The new year is waiting for us with new opportunities to make our dreams true. If we see back to find what we got or achieved in our present year which is going to end, it will disappoint us. so, what should we do to make our next year effective and accomplish our goals?
In order to be successful, you must have one big goal.
Take a piece of paper & make a list of 10 goals that you would like to achieve in the next 12 months. These are one-year goals.
Now sometimes, I'll have a one-day, a one-week, a one-month, three months, six months, but they're all goals that you want to accomplish within 12 months. Then you look over this list, and you say if I could wave a magic wand and achieve any one goal on this list, within 24 hours, which one goal would have the greatest positive impact on my life. And then you look at your list of 10, and the answer will jump out at you. And that becomes your major definite purpose. This is because of your major goal. Then you transfer this to a clean sheet of paper, and you write a deadline when you want to achieve this goal.
You make a list of everything that you could think of that you could do to achieve this goal. You then organize this list like a checklist, in order of sequence, what do you do first, what do you do second, what do you do third? And then you take action on your goal, and then you do something on that goal every day, seven days a week.
It's a very simple system, decide the most important goal, write it down, make a plan, and work on it every day. And then all of your other goals will start to move forward. You'll start to make progress on the big goal, but all of the other goals will start to move forward almost without you even paying attention to them. So that's really the key to success, is a single focus.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were at a dinner party with Bill Gates' father and a large number of other people, at Bill Gates' home in Seattle a few years back. And they were chatting with each other, they're very good friends and somebody came up to them and said,
excuse, gentlemen, I don't mean to interrupt you, but you're three of the most important, most successful people in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are number one, number two wealthiest men in the world. What would you say is the most important ingredient for success?
And they all stopped and broke off their conversation, and all turned simultaneously and looked at the man and said Focus.
also read: Top 5 habits of successful people
Focus is the most important quality for success. If you can focus, you can do anything. If you can't focus, you must always work for someone else who will make you focus. Now wonderfully enough, focusing is like learning how to ride a bicycle or type with a keyboard. It's a learnable skill. You can learn to focus by practicing focus until it becomes automatic.
A beautiful and powerful quote is from Goethe the German philosopher as he said,
"Everything is hard before it's easy."
So the formation of any new habit is hard before it's easy.
You have to keep working on it. It's just like a bicycle. You keep falling down, and you have to keep getting back up again until finally, it becomes easier and easier, and soon it becomes automatic. And when you automatically get up each day, plan your day and work on your most important goal, your whole life will transform.
So here are some guidelines for writing your goals.
First
make sure you write them in the present tense as if your goal had already been achieved.
For example, instead of saying I will earn X amount of dollars each year write I earn X dollars each year.
The reason that we do this is that your subconscious mind can only register commands that are phrased in the present tense.
Second
write your goals in a positive sense. So instead of saying, I will quit smoking, you would write, I am a nonsmoker.
Finally
write your goals in the personal sense. In other words, all of your goals should start with the word I.
This is the only way that your subconscious recognizes that this is a command coming from the head office when you say I, plus an action verb in the positive sense. I earn X number of dollars this year.
There's a process that has made more people rich than any other single process of goal achieving, and it's to take your major goal and structure it as a question.
If your goal is to earn $100,000 a year, then you write, how can I earn $100,000 in the next 12 months? Now that's an open-ended question, not how can I earn it at my job or doing a specific thing. Just an open-ended question, how can I earn that amount of money?
And then you disciplined to write 20 answers to the question. And the 20 answers are all the different things that you can think of to earn $100,000. Work longer, work harder, upgrade your skills, get a new job, take a part-time opportunity, whatever it happens to be. Write down everything you could think of, but force yourself to write at least 20 questions or 20 answers to the question.
The 20-question method, called mind storming, forces you to dig deep into your mind, where you will find all your answers.
One of the most valuable exercises you can engage in when setting goals is to ask yourself, what is my limiting step?
What is the one factor that determines the speed at which I achieve my goal? Or whether I achieve it at all throughout my personal development? Your ability to identify your limiting step is one of the best demonstrations of your intelligence and a step toward building self-confidence. Your capacity to eliminate this limiting step is one of the best demonstrations of your overall competence in achieving anything you want.
Self Confidence
In studying everything that has been written or said about personal development and success, the conclusion I came to was that your level of self-confidence is probably the critical factor in everything you'll accomplish.
When you have enough self-confidence, you will try almost anything. Because success is largely a matter of averages or probabilities, the more things you try, the more likely it is that you will achieve greatly. The same is true for you. By setting goals, trying more things, engaging in more activities, and exploring more opportunities, your probability of success increase dramatically.
The only real limiting step that you might have is your level of self-confidence. When you reach the point at which you believe in yourself absolutely, the barriers that exist in your external world will not stop you. The major obstacles to success always lie within the mind of the individual. They are not contained in external circumstances or situations or people.
By building self-confidence, you win the inner battle. The outer battle seems to take care of itself.
There is an African proverb that says:
“When there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do you no harm.”
Three important ideas for building self-confidence
First
Accept complete responsibility for yourself and for everything that you are and ever will be.
Second
Accept that you can change your situation only by going to work on yourself and learning the things you need to know in order to be better.
Third
Setting goals with timelines for the things that you want, and then working on them every day to bring those goals into reality builds your self-confidence.
We watch people, everybody hears the same things, and they hear the same ideas, but then we watch and we see how quickly they take action. And if a person takes action quickly on a new idea, the chances are, they're going to be successful go up by hundreds of percent.
Prepare in advance
You know, the old saying,
"proper prior preparation saves poor performance or prevents poor performance".
The six P's :
And so prepare your work list for the following day the evening or the night before. The last thing you do at the end of the day is you lay out the day that's coming.
The best exercise is for you to plan your entire next day as the last thing, you do before coming home from work.
When you plan your day the night before, your subconscious mind then goes to work on your plans and goals while you're asleep. Very often, you'll wake up in the morning with ideas and insights that apply to the work of the day.
Now a major benefit of preparing your daily list the night before is that this exercise lets you sleep more soundly. A major reason for insomnia is people lying awake trying not to forget to remember everything that they have to do the following day. But once you've written down everything that you have to do on the list, it clears your mind and enables you to sleep deeply. This will help you increase your productivity throughout the whole next day of work because you'll be more relaxed and more refreshed.
Give yourself a reward
of some kind for practicing the new behavior. Each time you reward yourself, you reaffirm and reinforce that behavior. Soon, you begin to associate at an unconscious level the pleasure of the reward with the behavior. You set up your own force field of positive consequences, that you unconsciously look forward to as a result of engaging in that behavior or habit that you've decided upon.
So what do you think holds people back?
They know what they want to do, but they just can't keep the habit. They do it once, and then they fall off the train, and then the next month they do it again and they fall off the train.
Consistency
How do you make that consistent?
Manage your time to accomplish your tasks on time.
Well, you just keep working at it and working at it. The best way of all is to plan it in advance. Instead of sitting down, never start work without a list, and never start work without prioritizing your list.
People sit down, and they say, well, before I make a list I'll check a little email, check a little spam, send something to my friends, see what's going on YouTube, and so on and so forth, and then they look up and it's 10 o'clock. And they haven't done anything of value.
So start on your most important task. And do that until it becomes a habit. And here's an interesting thing about checking email, is when you check email it triggers the release of dopamine in your brain. Dopamine is a drug. By the way, there are all kinds of books and articles and scientific studies on this. And dopamine is the same drug as cocaine. And what it does, is it's triggered every time you have a shiny object, or something new or different or interesting or sparkling.
If a telephone rings next to you, you go, bing, your brain releases endorphins, and you can't hardly wait to see what it is. You're talking to somebody, and you could be talking to somebody about something very serious, and your telephone goes off bing. Your whole mind goes blank. The middle of the conversation stops. You grab for your phone, you pick it up, you look at it, you check it out and everything else, and then you come back.
If you're working on a task, it takes an average of 17 minutes to get back to the task. And then there's another distraction, so another 17 minutes. The average adult is checking or their email and their phone between 95 and 145 times a day.
By the way, USA Today and Harvard have proved that you lose one IQ point for every hour that you leave your email on. At the end of the day, you've lost 10 IQ points. You actually become stupider throughout the day, dumber. And I ask this of my audience as I say, Have you ever finished a day where you don't think you've accomplished anything?
You've been on email responding to bings and beeps and rings and so on all day, and at the end of the day you go home, and honey says, what do you want for dinner? And you say, I don't know, I don't care. Anything, I just want a drink. Because you're so exhausted, you cannot even decide.
You sit there, and basically like you've just been punched in the side of the head. Because your brain is dead, and you lose 10 IQ points. You get stupider throughout the day. You've got to turn that darn thing off if you want to remain sharp Develop the habit.
You say I'm going to develop the habit, and I'm going to give myself my reward, and my reward will be to check my email after I finish my first task. So all of the success in life is task completion. If you don't complete tasks, you have no future. And so if task completion is the key, then what you do is complete more and more important tasks.
And if you start every day by completing the most important task, your brain actually releases endorphins. Now endorphins are another chemical and it's only released when you do something that is life-enhancing, and what that means is, when you do something that is good for you, that enhances your life, that furthers you, it makes you happy. It releases energy, and it raises your self-esteem.
If you want to be a winner, how do you be a winner, well you win? And winning means you cross the finish line. So if you start and complete a task, you're actually winning. And you get a feeling of being a winner, which gives you an infusion of energy, and inspiration, and it drives you and motivates you to want to get that feeling again. So how do you get that feeling again? You start and complete another task.
So I've developed the habit, and people who are successful develop the habit of starting and completing tasks. So my wife comes in and says dinner's in five minutes, so I look at my list, and I say, okay, there's a five-minute task. And I'm going to start and complete a five-minute task. And each time you complete a task, you get a burst of endorphin. The bigger the task, the more endorphin. The more endorphin, the more quickly you become addicted to starting and completing important tasks. And every single successful person has a reputation for starting and completing important tasks.
If you want the job done, give it to him or her. You want the product served on time, you want the product completed, you want the product manufactured, shipped, delivered, give it to him, give it to her, give it to that company because they always deliver. That's the best reputation you can have if you want to get rich.
I want to encourage each of you to use the advice here to take action on achieving your goals and pursuing your dreams instead of living on Someday Isle. Someday, I'll do this, someday, I'll do that. But you never do it. Take action, and take action now.
Wish you a happy journey to your successful life!
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