When we talk about internet marketing and successful people who are running businesses online, one person almost always tops the list, and he is Anik Singal. Anik is the founder and CEO of Lurn, Inc. and VSS Mind. He is considered one of the most successful digital publishing marketers in the industry and specializes in product launches, building funnels, SEO, affiliate marketing and also management consulting.
BusinessWeek listed Anik as the top 3 “Best US Entrepreneurs Under 25” and also is also regarded as an Inc.500 CEO, listed two times among the Fastest Growing Companies in America.
He was raised in a lawyer family where his parents wanted him to be a professional lawyer, engineer, or a doctor, but not an entrepreneur. However, Anik knows deep within his heart that he has a calling in the business world. Despite earning a full scholarship and studying in a prestigious school for a degree in the medical field, Anik chose to follow his heart and dropped out from the college to build his own business.
Of course, it was not an instant success. Anik has gone through the thick and thin, he was struggling in the beginning to build a profitable online business and he was in debt as much as $1.7 million, but he did not give up. Anik continues to work on his business and eventually, he found the formula for success and the rest quickly became history.
Below are the top 10 success principles you can learn from Anik Singal and how he built his online business empire from scratch to the top.
1. Build Strong Core Beliefs
When it comes to achieving success, Anik believes that everyone needs to have a core belief that supports them and direct them on the right path. Most people fail to accomplish their goals and are struggling to make ends meet because their beliefs are not supporting their dreams.
Anik says that our inner beliefs are the foundation of a building. If the foundation is strong and solid, the building on top of it will be just a matter of planning and execution. And so if you want to build a successful business, you must first grow a strong belief system that will support your dream.
“It soon became obvious to me that my best mentors and teachers not only did great things but believed great things,” writes Anik in one of his books. People who operate from their inner conviction are the ones who will be successful. If your inner core beliefs are not in alignment with what your dreams, you will never attain the results you want no matter how hard you try.
Therefore, build a strong core belief system that will support your dream. When you truly believe that your dreams are possible, your actions will follow. What you do will be in harmony with your dreams, and eventually, the results will come. And this is the first step that everyone should follow if they want to live a successful life.
2. You Must Have a Dream
For Anik, building a successful internet business started as a dream. He was studying in the medical industry for a degree, but somehow, he has a bigger dream than just being a doctor. He knows that he wanted more and he always has a dream of being an entrepreneur. He wanted to earn more money, to build businesses and to help even more people through businesses.
And you have to be the same by starting with a dream. What is your dream and what do you want to accomplish in your life? If you look at children, they are crystal clear with their dreams. When you ask children what are their dreams, some will tell you that they want to be a doctor to save people, some will tell you they want to be a police to put all the bad guys in jail, and some will tell you that they want to be a superhero like Spiderman to keep the world a better place.
Regardless of what dreams these children have, they are absolutely clear and specific. They know exactly what they want in life. Things will be different when you ask an adult. Adults will tell you that they just want to be happy, get a better pay, able to settle their bills, etc. Their dreams are vague and small.
This is because as an adult, you have been going through failures and the conditioning from the people around you and the media. When you dream of becoming someone successful, people will tell you that it is impossible and ask you to be “realistic”. Over time, you have been conditioned to be mediocre. You do not dare to dream anymore and you choose to settle for living an average life.
Therefore, choose to reignite your dreams. Keep your dream alive and dare to envision the success you want. More importantly, dare to pursue what you desire by creating a blueprint.
3. Create a Blueprint
Anik is someone who strongly believes that success is engineered and not happened by chance. He says that he managed to build his business to skyrocket his profit because he has a blueprint and follows that blueprint. Just like baking a cake, you need a recipe.
When you have no idea how to do something, the easiest way to go about it is to follow a blueprint. You can ask someone who has done it and learns how to do it from a book. The key is that you need to follow a blueprint, which is a proven path to success.
Even if you are a total newbie and has no idea how to bake a cake, but when you follow a proven recipe, you will produce an almost similar result. Of course, the cake you bake may not be as delicious, but it will come very close to the result of the recipe. In other words, you can shortcut your learning curve and get the right result using proven methods.
And this is why Anik decides to write books and teach people how to build successful online businesses too. He understands that having a blueprint is important because as long as you follow the proven path, you will eventually arrive at the right place that you desire.
4. Set Mini Goals
Another important success principle shares by Anik is to focus on the things that you want. Anik says that writing down your specific goals and then breaking them into smaller mini-goals is what makes it possible to get out of the “dreaming mode” into the “action mode”.
Whatever dreams you have, you can define them as goals. And then turn them into smaller actionable steps according to your blueprint. And what you need to do then is execution. Most people have dreams, but they did not turn their dreams into goals, let alone breaking their goals into smaller actionable steps.
Imagine if you want to lose your extra body fat of 20 pounds. When you think about it, you may feel lousy because to lose 20 pounds, you may have to cut out desserts, drink 8 to 10 glasses of water each day, cut out soda, hit the gym and workout for hours, ride your bike, go jogging, and eat less. Even if you are motivated to do all these things, after a week and you step on the scale to check your weight, you will notice not much different. Perhaps, you may lose a pound or two, but 20 pounds? It is not likely going to happen within a week.
This is what Anik calls the motivation gap and this is why people are losing motivation and eventually giving up on their goals. Hence, Anik suggests people set mini-goals that give you little wins and motivation to win the war. Instead of setting a big goal of losing 20 pounds straight, set 4 mini-goals to lose 5 pounds each. And when you achieved that mini-goal, you will feel motivated and gained more confidence to continue to move forward.
5. Focus on What Works
After Anik successfully built his business to earning $10 million, he became famous and was featured in many mainstream media such as BusinessWeek. He then lost his focus on his passion and started doing something else. He built 3 global offices, hired a crazy number of employees, and lived the jet set lifestyle. He thought he had it all.
What truly happened was that he was deviating from his focus. Instead of growing his digital publishing business, he chose to focus on something else. He started to go away from the digital publishing business. And then the business took a nosedive and lost money. Anik was crashing into $1.7 million debt due to his lavish business expenses. And his health suffered too. He was hospitalized during a flight because he lost consciousness. And that became his wake up call.
Luckily, Anik regained his health and re-discovered his focus. He asked himself, “What was it that built my business the first time?” And then everything clicked. It was his digital publishing business that he has chosen to ignore. Anik then re-focused his energy into what he did best, building digital publishing business.
Anik found his focus again and able to turn everything around. This is why you should never deviate from your focus. When you are working on a plan and if it works, you should learn to improve it and repeat the process, not to deviate from it or do something else. Thus, do not lose your focus on what works.
6. Building Your Network of People
Anik Singal is someone who trusts that in order to build a successful business or to live a successful life, one must build a powerful network of people. He believes that it is not what you know that truly matter, it is who you know that will make or break your business and life.
This is the main reason Anik continues to attend seminars and conferences held around the world. He wanted to meet new people and to learn more from them. Anik even shares the same stage as Sir Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Airlines. He also makes friends with other big names such as Robert Kiyosaki and Bob Proctor.
And this is what you must do. Grow your network and join other successful people so that they will influence you and support you to go higher. The saying, “You are the average of the five people you mix with most of the time” makes sense. This is why highly successful people make friends with other successful people. They know that the people around them will influence and impact their thinking, and hence, their lives.
Therefore, identify other successful people in your industry that you can join. Make a conscious effort and put in the time to get to know them. When the people around you change, you will start to change as well.
7. Make the Right Choice
Anik once said, “A flash moment is a brief window of time where something shifts and the door to incredible opportunity swings wide open… At that moment, you have 2 choices. You either jump in and seize the day or you stand still and the door closes with you on the wrong side. It all comes down to your choice.”
You become who you are and where you are because of your choices. If you make the wrong choice, you will end up in the wrong place or the places that you do not want to be. If you make the right choice, you will get to where you want to be and living the life you always desire. It is that simple.
And so you must learn to make the right choices. And before you can tell if a choice is right for you, you must understand specifically what you want out of your life. When you know what you want, follow your heart and listen to your gut feeling, and then jump in when the choices come to you.
8. Listen to Your Gut Feeling
When Anik was studying in the college, he was going for the degree in the medical industry. He thought he wanted to be a doctor, but to his surprise, his inner feeling told him otherwise. Anik discovered that the more he studied the subject, the greater his rejection and the more hatred he developed.
What happened then was that Anik took a leap of faith and listen to his gut feeling. He dropped out from his college and went on to build businesses as an entrepreneur. This is what is happening to most people too. They have an inner feeling for their dreams, but they do not dare to listen to their intuition, instead, they choose to settle for something less and follow the crowd. They end up working in a job that they do not like.
While there is absolutely nothing wrong with holding on to a job. If it is a job that you love doing and are passionate about, then it is perfectly alright. The problem is that most people ended up working in a wrong job that they do not like. And if you don’t like what you do, you will never be able to produce an amazing result from it.
This is just like how Steve Jobs put it, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
9. Bounce Back Higher
One of the most important success principles Anik has developed is his ability to bounce back from failure. Anik says that in his journey to building a successful online business, he has faced with many rejections, setbacks, and failures. However, he learned how to handle them by bouncing back stronger and higher. Just like when he was in deeply in debt. Most people will call it quit when they are in such a huge debt, but not Anik. Anik learns to bounce back higher from his failures.
You must adopt this principle too if you want to be successful in your venture. The journey to success is not going to be smooth. It is a bumpy ride where you will have to face challenges and setbacks, but what is more important is to not let your failures hold you down. Instead, you must learn to turn your failures into feedback, so that you can become better and bounce back higher.
10. Giving Back
And like all other highly successful people, Anik Singal is someone who believes in giving back to the society. He has founded a non-profit organization called “For All Our Good” and has also built 4 schools in India. He has the aim to build over 100 schools in Mumbai and then scale to the rest of the world.
One big difference between successful people and ordinary people is that successful people work for a cause, while ordinary people choose to work for the money. People like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Jack Ma, and others are rich beyond most people’s wildest dream, but they choose to continue to work rather than stop to enjoy the money. This is because they like what they do and they believe there is a bigger cause than chasing blindly for the money. Extraordinary people constantly strive to provide better services and products to their customers. They focus on giving value and helping people. And money is just a score for what they do.
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