Under the Laws of Success
Successful people have a clear sense of purpose and direction in every area of their lives.
Lloyd Conant, founder of Nightingale Conant Corporation of Chicago, the biggest producer and distributor of audio programs on success and achievement in the world, worked with and studied successful people for more than fifty years. He came to the conclusion that "Success is goals, and all else is commentary."
Your ability to set clear, specific goals for yourself in every area of your life will do more to guarantee you higher levels of success and achievement than any other single skill or quality. Absolute clarity about what you want is the starting point of all great accomplishment.
The more definite and focused you are, the easier it is for you to make better decisions on your priorities and the use of your time. The more time you spend on your most important goals, the more you accomplish, and the better you get at accomplishing even more. And the more you achieve, the better you feel about yourself, the more you feel like a winner and the more you want to achieve. You put yourself onto an upward spiral that leads to ever-greater accomplishments. You feel terrific about yourself.
How to apply this law immediately:
1. Take out a sheet of paper and write the words "Dream List" at the top of the page, along with today’s date. You might want to use a spiral notebook for this exercise so that you have several pages together in the same place.
Create your own "five-year fantasy." Imagine that five years have passed and your life is now perfect in every respect. Imagine that all your goals have been achieved, all your problems have been solved, and you are living the life of your dreams.
Imagine that your income, bank account, relationships, family life, health, work, and career are ideal in every way. What would they look like? What would you be doing? Who would you be with? Who would you no longer be with? How much would you be earning? What sort of lifestyle and family would you have? What kind of home, car, clothes, and level of physical fitness would you have?
Describe your future vision for yourself in complete detail by writing out everything you could ever imagine wanting to have on your Dream List.
Some people will come up with a list of only five or ten items. Others will come up with a list of 200 or 300 items that they would like to accomplish in the next five years.
For there to be motivation, there must be a motive. Fully 85 percent of your motivation is determined by the consequences that you anticipate, or the things that you hope to achieve, as a result of what you do. The more clear you are about what you want, the more motivated and determined you will be to accomplish it.
Once you’ve written down a list of your dreams and goals, a list of everything that you would like to have in your life, the next step is for you to assign priorities to them.
Next to the items that are most important to you, the ones that can make the greatest difference in your life and that you desire most intensely, write the letter "A."
Next to the items that you would like to have but are not as important or as life changing as those in the first category, write the letter "B." Next to each of the remaining items, goals that you wrote down that you would like but you don’t care about passionately, write the letter "C."
Now, transfer all of your A goals to a separate sheet of paper. Then ask yourself, What one goal on this list, if I were to achieve it, would have the greatest positive impact on my life?Write "A-1" next to this primary goal. Then ask yourself, If I could achieve only one more goal on this list, which one would it be?
Write "A-2" next to your second most important goal. Go through the entire list of A goals with the same question, writing "A-3," "A-4," and so on until you have organized all of your A goals in order of priority.
Your A-1 goal should be your "major definite purpose," the most important goal in your life. The accomplishment of this goal will lead you to the accomplishment of more of your other goals than any other single goal on your list. Your selection of an A-1 major definite purpose, your most important goal, is your starting point to personal greatness. By deciding on this goal for yourself, you join the top 3 percent of high-achieving men and women in our society.
In our strategic planning sessions with corporations, we use a similar exercise. We ask the executives in the session to imagine that five years have passed and the company is perfect in every respect. We go around the room and invite each person to describe the company from his or her point of view, from his or her particular position of responsibility.
We then discuss and agree upon the most important goals that the company would have achieved if it were ideal in every way. The main goal or output for the company soon becomes clear. It then becomes obvious that most of the other goals are inputs, or steps toward the achievement of the main goal.
For example, in strategic planning with a large national restaurant chain, we came up with several goals having to do with increased volume per unit; food quality; reputation in the marketplace; hiring, training, and promotion strategies; service standards; internal financial controls; and so on. However, the major definite purpose agreed upon was increasing the share price by 300 percent over the next five years.
It became immediately apparent that the other goals were subgoals that would need to be achieved if the company were to be profitable enough to realize its goal of a tripled share price. The other goals were the inputs, the accomplishments of which would lead to the desired output.
In reviewing your personal goals, you should divide them into three categories. The first category is your personal and family goals. These are qualitative goals, having to do with people, time, and quality of life.
These are the reasons "why" you are doing what you are oing. You should be crystal clear about the underlying reasons hy you want the material and tangible goals that you are orking for. Many people get sidetracked working for material hings and lose all sight of the reasons why they are doing it.
Your second set of goals is your career and material goals. hese are the "what" of your goal list. These are the goals that ou have to reach in order to get to the "why." The "what," or business and financial goals on your list, will be career achievements, financial income, and sales or profits, the money and aterial objects of your life.
The third type of goals is your personal and professional development goals. These are the "how" goals. These are the asks that you must do, or become competent at doing, in order to achieve the material goals that will lead you to the accomplishment of your personal and family goals.
You need goals in each of these three areas for your life to be in balance and for you to perform at your very best.
2.Make detailed plans of action to achieve your goals. Once you have set priorities on your original list of goals, divided them into As, Bs, and Cs, and then transferred your As on to a single page and organized them in order of priority, you are ready to begin the planning stage. In the planning stage, take a clean sheet of paper and write your A-1 goal at the top of the page in the present tense, as though it were already a reality.
For example, you could write, "I earn $100,000 per year." Then make a list of everything you can think of that you can do to achieve that goal. As time passes, you will think of additional actions you can take, which you should add to your list. Keep adding new ideas until your list is complete.
Do the same for each of your other A goals. At the end of this process, you will have a list of A goals, each accompanied by a list of several ideas to accomplish each one.
Then organize each list of activities by time and priority. Which are the tasks that you can or should do or begin first? What are the actions that are most important and would make the greatest difference in the attainment of the goal? Write down an A, B, or C next to each of the items and then write down A-1, A-2, A-3, B-1, B-2, B-3, and so on next to each item.
You will now have a list of your most important goals, organized by priority. You will have a list of the activities you must engage in to achieve those goals, also organized by priority. You will have a goal and a plan for each important area of your life.
Review this plan each day, morning and evening. Resolve to do something every day to move yourself toward the attainment of one or more of your most important goals. This daily work on your goals enables you to develop and maintain a certain degree of momentum. With this momentum, you will be astonished at how rapidly you begin to make progress on even your largest and most challenging goals.
In brief, here is a simple, powerful, and proven method for setting and achieving any goal. Practice it yourself and teach it to others:
Step one: Decide exactly what you want. Most people never do this.
Step two: Write it down in clear, specific, detailed language.
Step three: Set a deadline. Set subdeadlines if the goal is large, long term, or complicated.
Step four: Make a list of everything you can think of doing to achieve your goal.
Step five: Organize your list into a plan based on priorities and sequence, based on what comes first and then what must be done before something else can be done.
Step six: Take action on your plan immediately. Don’t delay.
Step seven: Do something every day, no matter how small, that moves you toward your goal.
The Key to Great Success
After a seminar in Minneapolis recently, a businessman told me a great story. He said that he had come to a seminar of mine with a friend about eight years ago. He was from a farm family and lived in a small town outside of Minneapolis. He had never heard about goal setting before.
He told me that he returned home that night, wrote down his goals, made a plan, and took immediate action. From that day to this, he told me, he had disciplined himself to do something every single day that moved him toward his major goal, whatever it happened to be at the time. He said that his income had increased just over 1,000 percent, ten times, in eight years. He concluded his story by telling me that it was the idea of "doing something every day" that was more important than anything else he had ever learned.
When you begin to practice regular, systematic, daily goal setting and planning, combined with the other principles you learn in this book, you will get results that will amaze you, and all the people around you. You will accomplish more in a year or two than others accomplish in five or ten years.
Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc, (San Francisco, 2000).
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