We’ve all heard the headlines about our healthcare system and how those in government have evaluated the vital signs of its effectiveness during this recession. Whether you agree with the proposed solutions being tossed around in Washington or not, the function of conducting such an evaluation on the health of your business productivity will have a greater impact on your own recovery than any law that’s passed in Congress.
The success and failure of practically every online home-based business can be traced back to the health of the daily and weekly revenue generating activity. Unfortunately, all too often we settle into a rut, which sends our personal economic picture into a tailspin.
Goal Fixation Is Unproductive
That’s right, I just said that (or rather wrote it) but more often than not, goals are errantly substituted into the “action step” category, which they are not. Action steps are objectives that you are committed to achieve today that are required in order for you to accomplish a short term goal. Short term goals are steps which need to be climbed in order to reach your long term goal. Daily Action Steps and Short Term Goals should be your obsessive focus – not your long term goals.
Long term goals are instead desired outcomes that are direct results from achieving those action-steps and reaching those short term mile markers. Unfortunately because they are shiny pretty things representing our ultimate destinations they are also typically obsessed upon far too often causing one to evaluate progress from a totally inaccurate perspective. Let me give you some examples.
It’s akin to planting a seed and looking at it 3 times a day to see if it sprouts. After a week or so you become increasingly disparaged, wondering if you had done something wrong. Could you have chosen the wrong seed? All the while it had never occurred to you to focus on the action of watering it and seeing that as daily progress. This is how many novice business owners are with their long-term business goals and its one of the greatest causes of business owner de-motivation. Make no mistake, long term goals need to be made, however, long-term goals WILL NOT get you where you want to go. They are a destination. Goal fixation is typically a result of being told to make goals, but not being taught how to effectively plan to reach them.
If you have a goal of hiking to reach a mountain that you can see from 100 miles away and you travel 2 miles a day you can’t fixate on the ultimate goal or you’ll become demoralized every time you self-evaluate. After 7 days of hiking you become tired of focusing on that mountain and not seeing any progress. That’s because it’s not an accurate reflection of your daily effort. You must focus on reaching the next road sign that is 100 yards away, then the next intersection that is a mile down the road, in order to accurately evaluate your progress. It’s the same in business.
Contrary to those that say you must look at your goals everyday, in my experience, goals need to be made, documented and then set aside. They are to be brought out as yard sticks only every few weeks. Otherwise the temptation will be to use them to beat yourself over the head with because you don’t feel you are making progress quick enough.
All About The A+B
I am a firm believer that results cannot be your daily focus because they are actually eventual outcomes that are born from passionately doing the right things consistently (i.e. your activity). The daily plan or formula must be your constant motivational focus rather than goal fixation, for it is only that formula which ensures the desired goals will become a reality.
The formula that I’ve taught for years is HE + SP = DR. Simply put, only your High Effort applied to a Structured Plan will produce your Desired Results. It all starts with a structured plan of those activities you feel are most important for you to get the highest return on the time and energy you invest. The plan can be fluid and altered from one day to the next but its very important that it is solidified at the end of the day prior for the following day.
I cannot stress how important this step is because it naturally forces you to wakeup with a purpose knowing exactly what you need to accomplish that day. The plan is then implemented with your high-effort, which I believe is the “high-octane fuel” that makes your business engine accelerate.
Master The Unnatural
One observance that I have found interesting is that most high-effort individuals are undisciplined planners while most effective planners have the natural “tortoise-like” pace of implementing and executing their masterful plan. The most successful entrepreneurs are those who naturally excel at one of the two traits but have painstakingly trained themselves to become proficient at the other. They in effect have acquired the ability to have a one-two punch by doing what was not natural until it became natural. They lived one of my favorite mantras, which is: “Do one thing everyday that you fear”.
That brings me to the two elements that are toxic when combined; fear and failure. Usually what we “fear” is doing something that comes unnatural which undercuts our self-confidence because of the increased risk of short-term failure. This is the area of the greatest growth for new entrepreneurs. Do not fear short term failure!! As I’ve said before “The entrepreneurs who achieved their financial goals saw failure as “Success University”. Don’t ever quit on your dreams-just study and learn to graduate!
Conclusion
It is practically impossible to fail if a reasonably well-constructed plan is met with daily high effort. If end results are your focus then at the end of the day you are actually demoralized because you feel that you have not accomplished a thing today. As you build your “online highway” it’s very easy to pave a mile of road and feel that you’re wasting your time until you reach an intersection that brings you the fast-paced, consistent (online) traffic ultimately working for.
The truth is that you should feel you’ve accomplished much because you’ve completed all the prioritized activities that you planned for the day. You’ve paved your mile of road. Be assured that you cannot continue to add a mile of road without achieving success even if it is months down the road.
So instead of waiting for a bail out – bail yourself out by becoming obsessed with planning the day prior and pouring your High Effort fuel into that Structured Plan. Be content with knowing the fact that one-mile of paved road is guaranteed to bring you closer to the long-term business goals you’ve set.
Even though long-term goals should not be your focus, they can and should be your celebrated end result. When your paved road reaches a major goal destination, you deserve to become momentarily obsessed with basking in your accomplishment of successfully achieving the milestone. After realizing soon after that you are not yet satisfied, recalibrate for the next destination and reapply the formula that got you there.
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