A key ingredient for success….and it’s not what you think!

Practicality dictates that everyone's results will vary as we are all unique and different. Basically, it takes hard work to make a substantial income in this business, and some people will make no money at all. The earnings of an Empower Network affiliate will be 100% dependent upon their skills, work effort, commitment, leadership capabilities, and market conditions. Common sense would suggest that in most opportunities, one would find exceptional individuals performing well above average, while others perform under the average. Empower Network does not guarantee any level of income or your success.

To see our full income disclosure, please visit our website at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php. So once again, my name is Tony Rush, and I've been with Empower Network for a little over two years. Ironically, this past weekend was our two-year anniversary with Empower Network. My wife and I got started here in November of 2011. And many people in the community have heard my story, so I'll offer only just a very short version of it tonight.

I've been in the home business profession since, I guess, 1991, I think was the first time that I ever got the idea that I could make money from home. So in over 20 years, I've seen a lot in the industry. And my wife and I have done a little bit of everything in the home business profession with regard to, you know, network marketing, multi-level marketing. We've done the weight loss and the vitamins.

There's lots of wonderful companies out there, lots of different kinds of pay plans, lots of different products and services, and people doing arguably very well or somewhat well in lots of them. But if I go back two years ago, I found myself in 2011, I found myself a little burned out, quite a lot burned out, actually. The grind of making money from home was starting to catch up with me.

I had gotten to the point where I was making what most people would call a decent income, but I was really having to force myself to do it. The hassles that are normally associated with the home business industry, sometimes you're happy to do it because, hey, it lets you get home, it lets you write your own check, but nobody will consistently do something over and over and over that they really don't like doing, no matter how successful they are at it. Eventually, it'll catch up with them. And in my particular case, I had been doing lots of phone work.

That was my particular thing, was calling leads, calling prospects, booking people to presentations, and doing three-way calls and conference calls. And, of course, at various times in my career, I've done a little bit of just about everything, you know, buying leads, home parties, drawing circles on the back of napkins and doing those one-on-one presentations in people's kitchens and coffee shops. So in 20-something years, I realized, you know, I've got to find a way to streamline this. And as it happened, Empower Network came across my desk in November of 2011.

And I'm very grateful for a couple of things, one of which, most importantly, is that I was humble enough to realize that even though I've made a lot of money in this industry, and I've been in the industry for a long time, I was humble enough to say, you know, I don't know who David Wood and David Sharp are personally, but I see them getting results that I have not gotten, and I'm willing to be wrong about some of what I think I know about this whole making money from home thing. And, you know, I jumped into Empower Network. And within about five weeks, we were making a couple hundred dollars a day in the affiliate program.

And was doing that without calling anybody. No phone work. You know, no chasing friends and family. And I very quickly saw my income go from a couple hundred dollars a day to a thousand dollars a day, a couple thousand dollars a day, and so on. And now, two years later, I can tell you that after having earned...

And I want to be really candid with you guys tonight, okay? Can we just all pretend that we're sitting on my back porch here in Alabama, and I've got a cup of hot tea here, because I'm a hot tea drinker, but we've got iced tea here, too, if you want that. But I would love for this to be different than any other kind of call you've ever come to, especially if you're a kid. Because I'm not going to whip out the flip chart, you know, and I'm not whipping out the product catalog tonight. I just want us to have a real conversation as real people.

As I look back on two years of working this business, and I see the changes that this business has made in my life, as I see my bank account grow every day, as I look around and I see the decisions that I'm able to make for my kids, I see the lifestyle that our family has been able to start to enjoy, whether it's, you know, sometimes it's not even the big things. I can tell you, you know, that we drive a really nice car that we paid cash for. We're living in a really nice home. I can tell you that last month on my birthday, my wife surprised me with a first-class trip to London, England.

But I'll tell you honestly, today, can I just be totally candid? You know what I'm most grateful for? Today, I've had the worst case of allergies in the last four days, and today, the biggest thing that I was grateful for was that Empower Network allows me to make money whether I feel like working or not. And to be honest with you, I would put a higher price tag on that than I would anything that I've ever achieved in terms of lifestyle. Just the ability that I did not have to drag my butt out of bed this morning at 6:30 and hit traffic on the way.

Let me tell you something. I am enormously grateful. When I get allergies, it doesn't bother my eyes or my nose. I can't stay awake.

I don't know if anybody on the line has that experience or not, but for some reason, about once a year, and not always, but whenever it does occur, it's the weirdest thing. It's like a Rip Van Winkle impersonation. I'll sleep for 12 hours straight, get up, stay up for an hour, and then those all sit on the couch or something.

After three days of fighting this, the biggest thing that I was grateful for today has nothing to do with the size of my bank account or how many stamps I've got in my passport. It just had to do with the fact that I didn't have to be anywhere this morning. I'm extremely grateful for that. As I look back, I want to offer you guys something tonight that you can put in your pocket and actually make some use of this week, no matter what you do for a living.

If you want to turn your annual income into your monthly income, this would be, if not the most important thing I could tell you, it would definitely be in the top three pieces of advice that I would give you. So I hope you got a sharp pencil tonight and you're prepared to take some notes. So in the last two years, speaking of hot tea, I've left my... I'm sorry.

I've left my other kitchen. In the last couple of years, as I look back on this journey that Jessica and I have been on and how we started here struggling financially, didn't have a lot of money, had squandered quite a lot of it as I was being burned out on working from home and having to beat the phone all the time. I was... As I look back, though, these two years, I see all the changes that have taken place. I also have to observe something else that's happened.

This is the part that's fascinating to me. It's this: it's the question of why is it that we can see two people that get started doing anything, but say a home business or a network marketing company or whatever. Two people, Bob and Tom. Bob and Tom get started in the same business on the same day.

They have the same company, the same product, the same pay plan. They got the same training and support. They have been recommended to read all the same books, listen to the same audios. They get the same access to the leaders and training and support. Same pay plan, same structure, same customer service department, same marketing materials, same websites.

Yet, we come and we find Bob and Tom 90 days later. Here's Bob getting fantastic results, and here's Tom who can't seem to figure out which end is up. Have you ever been in that situation? Have you ever been Bob or Tom, or have you ever observed it seems like two people in a similar situation getting very, very different results? This is fascinating to me.

I am fascinated by situations like this. Matter of fact, I'll give you an example. I have a friend of mine in North Carolina who I've known for, I don't know, 20, 25 years perhaps. I've known him for a long time.

He has two daughters, two daughters separated by age by a year. One of the daughters, beautiful, successful, prosperous, well-spoken, married, beautiful, healthy children. In general, you would just look at this person's life and say this is the person who has taken care of life with a certain amount of care and attention, interested in upward movement. And similarly, or conversely I should say, his other daughter may not have had a shower this week, may or may not be in a homeless shelter tonight.

So remember, you should not be on drugs. I know at one point she was on drugs. And you stand back from those situations, and without any judgment of good, bad, right, and wrong, you just have to look and say, here are two people who grew up in the same environment, with the same parents, the same basic rules and household, and two parents who had the best of intentions and did everything that they could to offer the resources and opportunities for each other.

That's my impression, of these kids to grow up and to have a prosperous life, and they wind up in two completely different situations. See, these stories fascinate me because if we look back, I'll be totally candid. There were people who got started in Empower Network before me. I didn't come here at the very beginning.

I was a little late. I didn't start the day the company opened. So there were people who got started here the same day I did or before, and yet perhaps they haven't had the same results that I've had. That's interesting to me. And, again, no judgment.

No judgment. We're all on our own path, you know. Everybody has their own choices to make. But it is a curious question that pops up. You think, how is that?

We could look at the corporate records. Hey, let's go back to just, like, a month, July. Hey, let's find two people that got started in the business in July, you know, and let's see where they are today.

And here's the truth. There's a lot of different factors, Arthur. You know, sometimes people get started, and they've never done any kind of a home business before, so they shouldn't be expected, you know, to compare themselves to someone who has maybe been in the home business industry for 20 years, right? So there are factors involved, and I think we would be foolish to ignore those.

The other thing, too, is this is more or less an experiment tonight, what I'm describing, this comparison, because in the real world, it doesn't really do you any good to compare yourself to anyone else. And you should write that in bold letters tonight, because tonight's conversation may be instructive, but it's not intended to give you the idea that you should be comparing yourself to other people who got started when you did. That's not my point, but I do want to use it to illustrate the fact that why is it that two people can actually go create different results? And there's several answers for this, okay? But I think if I were to give you one of the answers tonight, at least the one that's on my mind, okay?

It would be one word, and it's not a word. As soon as I tell you the word, you're going to say, oh, okay, yeah, of course. But at the same time, I want to stimulate your curiosity a little bit by telling you that this word doesn't mean what you think it means, okay?

And the word is this: it's focus. Focus is right. Focus. You know, just paying attention to one thing. Focus, that's what most of us would say focus is about. It's just making sure that all your attention is on one thing.

It's not a bad definition, but I want to kind of delve into it just a little bit because I think if I can offer you this and if I can communicate well tonight, this may be a moment where you can see very, very clearly how you can actually skyrocket your results in any business that you're in just by applying this one word in a slightly different way. I'll give you an example. I'm a huge fan of Apple, Apple computers. A lot of you guys may not know this, and I promise I won't spend too much time in metaphor and story tonight, but a lot of you may not know this, but Apple Computer was founded by Steve Jobs, but Apple Computer actually fired Steve Jobs at one time. He was gone from the company, I think, for maybe nine or ten years.

I can't remember. I don't remember exactly, and somebody else on the line probably knows the answer to that, but Steve Jobs started the company, got it off and running, and then was ousted from the company by the gentleman who he actually had brought on board to be, I think, the president. So here's Steve Jobs is out, and the company is just failing.

I mean, it was about to go out of business. When they hired Steve Jobs back, and I believe this was in the late 90s, 96 maybe, when Steve Jobs came back, the company was probably about 90 days from bankruptcy, according to one quote by Jobs. But here's the interesting thing, what happened. When Steve Jobs came back on board, they had lost over a billion dollars, a billion with a B, okay? Now, I don't care what business you're in.

When you hear a story like that, entrepreneurially minded people always perk up and they say, what in the world? How did somebody make a reversal like that? Well, one of the things that Jobs noticed when he came back was there was literally, I can't remember, I wish I had looked up the number, but they had something like 40 or 50 different products they were selling. There were 12 different computers. There were five different laptops and five different of this and that, and they had Apple printers.

If you guys remember when Apple used to make printers, good printer, but it was a printer. Anybody can make printers. And Jobs' thing when he came back was to say, okay, Apple has gotten away from the fundamental of what we were originally about, and he actually scrapped 70% of the product catalog. And he had the first press conference, he had a square on the board, four squares, one big square with four squares inside it. And he said, here's the new decision.

We're selling two desktop computers and two laptops. That's it. It's the only things we're going to sell in the realm of computers. And they took that concept and they went nuts with it. Well, naturally, this got a lot of criticism at the time.

Huge amount of criticism. Everybody thought he was nuts, because he's just going to come in and just wipe out 70% of the product. Well, let me find the quote real quick. There was a quote at the time, and I think Steve Jobs sums it up nicely.

And it's one of the things that David Sharp and I have talked about. David Wood and I have sat and talked about this at dinners. And I see it also in the language when I sit around and talk to people like Vic and Lawrence and Tracy and Aaron and the other top earners in the company. But here's how Steve Jobs put it. He said, people think focus means...

Saying yes to the things you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. See, that's interesting, isn't it? A lot of people think that focus means, yeah, I'm focused on Empower Network, or I'm focused on my iPad screen repair business, or I'm focused on my chiropractic business, or I'm focused on my nail salon.

But the poor lady running the nail salon, she said, I'm focused on my nail salon, and she's also decided to sell some curling irons in the store. And she's got her nail salon, but she's also decided that she's going to put some other off-the-wall thing in the case up front. And now she's selling phone cards and one thing. And see, this was Steve Jobs' point.

I'm going to say it again. People think focus means saying yes to the thing that you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. And that's what it means.

And he goes on to say, you have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things that we haven't done as the things that I have done. Focus is saying no to a thousand things. See, I find that's a revelation to me. But it also is not a surprise to me.

Because I look at my business, I don't dabble. I've been working on a business for a long time. And I've been with Empower Network for two years.

And somebody says, well, now, Tony, I came to Empower because I wanted to use Empower Network to market my weight loss business. And to you, I say, kudos, that is awesome. That's what we're here for. And if you say to me, Tony, are you saying I can't have multiple businesses, I would be the first to say, no, no, no, that's not what I'm saying at all.

At all. This is the beautiful thing about Empower Network, is that we do have autonomy. The beautiful thing about being an entrepreneur is that we have autonomy. And we've all got a little bit of cowboy in us, don't we?

You know, that's the reason we didn't want to work at a job in the first place. We didn't want somebody telling us how it had to be done. We wanted the autonomy to be able to make the decisions that we want to make that we feel like is best for us and our family. But within that is the conversation that I'm thinking tonight. Where does focus play a role?

And simply this: if you look at the number one income earners in the entire industry, they are all people who are single-minded and focused. You just won't find a lot of people. As a matter of fact, if you find one person making an incredibly good income trying to build seven or eight things simultaneously, they are usually the exception that proves the rule. Because for every one person you find that's even making decent money trying to do multiple things at one time, you'll find literally a million other people who are in two deals and neither one of them are profitable. So I look back at my own business and I think, what are some of the things that contributed to Jessica and I putting a couple million dollars in our pocket in our first two years?

It's about not getting distracted, getting a focus all the way down to the daily activity. Today, like today, all I wanted to focus on today was finishing a little bit of writing I'd worked on for my business. A little bit of writing. I wanted to finish up a video. I really wanted to make sure that this one part of the video was completely exactly like I wanted it, and I achieved that. Now, I could have spent that time researching ads and researching places to run ads, and I could have spent that time trying to write a half-assed email. I could have chosen to have done a half a dozen things ineffectively. And today, instead, I chose to do one thing very efficiently and very effectively. And I believe the video will be much better for it.

Why? Focus. First, discernment. Being able to look and see what's in front of you and to determine in the moment, as quickly as possible, this is what I need to be paying attention to, and that is noise. And then filtering out that noise as fast as you can.

And here's the thing. This can be a grueling way to view your business. It can be tiresome until it becomes a habit. Why? Because the moment you sit down at your computer, if you're like me, you've got about 15 tabs open on Firefox or Chrome or Safari, right?

You've got about 15 tabs open, and you sit down to do something about your business. But wait a minute. Hang on a second. I need to see what's going on with Facebook.

Oh, look, here's pictures of kittens. Oh, and look, here's that camera that I was looking at. Oh, and here's a real-time example.

Look at here. I'm on my Facebook page, and the first ad over on the right is a camera that I bought my sister for a wedding gift. The third one down, though, this book is a must-have, and it's the name of an internet marketing guru. Quite a good one.

Quite a good guy. I mean, he sells a lot of stuff. Oh, and you know, I'm going to click this, and wow, look at here. It's recommended by a guy named Frank, and it's written by a guy named Marlon, and if you want to borrow these 32 marketing secrets, oh, my God, I'm going to spill out the storm right now, and then I go look in my inbox, and I've got this special report, and here's the thing. I sat down to write an email, and now instead of being a producer, I've turned into a consumer.

Instead of being a producer, I've turned into a consumer. Now I'm consuming, here's somebody else's ad. Oh, free training. Here's one. Recruiting secrets.

And all it was, me clicking over to Facebook for just a second, and I was like, oh, my God. Guys, there's a lot of noise in the marketplace. So I'm going to wrap up by giving you the solution, and we're done.

And this may be the shortest Empower Hour call ever. And it's simply this. What you need to do is, first off, part of solving the problem is understanding that the problem exists. So get clear on the word focus. Focus is not just paying attention to what you're supposed to be paying attention to.

It means actively saying no to the noise. No, I don't need your new whiz-bang course. No, I don't need to join another business. I don't need to know what that team over there is doing. I am the evidence.

Because all I did was I came here, and I bought the Empower Network, and I bought the Empower Network products, and I applied them. Plus nothing, minus nothing. You've got everything you need from where you are. The biggest favor you can do yourself is to stop looking for secrets and actually just use the products that you've got and actually produce, actually get into action. As my friend John Lavenia would say, do the work.

Do the work. Forget the shiny objects. Forget the whiz-bang, this and that, the new flash in the pan, this and that. Do the work. It might not be sexy, but I'll tell you what, a couple million dollars in the bank after two years, that is sexy.

Okay? So that's the first thing, is get focused. The second thing is pay attention to actual actions. The actual actions, what you actually do is what counts. What are you doing?

There's a lot of focus nowadays on mindset and where your head is at and what your beliefs are. And those are all valid conversations. But at the end of the day, if you sit on the couch and you meditate and you have positive visualization and you do nothing but that, they'll come take your furniture. Okay? Sooner or later, somebody has to actually do something.

Right? The universe does not send checks from the clouds. The generally accepted practice is that you go show up in the marketplace as a person. You give them a little bit of value, offering a solution to someone who has a problem. They give a little bit of their value to you in the form of money, and then you give them your value in the form of a product. That's the accepted thing.

It's called commerce. Right? So it boils down to actual action. What are you doing? Not what are you thinking and what are you believing and what are you feeling, but stand back and look at what are you actually doing?

And what I want you to do is get a piece of paper, or if you're driving, just do this in your mind, and get a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle vertically and write down all your actions on the paper. Look back on yesterday or today and say, you know, what have I done for my business today? And a couple of things are going to become very obvious. Most people don't do a lot for their business. That's going to be a bit of a wake-up call for some people because we've all met these folks.

Right? They're very upset that they don't have any money in exchange for the work they didn't do. Right? They didn't do any work, but they're upset that the business isn't going as well for them as they think it should.

So don't get upset about money that didn't come in for work you didn't do. That's the first thing. When you actually sit down and write out the actions that you're taking in your business, the first thing that may hit you is that there's not a lot written on your paper. That should be your first clue. But for those of you who are consistently showing up in your business every day and doing something, what you're going to find is that these actions go on the left side or the right side of the paper according to the following heading.

The headings at the top of the paper are income producing, non-income producing. Okay? It's as simple as that. Write down what you did for your business today and put them in the appropriate column.

I'll give you an example. Let's say you're writing a blog article today. Say you wrote something on your blog today. Now, here's the thing. There are things that you do in your business.

Let me preface it this way. There are some things that you're going to write on your paper that are non-income producing that are still important. You have to do them, right? You actually have to do them in order for income to come in.

But they, in and of themselves, are not income producing activities. I'll give you an example. Listening to, say, reading a chapter in Think and Grow Rich, or perhaps listening to one of our Inner Circle audios, which is a fantastic product. If you don't own that product, you need to get that, by the way. Do that as soon as we hang up.

Listen to an Inner Circle audio. The opportunity to eavesdrop on somebody like Lawrence Tam. Amazing. Amazing guy. Really candid, very authentic.

The opportunity for less than three bucks a day to be able to listen to an audio like that, it'll change your life. But here's the thing: actually, listening to that audio is a non-income producing activity, meaning if you did that today, no money is going to come in as a result of doing it.

Now, you need to do it. Everybody needs to listen to that audio. But you need to write it on the paper for what it is. It's not, in and of itself, an income producing activity. Nor is it necessarily writing a blog.

Running ads, these are income producing activities. Generating leads. Emailing a letter to your prospects.

Inviting them to be on a call like this one. Or giving them a link to a presentation. Running some type of a promotion. These are income producing activities. Okay?

So, when you make a list of the things that you did in your business today, you can easily see where they fall. Now, here's the trick: prioritize. Starting tomorrow, make sure that you take care of your income producing activities first. See, there's nothing wrong with learning how to design a website.

But that is a non-income producing activity. There's nothing wrong with learning how to be a Twitter guru. But sitting there reading somebody's e-book or a little course on how to do that is not necessarily an income producing activity. It falls under the category of education. And if that's how you want to market, then there's nothing wrong with learning it.

Just don't mistake it for income producing activity, because it's not. Right? So, the trick is you want to prioritize. You want to make sure that every day you're focusing on income producing activities first. And then you can spend as much time as you want to on the other stuff.

But the danger happens when people do it the other way around. Because it's easy to fake yourself out, isn't it? Have you ever faked yourself out? I have. And I tell you what, if you do it too many days in a row, you wind up like, God, I'm really working my business a lot, but my income is just not where it ought to be.

Any time you hear somebody say that, here's a clue for diagnosing people's businesses. Any time you hear somebody say, I'm working my business a lot, but I'm just not seeing any results, I guarantee you that what they call working their business is non-income producing activity. I had a gentleman, I think it was last week, maybe the week before, who was saying something about working his business six or eight hours a day. I said, dude, I've got to be honest with you, I don't even know how you would work this business six or eight hours a day.

And I'm not being facetious. I mean, there's not a lot to do here. The marketing system that we have set up here at Empower Network is geared in such a way where, you know what, if you've got about 45 to 75 minutes a day, I would say that's a good part-time income. Because we don't get paid on time, we get paid on production, income producing activities. But there's just not a lot to get good at here.

And even full-time, if I were to actually get serious, and say, okay, let's not count the time that I spend arguing with people on Facebook, and let's not count the time that I get distracted listening to music and whatever. If I just were to add up the amount of time that I spend on income producing activities every day, I'm telling you guys, you can make a lot of money with a good solid two hours a day. Now, it might take me three or four hours to get those two hours done, because I'm easily distracted sometimes. This conversation about focus is as much for me as anyone. But seriously, I don't even know how you would work this business eight hours a day, unless you just are really a prolific writer, and you want to shoot very long training videos and that sort of thing.

It's just not required to do that much on a daily basis. But anytime you hear somebody say, yeah, I'm working my business a lot, and I'm just not getting a lot of results, 99 times out of 100, it's because they're focused on non-income producing activities. So here's the takeaway for the call. Focus is not about just paying close attention to the thing you're supposed to be paying attention to. It's about saying no to the noise.

It's about being a person of discernment. How fast can you identify distraction, and get it off your radar? That's the game to play. Focus, saying no to the noise, not getting distracted by all this auxiliary third-party stuff, because as good-intentioned as it may be, if it doesn't fit in with my vision of how I want to work, it is by definition a distraction. See, when I came here, I wanted to be the poster child for what would happen if somebody just came here, put their blinders on, put their head down, and just did the work.

Just did the work. And just said, okay, I'm just going to do whatever Empower Network's teaching is what I'm going to do. And if I know some things that I've picked up along the way, I'll turn around and put that in Empower Network products, which I've done. I'm in the 15K Formula and the Master's Course, and hopefully that's, I think, been of value to thousands of people. So it's a collaborative effort here.

There's no secrets, guys. The life that you want, wants you. The results that you want, want you. But there's no secrets. If you guys get to events, we toured the country last month.

We did four regional events in Anaheim, Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Orlando, and we met with thousands of people. And you guys stood toe-to-toe with us and looked us in the eye and spent time with us, and you know we are authentic, transparent people. The way I work my business every day is the same stuff that we teach in the 15K Formula and the Master's Course. Seriously. It's the same stuff you hear in the Inner Circle.

It's the same stuff you get in the viral blogging platform. There's literally no secrets here. And it's a little bit funny sometimes because, you know, me and Tracy or Lawrence or Aaron or Dick or Sharp or Wood, we'll be sitting around and, you know, I'll look over at Sharp and I'll say, hey, Sharp, where do you get the good leads? And we'll have a big old belly laugh because we know there's a lot of people who actually think that there's like some secret that the gurus keep for themselves.

And the funny thing is if you guys could actually eavesdrop on some of our leadership council meetings, we could probably do that sometime. We won't, because, you know, we talk about a lot of stuff that's scheduled to be announced and whatnot. If you guys could ever be a fly on the wall and hear the way the leaders