The Do Village

Each morning when I wake up, I make myself breakfast. I fry the eggs,  some bacon, flip some flapjacks and before I know it I have a great meal sitting in front of me.  After breakfast I get dressed for work and some mornings I have to cut my hair.  I first make sure my clippers are properly oiled, then I began cutting my hair by starting on the left side, next the right, then the back, followed by the top and finally the edges and before I know it, I have a pretty decent haircut.  I’ve been doing this routine religiously for years now and have become a great cook and quite the barber.

When I first started doing these things I was horrible at both of them.  Most mornings I would throw my breakfast away because the food was just that bad and as for the haircut….. Let’s just say after a few bad cuts I developed a need for hats.  My question is this, if it can take someone months or even years to become something simple as a good cook or a decent barber, why do people feel that business success should be granted overnight.

Everything that you do in your life has some type of a set routine to it that was developed by trial and error.  Whether it’s playing sports, doing laundry or even driving your car, your life is built behind small plans being executed and corrected on an everyday basis.  You have to understand this concept if you want to reach your full potential in life.  If everything in your life involves some type of plan what makes the process of achieving your dreams any different?  In my profession I always ask my clients either what makes them happy or what some of their goals are.  I hear everything from wanting to be a lawyer, a police officer,  to owning their own business one day.  When I ask them how they plan to achieve these goals and 9 times out of 10 they are completely silent.

Success in life is achieved by persisting through a process of trial and error until your achieved your goal.  You’re either planning to succeed or you’re planning not to.  By not having a process set in place to reach your goals your are actually planning to fail without even knowing it.

Here is a simple 6 step process that can be followed to help you reach your goals:

1.) Define your goal. You first have to make a decision on what goal you are trying to achieve. This is an easy step because every since we were babies, we develop the concept of daydreaming.  It’s also dangerous because half of the people in the world become stuck in this phase because this is something that requires no work or effort but it makes us feel good to think about our potential.

2.) Start the planning process. This is the part of the process where the work begins. Create somewhat of an outline or timeline on how you plan to reach this goal. A lot of people that claim that want to be successful skip this part because they feel that they know what they’re doing and writing things down take too much time.  By writing your plans and processes down you can retrace your steps to see where things may have gone wrong and correct them along the way.

3.) Seek good advice. This is a very important part of achieving your goal. Find someone that’s achieved your goal, pick their brain for ideas and mimic their success. No need to try to reinvent the wheel, the best ideas are usually old ideas with new applications of modern technology. If this step is done correctly you can save yourself some valuable time and effort by not making the same mistakes as your predecessors. If you don’t know or can’t find someone that has been successful in the area that your or needing help, I guarantee theirs a book or some type of class you can take to get the same information. You will achieve you goal a lot faster.

4.) Execute. If you’ve done the previous steps correctly, you should be excited and eager to start this part of the process.  Those that skip one or two parts of this formula become scared to start or they never start it at all.  They begin to make excuses on how it’s too hard or start blaming other people or things in their life that’s preventing them from doing so.

5.) Make minor adjustments as you go along. Now that you are executing you may come across better ways or ideas of achieving this goal don’t be afraid to make small adjustments to your original plans.

6.) Stick with it. Anything worth doing is worth doing horribly at first.  Most things that we set out to achieve in life didn’t come to us naturally, but we enjoyed the challenge of mastering the task.  Stick with your plan until your goal is in your grasp.

So as you can see it’s pretty impossible to become successful without some type of work being involved.  If this task was easy, everyone would be successful and there would be no need for this blog or any success book for that matter.  The beauty of putting your own plan together and later on achieving that goal can be one of the most rewarding things you can ever do in life.

There are 3 types of people in the world. Those that make things happen, those that watch things happen, and those that wonder “What just happened?”  What side are you on?

Keep doing!!!!

The above post was written by Brook Miller and  posted with his permission by Ron Story, Jr.