Ep. #222: Motivation Monday: Opportunity Doesn’t Knock–It Whispers

[00:00:00] Here’s something I think that most people don’t know opportunities are whispers, not fog horns.

Hey, this is Mike from muscle for life and welcome to another episode of my podcast. This episode is part of a weekly series that I have dubbed motivation Monday. Yes, I know. So creative of me. What can I say? I’m just a genius. Seriously though, the idea here is simple. Every Monday morning, I am going to post a short and punchy episode that I hope gets you fired up to tackle the workouts, work, and everything else that you have planned for the week ahead.

Because it’s one thing to know what you want to But it’s something else all together to actually make yourself do it. And I hope that this series gives you a jolt of energy and encouragement to go ahead and do all of those [00:01:00] things that you want to do. If you like what you hear, then make sure to check back every Monday morning for the latest and greatest installment.

All right it’s another Monday and that means that it’s time to get motivated. And let’s start with a quote. This one from Larry Page, the co founder of Google. He said that even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely. That’s the thing people don’t get. My little addition to that is.

That’s one of the reasons why if you’re going to think, you might as well think big, right? Hitch your wagon to a star. And today’s discussion is going to be about opportunities because success in any endeavor, in any aspect of our lives, it requires opportunities, right? So it requires opportunities for us to make profitable use of our talents and our skills.

It requires opportunities for us to present our ideas to the right people. It requires opportunities for [00:02:00] us to create the right products and the right services, opportunities to meet the right people, to do the right things and so forth. So everybody knows this of course, but here’s something I think that most people don’t know.

Opportunities are whispers, not fog horns. Now, what do I mean by this? What I mean is that. Every day, everywhere you go, the soft lilts of opportunity are there. They can be heard, but most people aren’t listening correctly. They aren’t tuning into them correctly. Instead of carefully listening for these murmurs, they are rushing around and they are waiting for thunderclaps of revelation to lift them off their feet and fill them with energy.

inspiration and certainty. And in my experience, that’s just not how the world works. Again, opportunities are whispers, not fog horns. Now I’ve experienced this myself in my career in the fitness industry, which has been a bit of a rocket [00:03:00] ride. So just in this last year, I sold about 240,000 books, and in the last five years I’ve sold now over a million books.

I’ve started a couple businesses. One is now a seven figure business, the other is an eight figure business. I have websites that get millions of visits a month, and so on and so forth. Now, if you ask me, that’s all great, but what I find more interesting personally. is the origin story, how it started, the opportunity, because it was barely a whisper.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or Advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth, so if you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on [00:04:00] social media, definitely tag me so I can say thank you. You can find me on Instagram at MuscleForLifeFitness, Twitter at MuscleForLife, and Facebook at MuscleForLifeFitness. So if I go back to 2011, I had a full time job doing very different work at that time.

And I wrote my first book bigger, leaner, stronger in my free time, a nights and weekends thing. And I self published it because I didn’t really want to go through the process of trying to convince an agent that I was worth representing and then trying to convince a publisher that I was worth publishing.

Because as an unknown author, That’s very hard to do. Instead, I figured that I was a good enough marketer and a good enough internet marketer in particular that I could just do it myself. And so I self published the book on Amazon’s Kindle platform and it started, I believe at 2. 99. So it’s a 3 book in the beginning.

And I didn’t really expect much to come of it because I didn’t have a website. I didn’t [00:05:00] have a name. I didn’t have any connections. I actually didn’t even have a plan at that time beyond publish the book and see if anyone cares. And so that’s what I did. And it sold maybe 20 copies in the first month. I think it sold fewer actually, but let’s just say at most 20 copies and it got its first positive review.

And I thought that was cool. Somebody bought my book and somebody liked it. That’s neat. And I didn’t really think about it more than that. Then though, the next month it sold about double the amount of copies. So maybe about, 30 to 40 copies and got a few more reviews, which also earned a nod from me again.

I thought that was pretty neat. Yeah. And I put my email address in there as well, just in case anybody wanted to contact me if they had questions. So I got a couple of emails, people saying they liked it, had some questions. And again, it was a curiosity. I thought it was interesting.

A couple months later, it had broken a hundred sales in a month. And although the project at that point, the book had really only made me a few hundred dollars. That’s when I started to wonder if this could go somewhere. Was this the whisper of an opportunity? Now keep in mind [00:06:00] also, I was doing nothing to promote the book.

Again, I had a full time job and at nights I would answer people’s emails. That’s it. I was not running ads. I was not doing any of the things that I’m now doing to sell a lot of books. And so again, at this point I was interested, was this the whisper of an opportunity or was it a red herring? Many years prior, I had thought that maybe I could make my living writing.

And at that time though, I didn’t really know how to go about it. And I went in another direction, which was I guess it was making my living writing, but not exactly a type of writing that I wanted to be doing necessarily because in my previous life I was creating employee training programs For various companies.

I worked in a lot of industries, but niched into the healthcare space in particular. And it was fine. It’s something I was good at. And there were things that aspects of it that were enjoyable, but it wasn’t ultimately what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And so that’s why I, decided maybe I’ll throw a book out there and see if I could go in that direction instead.

Yeah. And so coming back to [00:07:00] bigger, leaner, stronger, it’s now selling, a hundred plus copies a month. And that wasn’t enough to convince me to just quit my job and try to go all in on being a fitness person, of course, but it did perk my ears up and made me wonder if I could succeed as a fitness author.

Could I really go all in on it? And could I make a living doing something that I was more passionate about and that I enjoyed more? And at first I dismissed those musings, at least for the next couple of months, because there were plenty of reasons to not go there. Of course, the fitness industry is incredibly competitive and it’s cutthroat behind the scenes in many ways.

And getting noticed, of course, I knew was sure to be hard and would require a well thought out plan. And then. It would require executing really well on that plan. And, I also had bills to pay. And at that time I had some credit card debt even, so I couldn’t really afford a dramatic cut in my income.

And so I kept telling myself that, risking what I had, which was a stable, paying job to [00:08:00] chase what kind of seemed like a siren’s call was stupid, but there it was every day, whispering in my ear, as I sold more books. I couldn’t help, but wonder, could I be putting my skills to better use?

And so eventually I had to decide, was this an actual opportunity or was this an invitation to distraction or maybe even disaster? Now, ultimately, of course, I decided to pursue. That whisper, which indeed was an opportunity and actually a huge opportunity. And so what I did initially is I took again, some time at night, time on the weekends, and I revised that first edition of bigger, leaner, stronger based on reader feedback.

And, just made it a better book, republished it, started on another book, muscle myths, just to try that as an idea, put a trial balloon out there. And I also then. started on my first website, which was simply, it was like build healthy muscle. com. I think it was just Mike Matthews fitness.

Very creative. I know. And I also started doing some things to increase the visibility of bigger, leaner, stronger. I started doing, some book [00:09:00] giveaways, some ads, contacting various people in the fitness industry and offering to send it to them to check out. And as I continue to do more things, and as time went on Increased more and more.

And that was nice because I was able to use that money to pay off credit debt, credit card debt that I had accumulated mostly in my twenties being stupid, just traveling and spending too much money. And then at the end of 2012, so I published bigger, leaner, stronger in the beginning of 2012. So by the end of 2012, it was selling several thousand copies a month.

And I had a couple other books out there that were doing decently as well. And so at that point, I, that’s when I really recognized, okay, this truly is an opportunity to do something big and do something that I will enjoy more than what I’m doing or what I was doing at that time. And so I recruited my friend Jeremy to come work with me.

And we actually were going to do a, we’re going to start a publishing company at first because I actually, I really didn’t want to get into the fitness industry because there are a lot of things I don’t like about the fitness culture. I think a lot of it is [00:10:00] pretty fucking cheesy. And. Pretty narcissistic.

And a lot of hardcore fitness people, I think are also very cheesy and generally narcissistic. Just not my kind of people, not my kind of scene. So initially I didn’t want to really go all in on the fitness industry. I figured what I’ll do is I’ll continue to write myself. But I will also use what I’ve learned about selling books to publish other people’s books.

And so that’s the direction that Jeremy and I went in initially. We started probably got about two months into that, putting the website there, putting the whole plans and the whole strategy, what we were going to do there. And then we rethought our position. I just couldn’t help but see how big the opportunity really was to go into the fitness space and not just from a financial perspective, because you can actually make plenty of money if you can do well in the publishing space, but also in terms of personal satisfaction in terms of doing something that can help a lot of people in a very meaningful way.

And so ultimately. We decided to pivot away from the publishing company [00:11:00] and into fitness full bore. And so that was the end of 2012 is, moving into 2013. Now we started on muscle for life at that time, most of life launched in March of 2013 and we were off to the races. And now if you fast forward to today, of course, everything is big and shiny and the numbers are pretty impressive.

But remember, it all started today. With a very faint whisper. It really, I published bigger than you’re stronger on a Lark. I had heard about Amazon’s KDP platform because some dude named John Locke was the first guy for self published guy to sell a million books on Amazon’s KDP platform. And I saw, I read that story and that’s what inspired me to publish my first book, bigger than you’re stronger.

I said, Hey, who knows? Maybe people will like it. That’s about as much of an opportunity as I thought it was. And if you were to tell me then that I would be where I am now because of that, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’m too cynical. I’m too skeptical. I would say that is such a long [00:12:00] shot. That is such blue sky thinking.

I’m sorry. I’m an optimistic person, but I’m not delusional. So my point is, while my outcomes have become rather extraordinary, there was nothing extraordinary about how it all started. And that means that for you, your opportunities right now are whispering, they’re not yelling, they’re not knocking, they’re whispering.

If you’ve had any trouble finding opportunities to advance your career, your income, your relationships, any aspect of your life, really, you might be making the very common mistake that people make. And that is listening for fog horns and not whispers, looking for fireworks and not sparks. Even the best opportunities rarely announce themselves with trumpets and confetti.

They never come as signed and sealed gifts from the almighty. They never come with 100 percent money back guarantees. They’re often nothing more than Chances to improve on something that other people are already doing, to do something a [00:13:00] little bit different, to do it a little bit better. So start listening to the world around you a little more carefully and know that there is never a shortage of opportunities, never.

There’s only a shortage of people that can hear them and believe in them enough to do something with them. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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Lastly, if you didn’t like something about the [00:14:00] show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike at musclefullife. com. and share your thoughts on how you think it could be better. I read everything myself, and I’m always looking for constructive feedback, so please do reach out. Alright, that’s it. Thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.

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