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Know Before You Go
Getting lost in the woods can help you find a new trail in your business
The last (and final) time I hiked without a trail map was a few years ago on the Cross Timbers Trail on the Texas/Oklahoma border.
The Cross Timbers Trail is a 14 mile long backpack-able trail along the shore of the (regionally) famous Lake Texoma. It’s a beautiful hike any time of the year, weaving you in and out of gullies, over ridges and saddles, down to the shore and back up again into the woods over and over.
Being a very popular trail, I didn’t even look at the map before I went, despite there being an extremely detailed, full color, 5-foot-wide graphical map at the trailhead. It’s an out-and-back hike, it follows the lake, and it’s very well maintained by both the lake authority and a “friends of the trail” volunteer group.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, I had to learn my lesson once again in life, that as Ben Franklin quipped, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.
Long story short, I zigged when I should have zagged. Even with brightly colored orange trail blazes tacked to trees, I made a wrong turn on a shortcut and ended up hiking in a circle for about 20 minutes. Twice. (it hurts to admit that part). As I scrambled to update my AllTrails app with low cell signal, I eventually took a leap of faith and went the opposite direction that I thought I should go, and found the trail back to the parking lot.
It really really really… really… helps to know before you go.
That’s why the first step of your hike is to study.
Before you make a move to unlock profit in your business, make sure you know that trail well before you go. Research how other people have hiked that journey, what worked and what didn’t, and make sure you can identify pitfalls (before you fall in).
There are 11 trails in the Profit Hiker program, and here is what I recommend for people who have made it through each trail’s information:
Give each trail one full hour a day, for the next 2 weeks. Commit to 11 full hours of trail studying to change the future of your business forever. Treat each trail like it might be the one to unlock greatness. Create space to explore each idea to its fullest. Get creative.
Knowledge is power.
Onward and upward,
Simon Trask