Ken McArthur

Best-Selling Author, Marketing Expert, and Legendary Creator of Impact Presents "The Impact Factor"

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”Solve a Big Problem”

Want a million dollars?  All you have to do is solve a problem. In fact if you are a math whiz, you can have your pick of any of seven problems. All you need to do is solve one and the Clay Mathematics Institute will give you one million dollars.  Solve all seven problems and they will give you seven million dollars. Here’s an example of one of the seven problems from Clay that looks easy. It’s called the “P vs. NP Problem.”

Imagine that you have a big family. It’s been twenty years since the last family reunion, but Aunt Susie in all her socializing glory has managed to extract promises from 400 relatives that they will definitely come to a family reunion which is only 2 weeks away. Unfortunately, there are only 50 rooms available and you can only put two people in a room.

In her ever convincing way, Aunt Susie has decided that you are the most organized person in the family – how she got that idea I haven’t got a clue – and she has put you in charge of housing accommodations for the event.

There are a couple of problem cases though.  Some of the relatives don’t exactly get along that well. Luckily Aunt Susie knows everything about everyone in the family and she has compiled a list of pairs of people who should never – under any circumstances – room together.

On the surface, the problem isn’t all that difficult.  All you have to do is compile a list of potential roommates and then check it against Aunt Susie’s list to make sure that none of the pairs that are on her list have somehow gotten matched together on your roommates list. Sounds easy right?

Computer scientists call this an “NP-problem.”  With a computer it’s very easy to check to see if one of Aunt Susie’s “Do NOT Let These People Room Together” pairs appears on your rooming list.  All you have to do is put both sets in the computer and ask it to look for matches.  With an easy program today’s slowest computer can do that in less than a second.

But, who should get the available rooms? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just input the names of the people who are coming to the reunion and have the computer pick which people get the housing?  Just imagine that you write a program where you can enter the names of all the people and Aunt Susie’s list of mismatches and have the computer produce a final list of randomly generated roommates that is guaranteed not to have a mismatched pair. 

Unfortunately, it turns out that that’s not that easy. The total number of ways of choosing one hundred lucky relatives from the four hundred people that want to come is greater than the number of atoms in the known universe.

Even if you had a supercomputer, you would never be able to solve the problem by brute force – checking every possible combination – within your lifetime.  However, there is nothing that says that with a little bit of creative programming you couldn’t come up with a way to solve the problem.  In fact, I challenge you to do it; after all it’s worth a million dollars.

One of the biggest problems in computer programming today is figuring out whether the answers to a problem can be easily checked, but would still require too much time to solve by any computer. The roommate problem seems to be a problem that can’t be easily solved by a computer, but no one has proved that it can’t be done.  In fact maybe you could do it.

In 1971 Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin formulated the problem as a mathematical equation and asked people to solve the problem as, “Does P (easy to find) = NP (easy to check)?”  Stephen Cook’s description of the problem actually runs twelve pages of detailed mathematical specifications, but the basic problem is fairly simple.

If you could solve this problem the world would be grateful and you could be a million dollars richer.  If you don’t like this problem the Clay Mathematics Institute has six more problems just like it.

But, what if you aren’t a math whiz?

Luckily all problems are not math related and there are millions of problems just waiting to be solved. That’s a good thing, because if you want to have an impact, you need to solve a problem. 

Think about it for a minute. If there’s nothing wrong you can’t fix it.  If there is nothing wrong, no one will care if you do fix it. If no one cares about what you do, no one will notice you and you will have zero impact. So, if you really want to have a really big impact, you’d better start with a really big problem. 

I know that you are feeling overwhelmed right now.  I’ve been talking about huge problems that don’t have an easy solution and you thought that I was going to make your life simpler. You are right to feel overwhelmed, because when you set out to solve a big problem it’s overwhelming!  Just what you need right? – Another big problem without a solution!

Fortunately, there’s an easier way to solve big problems. If you want to solve a big problem, you should start with the little things.

Imagine two sisters, who both want to write a best selling novel. 

Cathy is brilliant and educated.  She studies with the finest writing teachers at a world-class university and she associates with some of the most well known authors in the world.  She is thinking about her book and constantly comparing her ideas to the great thinkers around her.  Each day she writes a little and measures it against her competition and each day she tosses her work into the wastebasket with a sigh because it doesn’t meet her standards.

Tricia has lived in the shadow of her brilliant older sister for all of her life and does not dream that she will ever be as smart or as educated, but she is compelled to write down her simple thoughts each day. At the end of each week, Tricia reviews the thoughts that she has written and looks for the flashes of life that occasionally sparkle in her simple words.  Tricia constantly trims and polishes the gems that she finds and saves the scraps of her thinking in her idea bin. Each day she builds and improves and each day adds to her skill. You know as well as I do who will write the best selling novel. 

If you want to solve a big problem, you need to take it one-step at a time and break it into manageable pieces.  Success is rarely achieved overnight, but since you only have limited time, you should be working on something that matters.

If you were at jvAlert Live in Orlando or Philadelphia or the “Get Your Product Done” workshop in Atlanta, you may have met a dynamic, ball of energy that was all smiles and all heart by the name of Muriel Moton.

Muriel is easily the most positive and uplifting person in ANY room.  Her smile glows and she is contagious with her enthusiasm and energy.

It’s hard to imagine that anything could have ever gone wrong for Muriel because she sounds like she’s never had a problem in the world.

However, if you think that Muriel is so positive because life is easy for Muriel, you are dead wrong.

In 1988, Muriel returned from her honeymoon in California and decided to go through the garage and get things organized. After tossing out quite a bit of trash, Muriel was not prepared for what she saw next; an unfamiliar credit card with her name on it. In fact as she looked more closely she found more and more credit cards in her name and a stack of unopened bills from the credit card companies. Muriel was in shock. The credit card statements showed that her new husband had stolen her identity.

Her driver’s license was suspended because her husband bought a car in her name and then allowed the insurance to lapse. Finally, the final straw was when Muriel’s husband reached out and grabbed her arm and told her, “If you ever leave me I will kill you. Do you understand me? I will kill you!”

I’ll let you read the rest of Muriel’s story and how she overcame so many problems in her upcoming “sure-to-be-best-seller” book, Live Life Like It Matters, but for now I’ll just mention that Muriel overcame those problems and many others that followed and now impacts people constantly, literally all over the globe.

For nearly 10 years, Muriel has shared the principles that are vital to preserving, protecting and maximizing human value and potential for personal achievement and fulfillment and organizational development — one person at a time. 

Imagine going to places like Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and having an amazing impact on people all over the world.  Muriel has done that. But it doesn’t matter where Muriel is. Muriel has impact on every person that she meets, which is why I mention Muriel in this book.

Bottom Up, Not Top Down

Muriel found some powerful ways to solve some very real problems and then she started to share those solutions with the people around her, just like you can.

I haven’t asked Muriel, but I tend to think that Muriel wasn’t thinking about becoming rich or famous when she was sitting on the garage floor crying her heart out. In fact, she was pretty emotionally devastated, just like anyone would be. And yet she has had some pretty amazing impact already and with the launch of her book, I’m sure that impact will only grow.

If you want to have impact like Muriel’s, you need to start from the bottom up, not the top down. Instead of thinking “I want to be rich and famous”, try thinking about how you can solve a big problem and share the solution with others. Once you start sharing a great solution, it can never be stopped.

Just like Juan Mann, Muriel’s presence will be felt. But, unlike Juan, Muriel has a plan to make it happen. Muriel is getting some great advice from some pretty amazing people that are thrilled to help her every step of the way. Part of that is because Muriel is constantly enriching their lives with her amazing attitude and open heart. Who wouldn’t want to help a person like that? I know that I do.

As we build your personal impact system over the coming months, I want to help you increase your impact in some very specific ways, but first you need to know that if you really want to have a big impact, you need to solve a big problem. Solve that problem and people will be thrilled to spread your impact all over the world.

First look for the pain, and then look for the solution.

The good news is that the world is full of problems waiting to be solved. You have a wide choice of problems to select from.  According to my friend, Christine Comaford-Lynch, people all around you are hurting and all you need to do is look for the pain. Listen when people tell you something hurts.

Christine has quite a history.  Bill Gates calls her “super high bandwidth.” I guess he should know because he dated her. President Bill Clinton has thanked her for “fostering American entrepreneurship.” Newsweek says she’s “the person you want to partner with.”

Christine ran away from home at 16 to become a model in New York City, became a Buddhist monk, broke her vows, decided to become a millionaire, made $10 Million dollars, gave away $3 Million to non-profits, retired at 40, got married to the man of her dreams. Sounds great right?  She also blew it a lot. Now that’s something you don’t hear about much!

Christine lives a very interesting life and she shares much of it in her new book, Rules for Renegades.  She recounts her first date with Bill Gates, who she met when she was a contractor for Microsoft and pokes a little fun at his methods in the romance department. She also talks about dating Oracle’s Larry Ellison and encounters with Barbara Walters and the Clintons. Christine learns something useful from them all.

As a five-time CEO/entrepreneur, she has defined new markets, developed products to serve them, and executed sales, marketing and product strategies. Throughout Christine’s 20 year career in business, she has started five of her own companies, all of which have been acquired or taken public, assisted 700 of the fortune 1000 and advised to the White House. But, it wasn’t always like that.

In 1989 Christine was a temporary contract programmer working for Microsoft when after years of using independent contractors in place of employees Microsoft began feeling some pain from the IRS.  Under the IRS guidelines, the independent contractors were actually employees and the IRS wants Microsoft paying withholding taxes. Now they’ve come down hard and Microsoft needs to either convert them to actual employees or make sure that they are working for other companies – quickly.

Christine is attending a meeting for all of the independent contractors with the “Dark Overlord of HR.”  The independent contractors love being independent.  They are taking home great paychecks and loving their freedom and suddenly they are told that they must either become employees or be hired by a new job shop, Volt Technical Services.

Christine is scanning the room and doing the mental math.  There are 300 contractors in the room.  With an average margin of $10 per hour going to Volt no wonder those guys are smiling so big.  How hard can doing payroll be? In a shot, Christine raises her hand and says, “I have a company. I’ll employ everyone. Plus, my firm takes a smaller cut of the employee’s paycheck than Volt.”

The first problem is Christine doesn’t have a company – at least not yet.  Luckily, Christine remembers that if you have a hundred dollars you can form a Delaware corporation in ten minutes. The second problem is that she knows nothing about processing payroll. Christine gives her Dad a quick call and he suggests that she outsource the payroll processing and by evening she has 35 new employees.

Microsoft was in a world of hurt because of the IRS crackdown.  Christine was able to provide a solution to ease that pain quickly.  Now Christine looks for the pain constantly – even while standing in line for coffee.

Fast forward to 1995 and Christine is standing in line for coffee at the local Starbucks.  The guy standing in line with her is talking about the pain of marketing consumer products on the Internet.  He doesn’t understand the technical issues, but Christine certainly does. Over the next few months they decide to launch a company to deliver personally targeted coupons and promotions directly to consumers. Within four years Christine sells her shares for a few million.

I have a real passion for helping entrepreneurs build sustainable businesses and I’ve worked with a lot of people who wanted to start a business on the Internet.  The Internet is an amazing vehicle for generating high-profit offerings with minimal investment, but thousands of people try to start an Internet business without solving a real problem.  In fact, most people are asking the question, “How can I make money” when they should be asking the question, “How can I help.”

Yesterday afternoon I sat down with a group of top-level marketers to brainstorm the question, “How can someone with $100 to invest, build a business that grosses a million dollars a year in a short period of time.”  Interestingly enough there are lots of ways to do it, but when all of the ideas were out there on the table, someone thought to ask the question “Why?”

Why would you want a million dollars in the first place?  Believe me, I’m not against the idea of you making a million dollars a year, but if you just stack it up in the corner and count it over and over, it’s not going to make a difference in your life or anyone elses.  Bottom-line, it’s not about having money – or it shouldn’t be --- because having money doesn’t do anything and if you want to have an impact, you have to do something.

“Impact doesn’t come from ‘having.’ Impact comes from ‘doing.’” – Ken McArthur

Jeffrey is short and eager.  If you close your eyes as he talks to you, you can almost imagine a puppy.  For most of his life Jeffrey has been a plumber, but now he has caught the Internet marketing, work at home bug.  The lifestyle sounds very attractive to Jeffrey.  He’s done his homework and listened to lots of Internet marketing experts.  He’s played around with some of the ways to make money on the Internet, but now he is ready to get serious. 

Jeffrey’s wife is getting a little concerned.  She wants to support Jeffrey, but she’s worried about the finances.  So far all of the cash flow has been going out of the family budget and she hasn’t seen a cent come back in.  Jeffrey says that it’s an investment in his education and he’s right because you can’t make real progress if you don’t educate yourself.  On the other hand, there comes a time when all the education in the world won’t help you make a dollar.  As my friend, Sterling Valentine says, “If knowledge were power, librarians would rule the world.”  Studying how to take action, doesn’t get you results.  You need to actually do something.

Jeffrey is just steps away from making a big mistake. It’s a mistake that new business people make all the time.  In fact, experienced marketers make the mistake repeatedly and they are still able to make money in many cases.  It turns out that making money isn’t all that difficult on the Internet.  Jeffrey can just put together a simple e-book, create a website and let people know about it and with a decent sales letter Jeffrey can make some sales.  A number of my friends have made sizable incomes from doing just that.

It’s so easy to sell products that many times we get caught up in the ways to wring more money out of marketing tricks and forget why people are buying the product in the first place.  People are buying products and services or looking for ideas to fix problems – not to be conned by marketing ploys.

Imagine Jeffrey’s choices.  The world is wide open.  He can develop products and services about anything, but the first thing that comes to mind is that he loves Internet marketing.  He’s new at it but he eats up every bit of information that comes into his email, so Jeffrey decides to take that information and make his own e-book about making money on the Internet.

Jeffrey’s choice is not unusual. People do it all the time.  A quick Google search returns over 55,500 results for the specific phrase, “Internet Marketing EBooks.” There are thousands of free ones available.  Where Jeffrey is headed literally hundreds of thousands of people have gone before. The “How to Make Money Online” problem has been solved over and over in different ways since the beginning of the Internet.

My friend, Rosalind Gardner has made a healthy living off of a simple e-book that she wrote years ago, but a closer look will show that it’s because she solves a very real problem for people and she gives some very real direction.  People can get information easily.  What they need is something that solves their problems.

Think of it from your own perspective.  You are reading this book because you want to have more impact not because you want more information.  If you follow this proven system, you will get more impact – not more information about impact.  That’s why I want you to create your own systems to solve problems.

Think of how much more valuable Jeffrey’s product would be if instead of delivering more and more information about making money on-line, he actually gave them a system that would do it. I’ll have a lot more to say about building your own systems in Chapter 13 and you will definitely want to be wide awake when you read that chapter because this system is crucial to make your impact grow and allow you to live the life that you want to live.

But, even if you have a system and it solves a real problem, it won’t make any difference if you don’t ask one simple question.

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Ken McArthur

Best-Selling Author, Marketing Expert, and Legendary Creator of Impact Presents "The Impact Factor"