- Making Your Best Contribution
By: Enoch Tan
If you really want to grow your business you are going to have to answer a single question that almost no struggling entrepreneur ever asks themselves. You want to know what it is? Of course you do, so let's press on.
Now listen, don't let the simplicity of the question fool you because it'll be easy to dismiss it, but if you do, you'll never even achieve a fraction of what you are capable of. Ok, so here it is:
What Work Are You Willing To Leave Undone?
The sooner you realize that you can't read everything, nor can you cross off every item on your to do list the better. Because at that very moment you are forced to realize that you absolutely must prioritize no matter what.
You see, realizing you can't do everything helps you determine what you really must be doing, and realizing you can't read everything forces you to decide which information you must read.
Now if you are wondering how you make these difficult decisions, have no fear because the answer is simple. You have to know what you want and what you must do to get it. Once you know then you can make effective decisions about what you should be doing, who you should be talking to, and what you should be studying.
What's important is that we each make the best contribution we can. Ask yourself this: Are you currently making the best contribution you're capable of making? If the answer is clearly no, then there's no point in continuing on your current path, is there? Common sense suggests that if you know you're on the wrong path, you should stop walking. The longer you stay on the wrong path, the worse things are for all of us. Maybe it will take a few days to find the right path. Maybe it will take several years. But it's still better to be lost for several years than to be lost for a lifetime.
Why do we hold ourselves back from the best and settle for the good? Fear. We fear what it will be like to live on the edge of the best. Just imagine what it would feel like to be reading the very best book, doing the best workout, eating the best food, having the best job, enjoying the best relationship, living in the best house, driving the best car, having the best friends, living the best life.
If you're holding something that's just good while something better is easily within your grasp, then your good isn't really good at all. The good is the enemy of the best. You have to give up doing something good in order to do something better. Be willing to bypass many good things because they are just not good enough compared to what's best. You want to serve and help, but you want to serve and help in the best way you can.
You need to sacrifice the urgent for the important. Many a times, what's urgent is not really necessary to be dealt with after all. You need to go for what's best instead of what's good or even great. Do not forfeit the greater good by allowing yourself to be entangled with the lesser good.
Have you ever single-mindedly decided to pursue a goal or solve a problem and just as you were making progress on it something grabbed your attention and moved your focus away from what you were focused on? Then all of a sudden when you went back to try to focus in on it again, you felt like EVERYTHING backed up on you and you had even more problems or things to tend to or deal with first.
It is a myth that opportunity only comes along once in a life time. The truth is, it comes along every day. If you have a vision and a clearly defined goal for your business, you can now determine what opportunities compliment your goal and are congruent with your business goals or if the opportunity is really a cleverly disguised DISTRACTION.
Keep your eye on your goal and DO NOT allow outside distractions to pull your attention off of what you are aiming to achieve. The truth is, many of these distractions will come as HUGE opportunities presented with great marketing, the rest will come as your very own family and friends.
But, some opportunities must be seized. And if this one will help you do what you already want to do better, or are doing better, then you know to take advantage of this opportunity and achieve greater success or at a faster rate. Instead of chasing opportunities, pick your position. The one that works to your strengths and compliments your vision. The secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours.
You need to be great at ONE thing and good at every thing else. Those that end up quitting, try to be "great at everything", and in the end are great at nothing and good at one thing, which is making no money at all.
It is very likely that you are the only person in your business with the capabilities and knowledge and skills to bring in new business, and making sure projects get completed. This is the only way your business prospers. When you don't do these things, they don't get done!
Focus on things that directly relate to improving the results of your immediate business. Leave other things aside if you want to see exponential growth faster. It is all a matter of balancing between closing yourself to other opportunities and opening yourself to them.
Stay focused and concentrate on your goal. In doing so, you will maintain your momentum and quickly achieve your dreams and desires. Let others waste their time on things that don't get any real work done, while you focus only on what's best and what's important.
About The Author
Enoch Tan aims to help people achieve greater awareness in living and experiencing life. To evolve human consciousness to higher levels. To change lives and to create possibility. To revolutionize the way we understand the mind and reality. Because that is what governs every area of life and destiny. Learn Secrets most people will never know about the Mind and Reality! Visit http://www.MindReality.com now and Get Free Ebooks of Universal Secrets!
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Your Only Recipe For Success
Setting Goals:
By: Innocent M Gathungu
Goals are like signposts. As long as you can see these signposts, then you know you are heading in the right direction. When you set goals, you eliminate the possibility veering off the track and derailing into failure. When a train veers of the rails, the entire locomotive is derailed. Looking at the rails, one does not see anything special in them; just a solid mass of steel. But that simple mass of steel ensures that the train remains on course and that everyone on board reaches their destination safely and on time.
Goals are like rails. Without them, our claim to success will never find expression in reality. Just as a train must stay on the rails to complete the journey, our dreams, our ambitions, and our desires must find expression in goals that are clear, realistic and timely.
When we have well articulated and clearly defined goals, the journey towards success becomes lighter, even less tiring. This is because goals help us to (i) stay focused (ii) be realistic in our expectations (iii) gauge our progress (iv) avoid being overwhelmed (v) re-evaluate and redefine our strategy to ensure conformity and consistency with our objectives.
Stay focused
John Maxwell says "obstacles are the things you see when you take your eyes off the goal". How true! Every time you take your eyes away from the goal at hand, you will surely wander off into troubled waters. If you get to a point in your success journey where you can't see your goal, you are definitely headed into failure territory.
Goals constantly remind us that there are tasks that need to be done, and within a particular time frame, for us to make progress. Without goals reminding us of where we are and what we are supposed to do to get where we ought to be, we will only be working hard and achieving nothing. Hard work, as Maxwell says, "is the accumulation of easy tasks you did not do when you should have". The easy routine tasks that we sometimes ignore feeds into our success. Failure to perform these tasks will translate into failure.
Goals must be realistic
Goals must be firmly established upon unflinching reality. If you want to go to New York and you only have ten dollars, it would be foolhardy to start packing for your journey. The reality is that boarding a plane to New York from Nairobi costs more than 10 dollars! But you say, "I have faith in God"? Well, faith is not foolish, neither is it an emotion. No amount of goose bumps or frenzied hysteria will take you to New York on ten dollars. Be real or you will miss the deal.
Goals are yardsticks
Like yardsticks, goals help us gauge or measure our progress, or lack of it. Without goals constantly reminding us where we are and what we should be doing to get where we ought to be, we will be running wild. No amount of sticking our head deep into the sand will help us achieve success. We must stick it out to the end by daily attaining the goals we have set for ourselves. This can only be done if today's tasks are 'done' today!
To post pone to tomorrow today's task will only mean one thing: a clog up tasks. The result is that we end up breaking our backs trying to accomplish both yesterday's and today's tasks; resulting in sloppy and unfinished tasks.
Goals help us avoid overwhelm
To de-stress our lives, we need to learn how to work smart by finishing our daily tasks on schedule.
This is important if we are to avoid being overwhelmed by tasks carried over from yesterday.
One of the leading causes of burnout and depression is the failure to tackle simple tasks on time. As tasks pile up one after another, we end up having to work overtime and sometimes overnight; pushing our body to limits it was not designed to go. To avoid overwhelm, learn to decongest your life by doing what must be done today, today! However if you want to work hard and up stressing yourself, go ahead and let the tasks accumulate.
Goals help us re-strategize
Finally we need to re-evaluate and redefine our strategy to ensure conformity with our objectives. Strategies help us achieve our goals faster. However, some of the strategies we use are sometimes rendered obsolete by the passage of time. When this happens, it is important to redefine or tweak them a little.
Strategies must always remain relevant and in line with the desired goals. When they become irrelevant or obsolete, they should be discarded and new ones invented.
Strategies help us save time by crowding out irrelevant tasks; those that only take up our time but which do not feed into in to our goals. Strategies also help us to concentrate on priority tasks; those that are crucial to the attainment of our goals.
About The Author
Innocent Mwangi Gathungu is a motivational and inspirational speaker. He specialises in helping people in their spiritual lives and in motivating them to achieve their highest potential. For motivational and inspirational articles, visit his websites at http://www.ssmk.net and http://www.realopportunity.org.
By: Innocent M Gathungu
Goals are like signposts. As long as you can see these signposts, then you know you are heading in the right direction. When you set goals, you eliminate the possibility veering off the track and derailing into failure. When a train veers of the rails, the entire locomotive is derailed. Looking at the rails, one does not see anything special in them; just a solid mass of steel. But that simple mass of steel ensures that the train remains on course and that everyone on board reaches their destination safely and on time.
Goals are like rails. Without them, our claim to success will never find expression in reality. Just as a train must stay on the rails to complete the journey, our dreams, our ambitions, and our desires must find expression in goals that are clear, realistic and timely.
When we have well articulated and clearly defined goals, the journey towards success becomes lighter, even less tiring. This is because goals help us to (i) stay focused (ii) be realistic in our expectations (iii) gauge our progress (iv) avoid being overwhelmed (v) re-evaluate and redefine our strategy to ensure conformity and consistency with our objectives.
Stay focused
John Maxwell says "obstacles are the things you see when you take your eyes off the goal". How true! Every time you take your eyes away from the goal at hand, you will surely wander off into troubled waters. If you get to a point in your success journey where you can't see your goal, you are definitely headed into failure territory.
Goals constantly remind us that there are tasks that need to be done, and within a particular time frame, for us to make progress. Without goals reminding us of where we are and what we are supposed to do to get where we ought to be, we will only be working hard and achieving nothing. Hard work, as Maxwell says, "is the accumulation of easy tasks you did not do when you should have". The easy routine tasks that we sometimes ignore feeds into our success. Failure to perform these tasks will translate into failure.
Goals must be realistic
Goals must be firmly established upon unflinching reality. If you want to go to New York and you only have ten dollars, it would be foolhardy to start packing for your journey. The reality is that boarding a plane to New York from Nairobi costs more than 10 dollars! But you say, "I have faith in God"? Well, faith is not foolish, neither is it an emotion. No amount of goose bumps or frenzied hysteria will take you to New York on ten dollars. Be real or you will miss the deal.
Goals are yardsticks
Like yardsticks, goals help us gauge or measure our progress, or lack of it. Without goals constantly reminding us where we are and what we should be doing to get where we ought to be, we will be running wild. No amount of sticking our head deep into the sand will help us achieve success. We must stick it out to the end by daily attaining the goals we have set for ourselves. This can only be done if today's tasks are 'done' today!
To post pone to tomorrow today's task will only mean one thing: a clog up tasks. The result is that we end up breaking our backs trying to accomplish both yesterday's and today's tasks; resulting in sloppy and unfinished tasks.
Goals help us avoid overwhelm
To de-stress our lives, we need to learn how to work smart by finishing our daily tasks on schedule.
This is important if we are to avoid being overwhelmed by tasks carried over from yesterday.
One of the leading causes of burnout and depression is the failure to tackle simple tasks on time. As tasks pile up one after another, we end up having to work overtime and sometimes overnight; pushing our body to limits it was not designed to go. To avoid overwhelm, learn to decongest your life by doing what must be done today, today! However if you want to work hard and up stressing yourself, go ahead and let the tasks accumulate.
Goals help us re-strategize
Finally we need to re-evaluate and redefine our strategy to ensure conformity with our objectives. Strategies help us achieve our goals faster. However, some of the strategies we use are sometimes rendered obsolete by the passage of time. When this happens, it is important to redefine or tweak them a little.
Strategies must always remain relevant and in line with the desired goals. When they become irrelevant or obsolete, they should be discarded and new ones invented.
Strategies help us save time by crowding out irrelevant tasks; those that only take up our time but which do not feed into in to our goals. Strategies also help us to concentrate on priority tasks; those that are crucial to the attainment of our goals.
About The Author
Innocent Mwangi Gathungu is a motivational and inspirational speaker. He specialises in helping people in their spiritual lives and in motivating them to achieve their highest potential. For motivational and inspirational articles, visit his websites at http://www.ssmk.net and http://www.realopportunity.org.
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