As we kick off a new year, The Impact Entrepreneur Show is kicking off the Starting Up series. We’re talking to people who got off their butt and took action to accomplish the dream they have been sitting on for years.

Mike Dillard is Founder of SelfMadeMan.com and host of Self Made Man, the #1 self-help podcast on iTunes.

The mentors in Mike’s life shaped his business destiny by giving him a wake-up call and encouraging him to invest in himself.

He was told that, if he wanted to achieve his goal, he had to become someone who was capable of achieving that result and he had to stop looking for that to come from something or someone outside of himself.

The first step towards investing in yourself is knowing what you’re investing in.

How were you manufactured? Find out.

• Take the Myers-Briggs test
• Take the Kolbe A Index
• Take the DiSC Test

Figure out how you are built and then, once you have that information, you can apply it to whatever you’re passionate about and you can execute in a way that is aligned with how your brain is wired.

The second step towards investing in yourself is mastery.

To develop a mastery of any skill:

• Put your devices away.
• Get deep into something. Read books for 2-3 hours a day & take an intensive course on the subject.
• Find the best practices of the best practitioners and create activities that will help you internalize their skills.
• Take action and see what happens.
• Do it over and over again, for a couple years.

“If you’re just sitting here in learning mode, you’re doing absolutely nothing. The biggest moment of learning or understanding you can have is by actually doing something and failing at it or succeeding.”

If you want to be a self-made person, there’s no big secret. Stop waiting for something outside of yourself, put time into mastering a skill, take action and add value.

I can’t wait to see what you do.

Don’t be a podcast junkie…

Resources:

• Self Made Man: Website | ...