The Million Dollar Challenge (2011)

This is the announcement post for Million Dollar Challenge. The challenge ran from Mar-May ’11 and is now over.

Money notes

Do you have financial goals such as to earn more money, to start new businesses and/or to generate passive income? Do you want to start taking action on these goals?

If so, then The Million Dollar Challenge (MDC) is for you!

Introducing: The Million Dollar Challenge (MDC)!

MDC is the latest Personal Excellence challenge, to provide an open platform where everyone can actively pursue their money-making goals. All MDC participants are invited to embark on their personal projects – be it to start a new business, to launch a new product, etc – whereby the goal is to earn as much money as possible (no time frame)!

MDC is quite different from past Personal Excellence challenges (30DLBL, 21DHL, fasting experiment), in 2 aspects.

Firstly, MDC has an open-scope – as long as you have an idea to make money, you are free to embark on it. You can be working on as many as 10 projects at one go, or you can be single-minded and just focus on 1 project. Anything goes as long as it (a) is a legit money-making idea, (b) adds real value to the world and (c) does not violate the law in any way. Unlike past challenges, there will not be a daily task to be accomplished. Rather, your task is to follow-through the project/plan you have created for yourself. The sky’s the limit!

All the money you earn through your projects will be yours. The point of the challenge is to inspire each other to earn more money than we can by ourselves. The projects are meant to be individually led, though you are free to collaborate with other MDC members if you find people with common objectives and interests.

Secondly, MDC will be a life-long challenge. There isn’t a fixed time frame where you must achieve the monetary results, though you are totally free to set timelines/time-bound goals for yourself. This doesn’t mean that we start taking a laid back approach to the goal – quite the opposite, in fact. If anything, it is to inspire/motivate us to take action even more because we’re acting out of sheer, unadulterated inspiration and desire for our goal, vs. fear. The key is to cultivate a long-term view of earning money through creating/adding value to the world, and to be more focused on our long-term aspirations, dreams and wishes, vs. short-term monetary gains.

Why MDC?

The idea of MDC has been brewing in my mind for a while. I’ve always wanted to start a challenge on making money, and I’m excited to finally be able to kick it off now.

Life-Changing Personal Growth Program – 30DLBL

30DLBL was the first challenge I launched as I wanted to start off with a core program that jump-starts one’s personal growth. I created 30DLBL Course, the life-changing 30-day personal growth course that encapsulates my best knowledge in personal growth and living our best life. Through 30DLBL, you work out your ideal life, identify your deepest life goals, craft your action plans, get your core habits in place, break off limiting beliefs, create your personal success network, and many more. It’s truly personal development on steroids, and everyone who has taken 30DLBL can attest to the power of the program.

30DLBL remains the key anchor program for PE. We have 3 live runs to date, with an average of 2-3 runs scheduled every year (only for those in the 30DLBL Circle). By subscribing to the newsletter, you get notified whenever there’s an upcoming run.

Healthy Living – 21DHL

Having set 30DLBL into motion, I was then keen to address specific areas of growth in life. In Jan this year, I kicked off 21DHL, to revamp the health and fitness aspects of readers’ lives, because I saw the need to drive awareness on healthy living. The challenge was a great success, with nearly 400 official participants who registered at the forums. With the active sharing and accountability through 21DHL journals, the participants learned a great deal about healthy living, more than they imagined. Many participants integrated important healthy living habits during these 21 days, with some even embarking raw trials and continuing their healthy diets post-21DHL. The results were massive.

Fasting Challenge

Last month (Feb), I decided to take the healthy living aspect of my life a step further, and embarked on a 21-day fasting experiment – going without food for 21 days to cleanse my body and rebuild my relationship with food. Some readers joined in with shorter fasts, while some took on 21-day fasts too. The experience changed my life completely and finally resolved my long outstanding issues with food for the past 2 decades. It’s been 2 weeks post-fast, and I’ve since maintained the benefits I’ve gotten from the fast (including the weight loss and the renewed relationship with food).

Making Money – MDC

Having intensively covered healthy living on the blog and forums for the past 2 months, I’m now eager to move on to other aspects of growth. The one I’m most interested to cover next is making money. After all, all things constant, who doesn’t want to have more money in our lives? At the end of the day, what we can acquire and do is a function of the amount of money we have. The more money we have, the more resources we have to do what we love.

With MDC, I want to provide a platform where everyone are encouraged to take action on their money-making goals, are open to try new things, are willing to selflessly support one another, get thinking about how they can add value to the world, while having lots of fun at the same time.

There are 5 specific values I want to cultivate with MDC:

  1. Open support and sharing – The mark of any successful community is one where members actively share and give. A community with members who neither participate, share nor contribute can never sustain. Hence, for MDC to be a successful platform for everyone, all participants are expected to actively engage and have an open support and sharing attitude.
  2. Desire to try and experiment – You can never earn more money if you constantly live in fear of loss and failure. Only through experimentation will you know what works and what doesn’t work. In MDC, you are encouraged to brainstorm and embark on any revenue generation idea you like – from setting up a new business, expanding your current business, investing, launching a new service, building passive income streams, to positioning yourself for an accelerated raise in the company. As mentioned above, anything goes as long as it (a) is a legit money-making idea, (b) adds real value to the world and (c) does not violate the law in any way. There are no limits!
  3. Provide value to the world – Money is a medium of value exchange. You earn money when you provide actual value to the world. This whole challenge is to get you thinking about how you can make money via adding real value to the world – value which people want to pay you for.
  4. Hard work and dedication – Making money isn’t supposed to be easy. Unlike lower-level aspects of growth like health and fitness or time management, making money requires a much higher level of skill, knowledge and effort. Hence, if you truly want to succeed in this goal, you have to be willing to put in 100 times more effort than your normal endeavors. The more time and effort you put in, the more it’ll pay out at the end of the day.
  5. Pursue your goals and dreams – One of the most amazing things in the world is the ability to do what you love and earn money doing it. Through MDC, I’d like to encourage everyone to pursue their passions and turn it into a sustainable, income generating business. Since MDC is a life-long challenge, you literally have the whole of your life to manifest results in your plan.

Hence, MDC is only for the specific individual who fits the 5 values above. The quality of the member is very important because it affects the power of the community. I expect the group participating in this challenge will be a lot smaller than past challenges but will be a lot more conscious, driven, ambitious and committed than the average person. This is intended to be a high consciousness community to accomplish your financial goals in life. People who fit any of the below should not join the challenge:

  • People who only want to leech off the MDC community and refuse to share, contribute or participate.
  • People who give excuses and assign blame to others rather than own up to their mistakes in life.
  • People who are constantly fearful of losing money and refuse to move out of their comfort zone.
  • People who look for “get rich quick” schemes, hope to strike rich via lottery and seek to make money with little to no effort. All these schemes attract low-consciousness, lazy, leech-type people who are always trying to look for the easy way out in life, refusing to put in real hard work in what they do. For the same reason, these people will never get anywhere in what they do.
  • People who lack commitment and have problems following through simple goals and plans.
  • People who are passive and lack initiative, always adopting the “wait and see” attitude vs. proactively creating the results they seek.

How to Sign Up: 3 Simple Steps

If you fit the MDC criteria above, then I warmly welcome you to join us in MDC! And guess what – participation is 100% free and doesn’t cost a single cent!

  1. Subscribe to the newsletter and RSS Feed. Subscribing means you get first-hand updates of all new blog articles, MDC-related posts and challenge announcements, free.
  2. Introduce yourself in the MDC sign-up thread now!
  3. In your introduction, share your immediate financial goal in life – an amount that would really inspire you when you reach it! This can be anywhere from $1 to $100 million, or even more. The more the better! For perspective, I rather aim for $200,000 and earn $50,000 than aim for $1,000 and earn $1,000. The point here is to earn as much as possible! The target is meant only as a reference point for yourself as you create your MDC plan (see below).

Your name will appear on the official participants list within 24 hours after you complete the 3 steps.

Why Sign Up?

It has been consistently proven in ALL past challenges that the participant who (a) signs up officially (b) actively shares, contributes and participates (c) makes the effort and commitment to follow-through on his/her plan will, beyond any doubt, accomplish significantly more results than the person who reads passively OR the person who chooses to participate quietly.

The fact is when you take part actively, you have a higher level of accountability, both to yourself and to the community, to follow-through on your goals. You also ride on the energy of the community to achieve more results, leading to a synergistic effect compared to if you do it by yourself.

I’m setting aside the community resources for MDC completely free for you, and I invite you to come on board and make full use of this opportunity. You can either be a self-help junkie all through your life, or you can make the conscious choice to take action on your goals. The difference is that the self-help junkie will find him/herself at the same place after X months or X years, continuing to lament and pity his/her state in life, while the person who takes action will grow tremendously in the short span of time. No matter what happens in the next  stage of your life and how much you end up earning, the fact is that signing up and actively participating in this challenge will enable you to accomplish more in your goals than you will if you turn your back on this.

As I wrote in Is Your Routine Empowering You?, no 2 activities are the same. MDC is clearly an empowering routine that will invite more positive growth and energy into your life.

After Signing Up

Your MDC starts right away after you sign-up, so there’s no need to wait for others to fall in. You can get started right away! In fact, the faster you start, the quicker you will be achieving your desired results!

  1. Start your MDC journal in the MDC forums immediately! (You are free to give the thread any appropriate title you see fit. Default journal name = XX’s MDC Journal, where XX is your name)
    • Create your plan on how you intend to achieve your MDC target amount and post it in the thread.
    • Break down your plan into small, doable action steps, starting with this week!
    • Bookmark the forums – You’ll be visiting regularly from now on
  2. Get started on your project(s) right away!
    • Track your progress in your MDC journal. You are free to update your journal as regularly as you want, be it weekly or even daily.
    • To achieve maximum results, my recommendation is to update at least once every few days for accountability and to keep the momentum going. Your updates should include (a) How you are progressing (b) Obstacles you’re facing (if any), (c) Things that are working (d) Things that aren’t working
  3. Report new earnings (USD) on the MDC earnings page whenever you have something to update.
    • As MDC is about revenue generation, we’ll be looking at revenue (any amount earned) and not income (revenue minus expenses)
    • All the money you earn will be yours. The earnings is only for documentation purposes for the challenge

I’ll also be participating in MDC and sharing my progress at MDC forums. Throughout the challenge, I’ll post articles on revenue generating concepts and principles. Members are also invited to share money-making ideas and concepts at the MDC forums.

The goal is to generate as much revenue as possible as a group through the power of individual action and community support! Unlike past challenges like 30DLBL, 21DHL or BIB, there will be no fixed timeline or deadline for MDC. Rather, the challenge ends when we achieve our challenge objective, which can be broadly defined as the earning of several millions of dollars as a group/community

This means that:

  • The MDC forums will be open 24/7, every day, until the challenge ends.
  • All readers can continue to sign up for MDC even today and get started immediately!
  • All members should focus on their long-term, life-long aspirations vs. focusing on short-term gains that we have no interest in.

What Counts as a MDC Earning

As long as the earning comes from a project you’re pursuing as part of your MDC participation, it counts as a MDC earning.

This means that if you’re currently employed and you get a normal raise at the same time every year, it doesn’t count. However, if you specifically work towards an accelerated promotion after joining MDC, and you get a raise that’s +10% higher than normal, the incremental difference will count as a MDC earning.

Or say, you got inspired to kick-start your business right away after joining MDC. You earned $2,000/month as a result. These earnings will count towards the MDC total.

In my case, I’m not going to count my base ebook sales, ongoing 1-1 coaching engagements and prebooked speaking engagements as part of the MDC earnings (since these already exist before I started MDC). However, if I get a sudden 300% increase in ebook sales due to a new marketing strategy I’m experiment with as part of my MDC plan, I’ll count the increase as part of MDC earning. Or if I launch a new book as part of my MDC plan, the book sales will count to my MDC earnings.

Serendipities that occur after joining MDC also count. For example, if I suddenly receive a huge engagement that is not related to my actions pre-MDC, I’d conclude that it’s the universe is responding to my desire to attract more money into my life. That would count as part of MDC too.

Latest MDC Earnings

Latest earnings can be found in the MDC Latest Earnings Update thread. Post an update whenever you have new earnings to report.

Money Making Ideas

Here is just a short list of ideas you can embark on:
  • Set up a business in your area of passion (drawing, fitness, singing, etc)
  • Launch a product
  • Launch a service
  • Start a franchise
  • Start a blog and monetize it
  • Affiliate programs
  • Sell advertising space (Websites)
  • Sell ebooks / Books (Lulu, Create Space)
  • Develop a program/software
  • Write a book; Land a book deal
  • Investing
  • Lease out a room
  • Freelance article writing
  • Accessory making
  • Home-based confectionery business
  • Set up your clothing / fashion business
  • Create a music album
  • Sell products on ebay
  • Set up a blog shop
  • Offer consulting service
  • Offer coaching service
  • Be hired as a speaker
  • Freelance work (Upwork, Freelance)
  • Actively working to an accelerated and higher raise in the company
  • Anything that offers value to the world

Brainstorm on more money-making ideas via these 25 brainstorming techniques!

Special Resources for MDC

As part of MDC, I launched 2 special series so you can get all the ammo you need in achieving your MDC goals:

  1. Million Dollar Tip Series – Where I share my best tips and learnings on revenue generation. New tip posted every 1-2 weeks.
  2. Successful Businesses Interview Series – Interviews with successful businesses that are making a difference in people’s lives, where we can learn from their success stories and implement them to our personal projects and businesses

Update May ’11: MDC is now over. We’ve generated over $50k as a group in just 2 months – an incredible achievement! Thanks everyone for your wonderful participation!