Persistence is important to achieve success, but giving up is also important. I’ve written about persistence before, so here I want to look at giving up.

Why is it essential? Why is it necessary to give up? Because it allows you to focus your energy on the few things that are truly important. By giving up, you:

1. Stop unfruitful effort. What’s the point of spending your time and energy on something that doesn’t work? The more you spend your time and energy there, the more you waste your resources.
2. Avoid spreading yourself too thin. There are probably many things that you want to achieve. But you can’t achieve everything you want. Your resources are limited so you need to choose and prioritize. If you try to do too many things at once you will end up achieving nothing.
3. Reduce your stress. Pursuing too many things means giving yourself unnecessary pressure. Don’t let your ambition stop you from enjoying your life.
4. Free up time for your loved ones. Don’t be so busy that you don’t have time for your loved ones. By giving up, you ease your burden and free up time to build meaningful relationships.

In essence, here is what you need to do:

Give up the less important things so that you can focus and persist on the few important ones.

Here are several tips to help you apply it:

1. Find what matters to you

You need a way to know whether or not something is important. That’s why you need to find what matters to you. What makes you feel fulfilled? What gives you inner satisfaction? Be persistent on things that matter to you and give up the others.

2. Assess your life every now and then

Even if you already find what matters to you, the busyness of life can obscure it. As a result, you might get distracted by superficial things. So find time to reflect on your life every now and then. Look at how your life is going. Are you staying true to what your heart is saying?

3. Learn to let go

You may know that you need to give up something, but it might not be easy to let it go. This is especially true if you already spend a lot of resources on it.

This is where the concept of sunk costs is helpful. Don’t get caught in sunk cost bias. The fact that you’ve spent your resources on the wrong thing doesn’t justify spending even more resources on it. Those resources are already spent. Now you need to find the best way to spend the resources that are left.

The concept of opportunity costs may also be helpful. Holding on the wrong thing means losing better opportunities. The more resources you spend on it, the more opportunities you lose.

4. Refocus your effort

Once you’ve given up the less important things, renew your focus and effort on the few important ones. Now that you are focused, you have a chance to make a real difference.

Photo by Japokskee

Note: This is a guest post from Douglas Cartwright of Living Words

Recently, I was watching a television show about Dean Potter, an American ‘slack line walker’ who strings one-inch thick nylon ropes between high mountainous places and walks across them.

Whilst that’s impressive, you might think “I’ve seen tightrope walkers before.”

But Dean is different. He does it without a balancing pole, or a safety harness, and the line is, literally, slack unlike the traditional high-wire walker. So it moves in the wind as he walks on it.

That’s amazing – but what is more interesting is what he says about why he does it:

“When I’m on a slack-line the feeling that if I slip, I die, totally overwhelms me…I’m after a feeling of total control of my life…that’s what I’m after in all of my life…I’m drawn towards these obsessive goals…”

What Dean has got (whether he realizes it or not) are outrageously powerful reasons driving him for doing what he does. He fully admits he knows that his addiction could lead to his death – but he does it anyway.

What drives a man to do such things?

This is the power of intention, driven by reasons, created by values: things that are so significant and important to him that he can focus his entire mind into what needs to be done to get across that line.

What I am writing about here is focus – and one significant way to improve it using the power of intention.

Some people seem to be able to focus on their priorities at will; and some people seem not to be able to. When these latter people do – they can’t seem to maintain it for long.

Why?

We’re going to look at this and explore some of what we can do about it. But first, please settle yourself down and reacquaint yourself with some familiar (and maybe not so familiar) feelings.

Please picture this….

It’s Friday afternoon. You’re tired, winding down, and ready to chill out at the weekend. You lean lethargically over to your PC and check your email in the hope someone has sent you a decent joke.

Suddenly your boss appears by the desk and tells you he needs your sales figures (or substitute any other time-consuming report-type activity) by Monday morning, and it’s non-negotiable.

You must do it.

You hear your mouth agreeing, and your head nodding, but inwardly you hear your voice groaning and whining: “Darn! It takes ages to do these figures and I’m not in the mood – How on earth am I going to summon the energy or the focus to do this stupid thing?” You alternate quickly between flashes of anger, despair and frustration as you imagine the time it’s going to waste of your weekend putting this together.

If you work for someone else (and if you are a middle manager!) this is probably not unfamiliar to you – and if not so at work, then you can probably remember something like it happening when you were relaxing at home -someone has come to you with an urgent (to them) thing they need you to do; and you can remember the dragging resistance you felt to doing it even as you agreed.

Listen to the griping in your head. What kind of things do you say to yourself about it?

Now, clear your mind and think what your reaction would be if completing that one report (or other task) meant:

• Significant promotion or major career boost.
• An extra 20K per annum tax free. Or any amount you want.
• A new house anywhere in the world you desired.
• Health and long life.
• Being with the partner of your dreams.
• Understanding what it meant to be close to God.

What if it meant all your dreams come true just because you got it done that evening?

Ok, I know. Now, just go along with me for a minute. I know that no one’s report is likely to mean any of those things.

But what if it did?

What if all you had to do was that one lousy report and all your problems would be solved?

How would that feel? What would your motivation be to do it then? Imagine.

Pause for a moment and clear your head. Ask yourself this: “Why would I do the report in the second case and not the first?”

Isn’t it obvious?

In the first instance the only thing motivating you is probably the fear of getting bawled out or fired.

But in the second you’ve got better or more powerful reasons to do the report.

Many or all of those things listed are what people value, what they work their lives for, what they give up their time and money for.

It is the reasons that we have for doing things that make all the difference. It is the meanings we give to the events in our lives that determine how favourably we respond to them – and how strongly we feel about doing or not doing them.

The reason (!) I told you about Dean Potter was to demonstrate that if a man can find reasons to do something that goes against almost every instinct most of us had (walking across a bendy rope 500 feet up in the air with no safety harness!) then does that not inspire you that you could find some powerful reasons to do what you need to do in order to achieve your goals?

There are some things in life that you have to do if you want to be successful and in some cases even remain solvent. There are things you have to focus on, things you have to give “regular focused sufficient attention” to – whether you like it or not.

You probably do know (some of) what you should be doing in order to ensure your success.

So why don’t you?

Could it be because your reasons for not doing it are stronger than your reasons for doing it? Could it be that although it should be, it’s just not registering on your gut-level importance meter? That you just don’t feel like doing it???

What we need is a method of producing strong and lasting motivation that will see us through our good and ‘other’ days. What we need to do is to find a way to generate feelings strong enough to overcome our resistance AND access those feelings on a regular basis so that we can do what we need to. This pattern is based on the Intentions pattern which was created by Professor Michael Hall Ph.D, creator and trainer of Neurosemantics.

THE TECHNIQUE:

You will need at least 20 minutes and a paper and pencil/pen to do this properly. It would also be good if you are somewhere you cannot be seen as you may want to stand up during the final part of the exercise.

1) First, pick an activity you know you ‘should’ be doing in order to increase or turbo-boost your progress towards your success. Pick something that in your heart of hearts you know you are resisting. Got it?

Turn your paper to portrait format.

Write the activity in the middle of the top of the page.

We will now use this activity as a reference point to explore and create your higher and more powerful mental motivations.

2) Answer the questions about ‘How is this activity important to me?’

I take it that activity is significant, right?

How is it significant?

How is it valuable?

How is it meaningful?

What else is important about that?

How many other answers can you identify about this activity?

Write your answers from left to right of the page about an inch below the activity. Basically write what looks like a paragraph of answers.

3) Take a mental step back. Well done. You’ve started to explore your mind set and ask questions about your motivations which is more than many people do.

Now, look at the answers you have just written. Your activity is important to you because of these things, right?

Now ask the following questions about your answers.

And how are these answers important to me?

What is important about having this?

And if you got these feelings and senses of value exactly as you wanted them, what’s even more important than that?

Write down the answers in a paragraph an inch or two below your previous answers.

[Please go with the question and consider your answers even if it seems a little strange to do so.]

Keep doing steps 2 and 3 until you find yourself just repeating the same sort of answers as you did in the previous paragraph.

4) When you can’t list any more answers, look at your final paragraphs and let yourself feel your response to them. It will probably be powerful. Now, (and this is important) think about your activity whilst feeling these feelings. Imagine DOING the activity whilst feeling these powerful feelings.

Doesn’t this begin to totally transform your perceptions of that?

How does this work?

The cut and dried version comes from paraphrasing the German philosopher Nietzchie (the one who supposedly said ‘God is dead’) : “A man can endure how if he has a strong enough WHY” [my italics]

Dean Potter’s why drives him to do extreme things. For the rest of us, making those business calls, building that shed, and booking that training seminar might be enough to start with!

Douglas Cartwright is a personal breakthrough and effectiveness coach and trainer. He helps self-motivated people who are ‘stuck’ get moving and start taking action. You can start to untie your psychological ‘knots’ at www.livingwords.net and pick up an outrageously powerful implementation technique for free at www.overcomingprocrastination.co.uk

Photo by John Loo

Note: This is a guest post by Jonathan Beebe of Develop Minds

Apathy is something that most of us have experienced a time or two in our lives, and for many of us, the feelings of apathy are all too familiar. The good news is, there are ways to rid yourself from feeling the absence of passion, emotion, and excitement… and it’s a lot simpler than you may think.

But first, let’s talk about how apathy affects you and your ability to live life to the fullest. Not only do apathetic feelings ultimately leave you feeling empty and unhappy due to the lack of motivation and desire, but it can also have negative effects on your social life, your studies (if applicable), and your work. Apathy seems to heavily promote procrastination, and unfortunately, it has even been closely linked to suicide. Suffice to say, apathy is a little more than a mild issue.

Fortunately though, apathy can be cured in three easy, but important steps. So the next time you feel apathetic, just think back to this article and maybe it’ll be exactly what you need to inject a little emotion into your state-of-being.

Understand What Apathy Is

While the cause of your apathetic perception of the world may stem from past experiences, your peers, and social conditioning, apathy is actually something you have direct control over. If you are feeling apathetic, somewhere in your mind, you have chosen to see the world as apathetic.

There are many people in the world in your exact situation, yet a vast amount of those same people are not feeling apathetic, yet they live in the same world as you do. This proves that apathy is all in your head, and is ultimately how you have created the world in your mind.

Consciously choose to create a better world in your mind, stick with those thoughts, and eventually you’ll find that there is excitement and passion all around you.

Imagine this scenario. It’s a bright, sunny day and you are in a house. From where you stand, you can see two windows. One is extremely cracked and foggy, while the other is crystal clear as if someone had just cleaned it. The cracked, foggy window is labeled apathy, and the clear window is labeled joy. Which one would you choose to look through?

As overly simple as that sounds, that’s exactly the way it works in your mind. So first make the choice to start looking through the window of joy from now on.

Set Goals and Make Plans

Apathy is sometimes caused by lacking a clear purpose for your life, so an easy way to fix that is to make some goals for yourself. Make big goals and small goals. Then, draft up all the steps it takes, from A-Z, how you plan on achieving them. If you allow yourself to be overly optimistic and don’t let negative attitudes or beliefs get in your way, this could actually be a fun little exercise, and can leave you with a feeling or purpose.

Read a Book

Sometimes, mild apathetic moods can easily be cured by reading a book. Don’t like to read? Well, it definitely won’t hurt you so why don’t you give it a try? Who knows, maybe it’s not that you don’t like to read… maybe you’ve just never read a book you would enjoy. Watching movies is something I think most people enjoy, but I don’t think that would be the case if they went their whole lives watching movies that didn’t appeal to them. The same goes with books.

Books, however, will increase blood flow to your brain, and will help build neural connections so it’s not only good for you, but it will get your mind off of the way you are feeling because sometimes apathy only gets worse because many times those who are experiencing apathy lay around and dwell on it. So take a trip to your local bookstore and make an agreement with yourself to read at least one book.

Conclusion

So the next time you begin to feel the onset of apathy entering your day, I recommend you follow all the three steps I mentioned, though sometimes only one or two of them will be enough. It’s literally as simple as choosing not to perceive the world as apathetic, making some goals to create a sense of purpose in your life, and getting your mind off of apathetic feelings.

Remember those three things and you’ll be one step closer to living your life to the fullest.

Jonathan Beebe is the author and creator of Develop Minds, a personal development blog dedicated to providing free content aimed at helping you improve you life by increasing your consciousness, intelligence, and teaching you to fully develop your mind in a positive way.

Photo by gotplaid

There are some interesting comments in the post The Importance of Being Smart and here I’d like to discuss one of them. It’s a comment by Chew:

I have something to add to being smart. It’s about beginning with the end in mind.

The objective was to acquire 100,000 arrows, which is not the same as making 100,000 arrows. Most of us would have framed the challenge as “making 100,000 arrows” instead of “acquiring 100,000 arrows”.

No amount of smartness can outsmart the need to begin with the end in mind.

I love it. I don’t know about you, but I often find myself in such a situation. When I need to achieve a goal, I often frame it as achieving the goal in a certain way. As a result, I exclude other ways to achieve it.

This, I’m afraid, is a common problem. When people need to get a task done, they tend to do it in the most obvious way or the way that most other people do. This is a bad idea because by definition following the crowd means being average.

That’s why it’s important to begin with the end in mind. Instead of taking the most obvious route, take a step back and get a complete picture of the goal. Then ask yourself: what are the possible ways to achieve the goal? Notice that the question is not whether or not there is other way because there are always other ways. The question helps you find new possibilities you might never think of before.

You can take the concept further by questioning the goal itself. Why? Because a goal is just a way to achieve an even bigger goal.

Just take acquiring arrows as an example. Acquiring arrows is a way to achieve the bigger goal of winning the battle. So you should ask yourself: is acquiring arrows necessary to win the battle? What are other ways to win the battle? Thinking that you need to acquire arrows without considering other options means that you don’t begin with the end in mind.

You can still move further because winning the battle is a way to win the war, but you get the idea.

Applying this principle in your life will give you interesting insights. Just look at something that you do and ask yourself the bigger goal you want to achieve through it. By keep questioning you will eventually find the ultimate goal of your life. You should then work backward and find the best way to accomplish your goals at each level.

Here is an example:

• Q: Why do I need to do this job?
  A: To make money
• Q: Why do I need to make money?
  A: To be able to buy what I want.
• Q: Why do I need to buy what I want?
  A: To make me happy.

Let’s stop at this point. You should now work backward by asking this question:

• What are the possible ways to make me happy?

From your answers you might realize that you don’t need to buy stuff to be happy. Instead, there are other possibilities. Let’s say that the best answer you find is giving. Then the next question is:

• What are the possible ways for me to give?

This way you begin with the end and move backward to the point where you are now.

Beginning with the end in mind is important. Not only will it help you find more creative ways to achieve your goals, but it will also help you find the right goals in life.

Photo by muha

A goal without a plan is just a wish.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

To be successful in your life, you need to have a life plan. Without a plan, many of your dreams will only be dreams. A life plan, on the other hand, will help you turn your dreams into reality. It works because it gives you not a just a destination, but also a way to get there.

A life plan doesn’t have to be complicated. It should answer just two questions:

1. What is your destination?
2. How will you get there?

Let’s look at them one by one.

What is Your Destination?

You should know where you are going. Not knowing your destination is a mistake because you may end up in the wrong place. You need to know where you want to go so that you don’t waste your time and effort.

Here are some tips related to finding your destination:

1. Create your life map

To see how your life will be in the future, it’s helpful to see how your life has been in the past.  By creating a life map, you can see patterns in your life that help you find out where you should go.  Look backward, connect the dots in your life, and project them into the future.

Further reading:

• Examine Your Life with a Simple Life Map

2. Find your life purpose

Your life purpose gives you meaning in everything you do. It helps you do what matters to you and makes your life fulfilling. Without a purpose, you may achieve much but feel empty inside. Take the time to find your purpose in life.

Further reading:

• 37 Lessons to Help You Live a Life that Matters
• A Guide to Finding Your Life Purpose

3. Discover your big dreams

The size of your dreams has a lot to do with living in mediocrity. If your dreams are small, there is no reason for you to move past mediocrity. It’s easier to just live a comfortable life. On the other hand, if your dreams are big, you have to move past mediocrity to make your dreams come true. So discover the big dreams in you.

4. Make short-term goals

You should know what your final destination is, but you should also have milestones along the way. These milestones help you stay on track. They help you know whether or not you are on the right path to reach your destination.

You create the milestones by breaking your long-term goals into short-term ones. What do you want to achieve this year? What do you want to achieve this month? What do you want to achieve today?

5. Keep refining

Knowing your destination is a process. If you are like me, you will refine your destination over time. It’s like zooming in a picture. At first you see the big picture, but after zooming it in you can see its details. Similarly, perhaps you can only see the big picture of your destination now. That’s fine. Follow it. Along the way, you will find clues that make the picture clearer.

How Will You Get There?

After knowing your destination, you need to know how to get there. Here are some tips related to it:

1. Find and communicate your personal brand

To achieve your goals, you need to market yourself. You need to find the unique value you can provide to others and communicate it. This way people know that they can come to you to meet their needs.

Further reading:

• Career Tips: How to Find Your (Potential) Unique Value Proposition
• The 10 Immutable Laws of Personal Branding
• 12 Things You Can Do Today to Strengthen Your Personal Brand

2. Have some guiding principles

There are a lot of distractions along the way to your destination. To prevent yourself from being distracted, you need to have some guiding principles. You need to identify the value you believe in. These principles help you stay true to yourself in everything you do.

3. Find your deliberate practice

Doing deliberate practice is important if you want to be remarkable. Deliberate practice is the kind of practice that stretches the boundaries of your capabilities. A good rule of thumb is you need about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become a world-class expert in a field. Find out where you should invest that 10,000 hours.

Further reading:

• Finding Niche: Where to Invest Your 10,000 Hours of Practice
• How to Have an Expert Mind

4. Use tacking strategy

The world constantly changes so you need to constantly adapt. That’s why tacking – a term taken from the world of sailing – is a good strategy to apply. With tacking you set a short-term objective, work hard to achieve it, evaluate your performance, and adjust accordingly.

Further reading:

• Tacking: A Strategy for Personal Success

Executing Your Life Plan

After knowing your destination and how to get there, you need to execute your plan. Here are some tips on executing your life plan:

1. Focus

There is no question that focus is essential to achieve your goals. Without focus, you will spread your effort and attention too thin and eventually achieve nothing. Be careful though. You should be focused but not obsessed.

Further reading:

• How to Focus: Five Levels of Mental Focus You Might Not Aware of
• The Danger of Being Obsessed and How to Overcome It

2. Be persistent

You should be persistent because failure is inevitable on your way to success. Without persistence, it’s easy to get discouraged in the face of failure and stop before reaching your destination. Have faith and keep pushing forward.

Further reading:

• 7 Powerful Tips to Overcome Failure
• 7 Sure-Fire Ways to Develop Persistence

3. Build relationships

Nobody can succeed alone. You need the support of other people to succeed. So build your network before you need it.

Further reading:

• 106 Tips to Become a Master Connector

4. Start now

A good plan vigorously executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week.
George S. Patton

Don’t wait until your plan is perfect before you start. Don’t wait for the perfect time. Start now. You will learn more by doing than by waiting.

Photo by Tjeerd

If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we aren’t really living.
Gail Sheehy

You need to change in order to grow. You can’t grow if you just stay where you are. You can’t grow if you don’t change the way you think and act. In fact, changing your life is a continuous process. It never ends. The moment you stop changing, you stop growing.

I’m not saying that I know everything about changing life. I’m still learning myself. But here I’d like to share with you what I have learned so far.

Here are ten tips to change your life:

1. Slow down

To change your life, you need time to think and reflect. If you are always busy, you won’t have the time to think about your life let alone taking action to change it. You won’t have the room to apply the tips below. So slow down and make the room for change.

Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.
Eddie Cantor

2. Be willing to change

Willingness is essential. It’s your life; nobody can change it but you. If you aren’t willing to change, then nothing in this world can make you do so.

To build the willingness to change, first you should realize that your life can be better than it is now. No matter how good your life is, it can always be improved. On the other hand, don’t feel hopeless if your life doesn’t seem good right now. You can always change your life for the better.

3. Accept responsibility

Accepting responsibility for your life is a must. Don’t blame other people for the bad things that happen in your life. Don’t blame your family, friends, boss, or the economy. Whether your life goes up or down depends on you and you alone. Once you take the responsibility, real change is within your reach.

We immediately become more effective when we decide to change ourselves rather than asking things to change for us.
Stephen Covey

4. Find your deepest values

Deep down in your heart, there are some principles that you know is true. Take the time to find them. What do you think is the most valuable thing in life? What principles do you think you must follow to live a fulfilling life? These are the values you need to align yourself with. Find them and remind yourself constantly about them.

5. Find your cause

Change is not easy because there is inertia you need to overcome. Just like a space shuttle needs a powerful rocket to overcome the Earth’s gravity, you also need a powerful source of energy to overcome the inertia to change. Your cause is the source of energy you need. Your cause can give you the strength to overcome the inertia. To find your cause, find what matters to you.

6. Replace limiting beliefs with empowering beliefs

Limiting beliefs are among the biggest obstacles that hinder you from changing your life. You need to identify them before you can effectively handle them. To identify your limiting beliefs, observe your mind for thoughts that contain phrases like:

• “I can’t …”
• “I won’t be able to …”
• “I will always be …”
• “There is no way …”

Whenever you find one, write it down. After some time, look at your list. These are your limiting beliefs.

After identifying your limiting beliefs, you need to replace them with empowering beliefs. Write positive statements that counter the negative ones you wrote before and make positive affirmations using those statements. Do it whenever you realize that a limiting belief is at work.

7. Replace bad habits with positive habits

Besides identifying limiting beliefs, you should also identify bad habits you have. Are there habits that drag you down? Are there habits that you know you need to break? List them all.

Then, rather than focusing on breaking those habits, focus on creating new positive habits that replace them. For example, let’s say the bad habit is watching too much TV. Rather than focusing on reducing your TV time, you should focus on building a positive habit that will use the time in a better way. For instance, you might want to build the habit of reading.

8. Find a mentor

Finding a mentor can greatly help you improve your life. Not only can your mentor give you advice on what to do in certain situations, he can also warn you about possible pitfalls in your path. Without a mentor, most likely you will have to learn many lessons the hard way. Having a mentor will save you serious amount of time.

Getting a good mentor is not easy though. In many cases, you can’t just expect someone to invest his time in you for nothing. At the very least, you should show that you are an open-minded and teachable person. Furthermore, try to be useful to your mentor. Help him in any way you can to make his job easier. This way you send a message that you are a serious mentee that is worth investing in.

9. Have the right expectation

Having the right expectation from the beginning is important. Otherwise, it’s easy for you to be discouraged when things don’t go as expected. Change takes time, especially if you want the change to last. Having the right expectation prepares you to be persistent in difficult times.

10. Maintain the momentum

The most difficult part is always the beginning. Once you go through it, things will become easier if you maintain the momentum. Just think about pushing a car. The most difficult part is getting the car to start moving. Once it’s moving, pushing it will be easy as long as you don’t let it stop again.

Similarly, you should keep improving your life. Change your life day by day. As the quote above says, if you don’t change, you don’t grow.

Photo by pimpexposure

Jonathan Mead from Iluminated Mind just released an e-book entitled Reclaim Your Dreams: An Uncommon Guide to Living On Your Own Terms. I don’t know about you, but I believe that dreams are important part of our lives. Your dreams can energize, inspire, and motivate you. They can take you to new heights in your life. Most importantly, living your dreams makes you live your own life. You no longer live according to what other people are telling you. Instead, you follow your heart and do what matters to you.

Of course, doing that is not easy and that’s why this 84-page e-book comes to help. As its title says, Reclaim Your Dreams helps you reclaim your dreams. It does that in two steps:

1. It shows you how to overcome the obstacles to living your dreams.
2. It shows you the tools you need and practical solutions to living your dreams.

Here are some things I love about the e-book:

• It has useful tips on finding your dreams and connecting them with your value and life purpose. This way your dreams, value, and purpose are synchronized.
• It has tips to keep your dreams alive. I sometimes forget to follow my dreams when I’m busy with my activities. There are some good ways here to constantly remind yourself about your dreams.
• It identifies both the mental and practical obstacles to living your dreams and gives you the tips to overcome them.

In my opinion, this e-book is like a prequel to Career Renegade (my review). Reclaim Your Dreams deals more with finding your dreams and the motivation to follow them. Career Renegade deals more with how to make a living from it. Both can help you live a fulfilling life.

You can find more information about the e-book on the e-book’s web site.

To achieve personal success, you should first know what you want. You should first know your destination. Then, after knowing your destination, you should figure out how to get there.

I recently read a great strategy about “how to get there” in the book The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur by Mike Michalowicz. While the strategy is aimed at companies, I believe that it’s just as applicable to individuals. The strategy is called “tacking” which comes from the sailing world:

He (the sailor) knows that he will not follow a straight line; the changing winds alone will not allow for that. Instead, he will travel in a zigzag-like pattern.

By tacking, the sailor travels a short distance, maximizing the winds and avoiding hazards. He then analyzes where he is in relationship to his destination, adjusts the sails, redirects the boat and continues the zag part of his travels. After another short distance he again evaluate his relationship to the destination and adjusts.

These routine adjustments will eventually bring the sailor to his destination.

Isn’t that similar to achieving personal success? You know where you want to go, but the wind always changes along the way. No matter how good your plan is, unexpected things always happen. You need to respond to them and adjust your actions accordingly or you may never reach your destination.

For me, this is a great idea that I have started applying. From my past experiences, I know that things always change and a tactic might not work for long. Holding to it in the name of habit or discipline will only take me further away from my destination.

So now I decide to use the tacking strategy on a monthly basis. Here is what I do:

1. I look at my life purpose and its one-liner.
2. I set a goal of the year related to my life purpose.
3. Based on the goal of the year, I set some specific objectives for the month. I set the objectives based on what I think are the best tactics to achieve my goal.
4. I work hard the entire month to achieve my objectives for the month.
5. Near the end of the month, I evaluate how things are going. Did I choose the right objectives? Do the objectives take me closer to my goal? Do I find better tactics to apply?
6. Based on the evaluation, I set new objectives for the following month. These objectives could be the same or different from the previous ones.

That’s how I apply the tacking strategy. I do my best to travel a short distance (one month in this case) before evaluating my position and adjusting my actions. In my opinion, tacking is a very good strategy for personal success. It allows you to adapt to changing situation.

One question you might have is: why monthly? One month is the best duration for me. It’s long enough to apply a tactic but still gives me twelve opportunities a year to adjust my actions. Of course, your situation may be different, so find the duration that works for you.

Photo by wili_hybrid

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.
Joseph Addison

Looking at my life, there are many life lessons I’ve learned. Some of them are the fruits of difficult experiences. Some others are the advice I got from wise people. They came from different sources but they all have something in common: they are all useful to guide my life into the future.

Here I’d like to share with you eight life lessons that have significantly affected my life. Apply them and you will achieve true success in life. Here they are:

1. Be grateful

Being grateful is perhaps the most important attitude you must have to live a happy life. No matter how bad the situations around you are, you can always choose to respond positively. Being grateful makes you look at the world through positive lens and energizes your life. Don’t take things for granted. Be grateful even for simple things.

2. Follow your heart

Nothing can replace following your heart. People may tell you about the right thing to do or what they expect from you, but at the end, it’s your life. If you don’t live your own life, who will?

So slow down and listen to your heart. What does it tell you about your career? What does it tell you about your relationships? Listen to your heart and find the courage to follow it.

3. Dream big

How far you go is very much determined by how big your dream is. Having a small dream is like putting yourself inside a small box. You might end up living far below your fullest potential.

Of course, it’s not easy to dream big. Perhaps your failures in the past scare you. Perhaps you don’t think you have what it takes to achieve your dream. But don’t let negativity push you down. Be dare to dream big.

If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse.
Walt Disney

4. Good is the worst enemy of best

When you reach a position that is good enough, you may become comfortable and think that it’s no longer worth it to continue fighting for the best. That’s why good is the worst enemy of best: it makes you stop before you achieve your fullest potential. It distracts you from pursuing your best life. Be grateful for what you have but understand that you still have a lot more in front of you.

5. Run your own race

Your race is different from other people’s races. Realizing this is liberating because it frees you from envy. When you hear that other people are successful, you can sincerely be grateful since you are not in competition with them. At the same time, it also pushes you to live your best life. Why? Because you are competing against yourself.

I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
Mikhail Baryshnikov

6. Focus on what you can control

Sometimes you might have bad experiences that you can’t do anything about. If that happened, don’t dwell on it. You are wasting a lot of mental energy if you do. Move on and focus instead on things you can control. Applying this frees you from a lot of stress and worries.

One application of this principle is on changing people. Which one do you think you can change: yourself or other people? You can’t change other people but you can change yourself. So focus on changing yourself.

7. Failure is your friend

Befriending failure makes you dare to try new things. It puts you on the path of inventions, breakthroughs, and innovations. Failure is often the price of progress.

Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.
Thomas J. Watson

8. Relationships are your greatest treasures

At the end, what do you want to achieve in life? Will it be meaningful to have a lot of money if you have broken relationships? Will it be meaningful to be famous if you lose love? I don’t think so. Your relationships are your greatest treasures. Understand it before it’s too late.

Photo by pshutterbug

Making money is a significant part of our life. People spend 40 hours or more of their time a week to make money. For that reason, it’s essential to have the right perspective when it comes to making money. Otherwise we may focus on the wrong things and end up at the wrong place.

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a while and I’ve come to a perspective that I’m about to share with you. This perspective helps me connect making money to a greater purpose and makes it more fulfilling.

The Goals of Making Money

Why do people make money? What do they try to achieve? I believe there are two levels of goals in making money: a lower one and a higher one.

The lower goal of making money is to meet your needs.

This is the goal that most people has and there is nothing wrong with it. I also have it as a goal since I do have needs that can only be met with money.

But there is a higher goal.

The higher goal of making money is to make yourself useful to a cause you believe in.

While the lower goal of making money sits on level 1 (Physical) or 4 (Esteem) of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the higher goal sits on level 8 (Transcendence). Consequently, the higher goal is more fulfilling. It’s fine to have the lower goal of making money, but I believe that sooner or later we must adopt the higher goal.

Of course, you can be useful to your cause in many ways. Being useful financially is just one of them. You may want to be useful to your cause in non-financial ways and that’s absolutely fine.

In my case though, I want to contribute financially as well as in other ways.

Now I will share with you what I think is the best way to be useful financially to your cause.

Being Useful Financially To Your Cause

There is one thing that makes you useful financially to your cause : the ability to make money.

Notice that I say the ability to make money and not the amount of money you have.

This, I believe, is an essential principle when it comes to making money:

Having the ability to make money is more important than having money.

It’s not how much you have. It’s how much you can make. There are three reasons why the ability to make money is more important than having money:

1. By having the ability to make money, you won’t be obsessed with having a lot of money because you know that you can always earn the money when you need it.
2. By having the ability to make money, you can easily give money away. Again, that’s because you know that you can earn the money when you need it.
3. By having the ability to make money, you can share your knowledge on how to make money rather than just giving the money itself.

This way you can be useful to your cause in three ways:

1. You have the time to do important things for your cause that aren’t related to making money. That’s because you aren’t so obsessed with having money that your time is occupied with work.
2. Your money can directly help the cause because you’re willing to give it away.
3. You can help other people earn more money. They can then be useful financially to the cause and thereby create a multiplier effect.

As you can see, you are useful in many ways if you have the ability to make money. That’s why you should focus on increasing your ability to make money.

In a future post, I will discuss how to do that.

Photo by jenn_jenn