a lot of money. You want to figure out what sorts of numbers are important in your business so you can focus on them. Now, in affiliate marketing, numbers you're looking at are CPA, EPC, stuff like that. Each business has a particular important number that you want to look at. You should know exactly how many sales, leads, clicks, impressions that you need to hit your target. So, for instance, if I wanted to be making a million dollars a month, I know that I'd have to be getting roughly 1,000 sales per day. If I'm promoting weight loss products, I'd need 1,000 conversions a day because I'm assuming the average product in the weight loss industry for affiliate marketers is $35 CPA. So I need 1,000 sales a day over the course for 30 days to get to my numbers. To get 1,000 sales a day, I need roughly 10,000 clicks per day to the affiliate network on my landing page. Now, to get 10,000 clicks per day, I need to be getting roughly, let's call it, 50,000 people going to my landing page. Now, to get 50,000 clicks to my landing page a day, I would need to get 5 million ad impressions per day. So I'd need to show my ad 5 million times a day. So I'd either need to find search terms that are searched 5 million times a day or I'd need to find websites that get roughly 5 million visitors a day. That's the math to making a million dollars a month. But I broke it down into very specific chunks. So I know exactly what I need to do. How might something like that inform us of what we need to do? Well, instead of focusing on advertising on websites that get 50,000 visitors a day, I'd only make sure to focus on websites that get 5 million visitors a day. And I'd figure out how and I just keep working on getting an ad on those. That way I know that whenever I want, I go to a million dollars a month. Any financial call can be broken down into these simple things. And last but not least is spend time reflecting with a mentor so they can help you course correct. Review your numbers with a mentor if you're coming up short on them. They can tell you how to improve various numbers so that you get to your targets. The numbers you wanted to improve might not be the most important numbers to improve. For example, you might think you need more leads to get more sales. But they might show you just how you can increase your sales conversion rate. Now you're getting more sales with the same number of leads. And when you increase your leads faster, you'll now be able to get to a higher income level assuming you're getting paid for those leads. This is the power of having a mentor who can help you with this. And I'd suggest only get a mentor who understands the numbers. Somebody else isn't really worth it. Now one of my mentors, he recently sold a company for about 50 million dollars. And it was a technology company. He made a lot of money. It was in a similar sector and he couldn't retire. But I mean again, for people who are successful, generally successful people like working. So they don't know what to do. Even when they have a lot of money, they just keep working, right? That's what successful people like working. Unsuccessful people don't like working, right? I had set a standard of three months to find somebody to hire for a technical role in my company. Three months. That's the time limit I gave myself. And it was a reasonable time limit given other conversations I've had with people who were also looking to hire for this particular technical role in their company. And what I did was after every serious interview that I went through with somebody for this role, I would call up my mentor or I'd send him an email or send him notes or something, send him a text. And I'd ask him his thoughts if this person seemed like a good fit to work in my company. Valuable advice, right? Somebody who'd sold his company for 50 million dollars is giving me advice. For free. This didn't come through any sort of pre-existing relationship. This came from me doing outreach and creating new relationships. This came from me putting in the effort. From me, you know, respecting that person's time. And now I have somebody who's made tens of millions of dollars to reflect with. Now, how did I show this person I was worth talking to? And after my first conversation with any mentor, I do everything they tell me to do. And I only follow up with them once I've done everything that they've suggested I do and gone above and beyond. Now, I've had a number of people ask for me to mentor them. And I've given the same advice. I said, move out to Malibu, California, do affiliate marketing, make your first couple sales, and get a job in the marketing industry. Not wildly complicated things. Nobody's done it. I'd be happy to mentor someone, but they have to do those three things for me to even consider it. Most people, they only want to hear advice that resonates with something they already believe in their heart. Most people way beyond 99% of people are unwilling to take advice and do things they are uncomfortable doing, even if that person is more successful than them. Whereas in my case, I've trained myself to be able to identify people who are more successful than me. In this case, this person's wealth is public record. Their company sold for over $50 million. So I know this person is more successful than me. Therefore, when this technical person gave me their advice on what to do, I knew I could trust this person if I'm looking to become wealthier than I already am. And even though their advice felt uncomfortable and I did not agree with it and it didn't make sense to me, I did it anyways. It's really weird that my business is being led in these directions which I don't even know. I don't even feel comfortable with. We set up a different corporate brand for myself which cost me thousands of dollars. I spent the last three months hiring for a role that has zero revenue impact in my company. In fact, it just costs me. This new department I set up is costing me $30,000 additional a month. I don't know, it's technical stuff. I've always just outsourced the work for cheap. Why do I need to hire an American for this role? But again, I take the advice of my mentors. I'm willing to do things I don't even agree with and I'm uncomfortable with because I trust the process. And the process is to become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, you need to follow people who have already done it before. And it will probably lead you to do things you've never been willing to do before. So I hope that helps. And let me know if you have any questions for me in the comments below. Subscribe to my channel if you enjoy hearing about marketing and mayhem and success and mindset. If you wanna talk with me kind of casually, I don't spend much time with people on the internet, honestly, but if you do wanna talk to me casually, make sure to follow me on Twitch. And I play games occasionally. I play RPGs, JRPGs, card games, et cetera. So you can follow me there. And I don't know, maybe we could talk casually. And also if you want to really learn this stuff, I encourage you to join my Discord chat community. People learn from each other better. People learn from groups better. It's a mixture of one-on-one learning, just knowledge in books and group learning. So that's what works best for social creatures. So I encourage you to join the conversation there and add value. Once you join our chat community, our forum, add value to three other people's lives before asking for value in return, okay? Remember that. Answer three people's questions. Help three people out before you ask for something. The universe is gonna be treat you way better if you give value before you ask for value in return. If you notice, before I tune off, I'm wearing a blue origin T-shirt right here. I'm wearing a blue origin hat. This is Jeff Bezos's space company, which is the goal is to go out to space, establish a lunar base, and then use that as a launching pad for asteroid mining expeditions. The first trillionaires will come through asteroid mining. The amount of wealth and resources in space are enough to really end all wars and make everybody millionaires on the earth. So this is where abundance happens. What will happen is if we don't go to space and we don't mine asteroids is more people will have more babies and there will be less land for each person and more people and countries will fight over increasingly scarce resources and will end up in a form of communism and war and caste systems that just really allow for no social mobility and a lot of people end up dying and there's a lot of problems, okay? That's what happens. But the good news is that there's unlimited resources and all this can be prevented if we just go to space. So I encourage you to just start looking into space and asteroid mining and skills to go to space. And if you want a radical change in your life and you want to become successful in a radically different way, look into space, look into the skills needed to join the US Space Force, for instance, sort of work for a company like Blue Origin or Elon Musk's SpaceX or Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. All of these companies have a huge demand for skilled people right now and not enough people are going into the science, technology, engineering and math careers that support space programs. So I highly encourage you look into these things. Learn. There's so much opportunity right now in today's world to become rich from the internet or technology or software, space or all these things. There's endless amounts of opportunities out there but you need to go out and do it and acquire those skills and it's gonna be hard work, especially to go into space but they need you. And if you live in America, America especially needs you to go into these sorts of careers and help these companies out because that is the next frontier. That space is where we belong because we were born into paradise. We need to bring what's out there back and help make this paradise even better for everyone around us. Sorry, I went on a little rant about space but I'm gonna be talking more about space moving forward and why it's so important we go up there and really become entrepreneurs in space. So talk to you soon, have a good one. See ya, bye.