SUCCESS : DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING FOR?

By Cheryl Clausen

Do you know you want to succeed, but at this moment you don’t have any idea how you will do that? You belong to the same group as the vast majority of people. You think something looks good so you follow that path for a while, and then things just begin to fall apart and you feel like you’re back at square one. It’s frustrating, tiring, and it erodes your self-confidence. You can get off this path and make obtaining success easier.

Success is a big journey a life-long journey, and you want to think about it that way. The reason the things you’ve tried in the past didn’t work out was because you weren’t thinking long-term. Begin with the end the ultimate outcome that you want, and the “how” will come later. You can’t develop a plan to succeed when you don’t fully understand what success means to you in all aspects of your life. You need to think about this in enough detail that you can envision a typical day in your life when you’re successful.

Knowing the ultimate outcome will help you to avoid some of the pitfalls. Knowing the ultimate outcome you want will help you to know what you’re looking for. There a places you can go where they allow you to dig for gem stones. You pay a certain amount and you get to keep the stones you dig up. Now if you were to visit one of these places you could go with certain intentions or objectives. You might just want to see what happens to turn up and just dig for a little while turning in your rocks and seeing if you got anything of value. You might also have the objective of finding at least one stone that’s value exceeded the fee you paid to dig for gemstones. Because you know the ultimate result you want, a gemstone whose value is greater than the fee to dig, you would go to the library to learn what various gemstones look like in their natural state. Now as you dig for stones you’ll be able to recognize what they are, and you can then even begin to focus on a specific gemstone. If you did that can you imagine that you would be more likely to find a valuable gemstone than if you went and just did some random digging? It’s a whole lot easier to find something when you know what you’re looking for. It also helps when you know how what you’re looking for fits into your overall plans making it easier to get the ultimate result you want.

Have you noticed that big success is always tied in one way or another to specialized knowledge? You aren’t necessarily the person who has to have that specialized knowledge. But you do need to know how to organize that knowledge, and put it to use in a way that supports your plan for success. In fact, great success can be had simply from compiling and presenting specialized knowledge into a more user friendly format. You can even take the specialized knowledge of others and identify a new way to use that knowledge to solve an existing problem. You may also need those with specialized knowledge acting on your behalf supporting the various functions you need to get to success.

Know what you’re looking for by knowing the end result you want. Start to rough out your plan for how you could get that. From your rough plan begin to identify your action steps and search for the resources you’ll need to put your plans into action. Once you know exactly what you’re looking for it’s a whole lot easier to find it.

Want to develop your path for success? Success Model.

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