One does not simply become successful
I read 30 self help books and this is what I found out about reaching success. If you want to achieve something you have to follow this 4 step plan.
1. Decide and know what you want
The quote above taken from the novel “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll, illustrates the importance of knowing your goal. Therefore we have to define our goal and define what success means to us before we can pursue it.
“Without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.” — Fitzhugh Dodson
“Begin with the end in mind.” — Stephen Covey
The second habit in Stephen Coveys’ book “ The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is to begin with the end in mind. This is easier said then done, so here are a couple of exercises to help you find your goal.
Exercise 1 — Mind map your ideal self
If you just want to generally improve as a person you can use coggle (it’s free) to mind map what your ideal self would look like. Here’s what I came up with:
Once you have something like that choose a more specific goal. For example “Write a book” in the “Create/Do something category”. And if you don’t know what you would want to do or what your purpose is, read this article.
Exercise 2 — Find your message
One goal at a time works best, so you should choose one thing to focus on. GOAL at a time works best — Create a manifesto —
Exercise 3 — Choose, don’t be a donkey
This concept comes from Derek Sivers. He write about it in his article, but also is a constant ambassador of this idea.
It comes from a story about a donkey. While standing in the middle of the road it sees water on the left side and hay on the right. The donkey is hungry and thirsty and cannot decide what it should do. It looks to the water, then to the hay. It does this for so long that it dies in the middle of the road.
Sometimes we are indecisive because we don’t think long term. We want to focus on everything at once and end up not doing anything at all. Decide what you should do now, you always have time to go back and choose something else.
Step one summary —Decide and know what you want
2. Know why you want it
There’s a famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche. I’m not talking about his quote “God’s dead, we’ve killed him”, but rather a quote used when talking about personal growth.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche.
This sounds good but what should I do about it?
Exercise 1 — Write a manifesto (mission statement)
A concept discussed by author Stephen R. Covey in his book. It’s a piece of paper where you write your ideals (what you want to be), goals (what you want to achieve) along with quotes that inspire you. Reading this every morning is really helpful because it pushes you in the right direction.
Exercise 2 — Create a vision board
I stole this idea from
s article which you can find here. He recommends a website called milanote to create something that looks like this:
Jon Westenbergs three step guide to creating vision boards:
Here’s the action points for this:
1. Make a list of what’s important to you
2. Start collecting visual representations of what’s important using Milanote
3. Review it daily or weekly for the next 3 months — you’ll see progress!Again, to read the full article click here.
3. Build a plan
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Once you know what you need to do and why you want to do it create a plan.
Exercise — Find out what you should do
- Think about the one thing you want to achieve this year. Start with your yearly goal and then figure out your goal for the month.
- Once you have that (your goal for this month), narrow it down to your goal for the week
- Then based on your weekly goal, figure out your goal for the day and you will end up with what you have to do now.
This exercise is inspired by “The ONE Thing”
— a book by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan
4. The most important factor — be consistent
“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” — Stephen A. Brennan
You don’t gain weight overnight. You gain weight by eating more food than you need every day for a month. If you only had one cheat day every now and then, you wouldn’t notice it. The problem is that you have a lot of cheat days and not a lot of days where you eat right.
Just like gaining weight, improving at something or reaching your goal is a slow process. It might take years to perfect.
Remember the 10,000 hours rule
by Malcolm Gladwell
In order to become great at something you have to invest 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in it.
Call to action
Start now, not tomorrow, not in a few hours… start today, now.
Tomorrow you will wish you had started today
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it.” –Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
If you got anything out of this article click the ❤ button. It would mean a lot to me.
Thank you for reading!
