The discussion of what makes us successful has been going on for a considerable period of time.  Many of us are tempted to fall for fads, schemes or popular culture concerning the meaning and methods for achieving success in our lives.  Many of us have come to believe that success is about setting personal goals, and tracking our progress on those goals.  Others view success as a “life purpose” that we seek to accomplish.

Many of these perspectives contain important elements of truth, but many of them are also missing some very important elements.  By understanding these key factors of personal, professional, and professional achievement, we can learn how to create our own vision of success.

The first step on the journey toward our life’s goals and purpose is to create a clearer picture of what they look like.  Each person’s ambitions are unique, but many people share a common passion for some area of interest in their life, and a desire to pursue those interests.  When we develop a vision of the direction that we would like our lives to move, it frequently involves the ability to spend more time engaged in the activities that we enjoy.  This frequently leads us to believe that they key to success is simply to attain more of what we want.

More is Not Always More

The common conception that many people hold is that they will feel more fulfilled in their life if they can simply achieve more.  More money, a nicer car, a bigger house, more vacation, more time to follow their interests.  The implicit problem that we run into when thinking in the context of “more” is that our time is a finite quantity.  Each day only contains 24 hours, and there is only so much that we can fit into that amount of time.

Thus, the pursuit of more becomes a study in time scarcity.  Assuming that we are able to attain the additional things that we want, it is highly likely that they will create additional time commitments that we must undertake.  When these time commitments are added to our existing schedule, it frequently leaves us with more to do than we have time to do things.  This abundance of projects and scarcity of time frequently leaves us shorting the aspects of our life that are highly important (such as personal relationships) but not articulated on our sheet of goals.

What you Subtract is More Important than What you Add

The next level of insight in the attainment of success is to understand that our most important decisions are frequently not what to add, but what to take away.  The only way that we can avoid a permanent time crunch that leaves our friends and family out in the cold is to re-arrange our personal, professional, and financial priorities on a consistent basis.  This means that when we add something, we must be prepared to take something else away.

In the real world, trade-off decisions are a fact of life.  We cannot have our cake and eat it too.  There are decisions that must be made, and the way that we make those decisions will have a tremendous impact on our future.  The way that we can keep our life in balance is to continually monitor our balance of activities to determine when it is time to add something and when it is time to remove something or change the way we do it.

Success is an Equilibrium, Not an Achievement

What all of this ultimately means is that “real” success is not an achievement … it is an equilibrium.  It is a balance of things we want and things we do that deliver the most total happiness and satisfaction that we are able to achieve.  Unfortunately, there are very few success authors who are teaching this truism, and there are many people who are seeking success in the context of goals and achievements.

Granted, goals are very important.  However, goals are not the end … the are a means.  For example, many people profess a desire to run a marathon as a goal in their life.  What most people really mean by this goal is that they would like to adjust the equilibrium of their life in such a way that they can increase their level of fitness to a state where they can train to successfully run a marathon.  However, what this goal-setting process frequently misses is that it is possible to complete a marathon without being in optimal fitness (albeit at a slow pace), and that it is possible to achieve considerable fitness without ever running a marathon.

What happens when we place too much emphasis on the goals themselves is that the equilibrium can be lost.  The desire to run a marathon can come to dominate our thoughts and actions.  (Especially for Type-A folks)  In this way, the goals we are seeking can take on an obsessive nature that displace many of the other highly important aspects of our life in the single pursuit of a particular goal.

As we go throughout our lives, we should seek to keep our goals and ambitions in perspective so that they are viewed in the context of our life’s larger equilibrium.  This is the way that we can stay balanced and pursue the “real” success that is a (whole) life that we want to live.  The decisions that we make will all echo throughout our future, so it is important to choose wisely.

 

One of the things that we like to do is human beings is to fantasize about how our lives would be different if something were different.  It turns out that this mode of thinking produces two distinctive outputs.  The first is that it allows our minds to drift into a world where events unfold exactly as we would like.  The second is that by using the word if, it absolves our minds of any responsibility for making our dreams a reality.

The effect is very subtle, but it is still very powerful.  By thinking about our life if our dreams became reality, it sub-consciously reinforces the belief that our dreams will stay dreams.  A much more productive mode of thought is to consider how we can traverse the distance from where our current mode in life to where we want to be.  This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t dream about what life could be like, and use that as a vision to inspire our actions.  It simply means that we should not give ourselves an easy way out of failing to achieve our dreams.

The Power of How

By shifting our mental efforts to considering how to accomplish our goals, it triggers a very important shift within our consciousness.  It changes the context of our ambitions from something that we would like, but probably won’t ever get to something that we are creating a plan to go out and attain.  It may be that our first plan doesn’t work.  It may be that our plans need to change.  However, it is always true that nothing will happen unless we take action.

Another important piece of asking how to reach our goals is that it broadens our perspective.  It forces us to consider the causal chain that spans the distance and traverses the obstacles between where we currently are, and where we want to be.  Allowing ourselves to escape this analysis can bring our progress toward the goals and ambitions of life to a screeching halt.  It is almost always true that achieving our ambitions requires many thing to come into place.  It is also true that most of these things will not fall into place by themselves.  Unfortunately, when we think in terms of if, it robs us of the opportunity to organize the events of our life in a way that builds a bridge to our ambitions.  In order to make sure that we construct this bridge, it is critically important to think in the context of how.

Turning How into When

Once we have mentally constructed the map of how our goals can be achieved, it is important to shift our attention to thinking of when this will all happen.  The reason for this is because time is a finite resource.  Of all the resources that are available to us, time is the only one that we cannot produce more of.  Each day contains only 24 hours, each week contains only 7 days and each year only contains 12 months.  There is a practical limit to how much we can do (well) at any given time, so we must prioritize our activities to ensure that the things we hold most important are addressed first.

The notion of priorities is critically important when we traverse the distance between thinking of how to accomplish our goals and figuring when it will happen.  Everybody can create a list of things they would like to do and accomplish that is many miles long.  However, very few people have created a list of priorities that is reflected in their actions.  Most of us act on whatever happens to be the most urgent item of the moment and allow our priorities that are not immediately urgent to slip into the back of our mind until they are all but forgotten.

Ultimately, the factor that will most strongly influence when our goals become reality is where they land in our personal, professional, and financial priorities.  Each decision that we make is an implicit decision not to do something different.  Similarly, pursuing one set of goals is an implicit decision to ignore or delay another set of goals.  Because of this, we must be very mindful of what we prioritize and what we pursue so that we do not ignore things that are of greater importance for the sake of something with greater urgency.

Thinking of Possibilities

One of the buzzwords that has emerged in the popular vernacular over the past decade is “possibility thinking.”  In simple terms, this is a method of thinking how things ‘could’ be organized to create better outcomes.  The basis of the thought process is to avoid anchoring on the way that things work today and think in an unconstrained fashion to discover new solutions.  This mode of thinking can be very helpful in the context of our personal, professional, and financial goals.  Instead of starting with where we are in life, start with where we want to be.  Instead of attempting to trace steps forward from our current position into the future, trace steps from the future back to the present.

By changing the context of our thoughts, we can change the direction of our lives.  By changing the way we think about the world around us, we will change the way we interact with the world around us.  In this way, the way we think creates ripples that affect the way we act, which influences what we achieve.  Thus, the first step toward achieving your goals is to carefully craft the way that you think about your goals.

 

Social media is a highly effective channel for numerous business objectives, including driving revenue, but it remains a challenge to directly demonstrate revenue impact in the way that more straightforward sales efforts can claim through, for example, search. While marketing budgets (especially digital budgets) are bouncing back in the post-recession era, marketers still require a strong analytical link between spend and delivery against business goals to have the confidence to invest. That combination of spend and delivery against goals is what defines performance, but it requires that you can define both spend and delivery individually. Those definitions remain a challenge for social media.

Spend

It’s hard to quantify the spend on foundational aspects of social media. Spend might include overhead for internal personnel involved in customer service or promotions or sweeps designed to attract new followers. It might include training or new staff, the build of new creative or channels for communication, or a host of other expenditures that can’t be tracked to immediate sales. For instance, how do you measure the time value to tweet against your sales in that period? How do you factor in qualitative differences, i.e., doing it well vs. poorly or the cumulative effect of positive exposures on the propensity to recommend or buy? Earned media pros have tackled these questions for as long as the professions have been around.

Delivery

Social media has born a whole new set of engagement and influence markers that we know are valuable but are hard to put a value on. You can certainly measure lots of impact from social media. You can infer awareness from metrics like page views, visitors, “likes,” and followers. Intent might be derived from metrics like email opt-in, request more info forms and even time spent on site, coupon downloads, or sharing button clicks. Conversions in social commerce situations could in fact be a purchase but could also be defined as an email opt-in, depending on the goals. When revenue is your primary goal and you have other, relatively more straightforward channels like search to weigh it against, the safe marketer might stick with the straighter measurement path. But choosing your strategy based on its ability to return metrics – not results – is flawed thinking.

Studies that can benchmark the value of a Facebook fan, for instance, help us to connect the dots between our social media investment and the eventual return on that investment. But like all marketing endeavors, social media can be used for many different business goals. Not all of those paths lead to short-term sale, nor should they. If every marketing tactic is direct response-driven and we spend no time cultivating customers, then we will only succeed in closing sales of a) those that know and trust us already and b) those that are in market or have immediate need of our product or service. We can all see where that would be limiting.

There are few verticals more revenue-focused than retail/etail, and many in that industry have jumped into social media, glad for the opportunity to open communication channels with consumers, get them engaged, establish credibility, nurture advocates, and, oh, by the way, deliver timely brand and product messages. The promotional aspects of social media are a good fit for etail customer acquisition goals where they can define a lifetime value of a customer. Sweeps or contests are a popular social media tactic to deliver traffic and build email and fan lists and often have defined budgets so you can do a pretty good post review that maps those metrics as well as direct sales from the promo against the cost to develop, build, and run the promotion. While the promo often gets the credit, the costs and results of that promo are intertwined with the costs and efficacy of the social media foundation you have laid in advance of that effort.

In many ways, the upfront and ongoing investment in social media is not very different from the foundation required to establish a platform for profitable e-commerce. Measuring traffic and sales-driving efforts like display media and search is deceptively simple – except that it’s not, and we won’t even touch here on the myriad attribution issues that muddy the waters on assigning credit for online sales. Drop qualified traffic on a page that is not optimized, has out-of-date merchandise, or a product that is low in inventory and your results will suffer. Likewise, if you haven’t opened genuine channels with your customers, responded in a timely and appropriate manner, and earned their trust and time, then you won’t earn their dollars.

While most of us intuitively understand that engaging our customers and prospective customers, listening, and responding supports the long-term goal of brand building and all marketing goals – many don’t yet have the confidence to declare social media a revenue channel. We are missing a comprehensive set of tools to justify a social media investment for those marketers focused primarily or exclusively on revenue generation and metrics. We’re simply not used to thinking of revenue production in a longer-term window in digital marketing. We’re usually measuring sales against the marketing tactics in the same period or shortly thereafter within a given cookie or measurement window. Social media, in that sense, is more like SEO in that it is an investment in the longer-term brand health and in audience growth. Those lead to sales – directly, even if we can’t always measure them directly.

Article source: ClickZ

 

One of the things that many people grapple with in their personal lives is nutrition and fitness.  However, this topic can be very daunting for a couple of reasons.  The first is that tracking our nutrition and fitness makes it much more “real.”  Speaking for myself, it is much easier to talk my way around making smarter food choices when I was not keeping track of what I was eating.

This is where the power of a tracking system comes into play.  By keeping track of your nutrition through a free online portal such as Spark People, it provides a very powerful tool for reaching your personal fitness goals.  One of the most prominent difficulties people encounter when trying to stay fit is the natural human propensity to under-estimate the amount of calories that are consumed.  This makes it very easy to over-consume, and equally difficult to move toward our fitness goals.

By tracking our food and exercise, it gives a very powerful tool for pursuing our persona fitness goals. In addition to tracking total calories, Spark People allows you to track the split between carbohydrates, fat, protien, and a vast variety of micro-nutrients.  This allows us to move beyond simply counting calories to gathering a full view of our personal nutrition regimen.

It is important to understand that a pound of fat equals 3,500 calories.  The way that we gain fat is to consumer more calories than we burn, and the way we lose fat is to burn more calories than we consume.  Most of the daily weight fluctuations that most people experience are nothing more or less than water weight.  The way to achieve a weight loss goal is to consume less calories than we burn on a regular basis.  Fortunately, the Internet has delivered tools such as Spark People to help us in tracking our activities and achieving our goals.

 

As we go throughout business and life, many of us will set use goals to focus our attention and activities.  This is a highly important activity, because the process of writing our goals down gives them a feeling of tangible reality that is frequently absent when they exist only within our mind.  Of course, goal setting can be a tricky science since setting goals that are too easy will lead to a lack of achievement, and setting goals that are too hard will lead to discouragement as our goals go by without being met.

One of the intellectual godparents of personal success is Dennis Waitley.  His library of books, speeches, and presentations about achieving your goals have become legend among those who seek to scale the heights of great achievement.  The way that Dr. Waitley describes the ideal formation of goals is that they should be “Just out of reach, but not out of sight.”

Just out of Reach, but Not out of Sight

The subtle wit and wisdom of Dennis Waitley demonstrates the dichotomy of goal setting in a highly poetic and beautiful manner.  Goals should be set just beyond our current abilities and achievement to force ourselves to stretch.  The process of growth requires that we push beyond our current limitations to do things that we previously thought to be unachievable.  This phenomenon also plays itself out in the natural world as well.  Body builders know all too well that muscles grow by breaking down the existing fibers so that they grow back larger and stronger.  In this way, training to achieve new heights means that we must constantly break down what has already been achieved so that it can come back even stronger than before.

In keeping with the metaphor of personal training, it is also important to avoid over training.  Many aspiring athletes fall into the trap of attempting to build their strength and endurance too quickly, and incur injuries.  In regard to our goals and ambitions, setting goals that are too ambitious and too difficult will generate injuries to our drive and ambition.  Thus, goal setting is fundamentally about striking a balance that is ‘just right’ between being too easy and too hard.

Now that You Have a Goal, How do You Stick to It?

Once a person has set their goals, the next step is to continue pursuing that goal throughout the difficulties and temporary failure that frequently accompany worthwhile achievement.  The process of growth and development is frequently uncomfortable, since it involves simultaneously stretching beyond our current limits and temporarily failing to reach our desired goals.  This make sit very easy to become discouraged and possibly even give up on achieving our goals.

The answer to this natural tendency is to find a goal that naturally holds our attention, without consistent conscious effort.  This is the motivation behind David Schwartz’s book: The Magic of Thinking Big.  The insight that David Schwartz unfolds in his book is the transformative effect of setting goals that are big and inspiring.  Of course, this philosophy runs the risk of setting a goal that is too ambitious and results in discouraging failure.

So what is a person to do?  Goal setting is supposed to be about something that is both meaningful and achievable, but sticking to a goal is easiest when the goal is big and inspiring.  These two concepts appear to be in conflict with one another.  So how can we possibly set a realistic goal that is simultaneously big and inspiring?  To answer this, we need to think outside of traditional thought patters.  The first idea to wrap our mind around is the notion that there is no limitation to the size and scope of goals that we can set or undertake.  Thus, it is quite possible (and even recommended) that we select a large, inspiring goal and break that big goal into many smaller steps that are each sequentially achievable.

One Big Goal and Many Smaller Goals

The combination of a single big, inspiring objective, and many smaller goals that are sequential, achievable, and all lead to one single motivating objective.  It is likely that these smaller goals will build upon one another until they result in the single large goal that you set out to achieve in the first place.  The big goal serves to motivate our efforts and keeps our mind on the goal when progress slows and prospects become discouraging.  The small goals serve to systematically grow our achievement and abilities with small, achievable steps.

Thus, the ‘secret’ of goal setting is neither to set “realistic” goals, nor to set “big” ones.  The answer is to do both.  Motivation and ambition are deeply personal and individual sentiments.  The first step in keeping your mind on the goal is to find a primary goal that is inspiring enough to hold your attention without conscious effort.  Once this goal has been selected, break it down into small, achievable steps.

Ultimately, keeping our mind on the goals we seek to achieve is really about making sure that the goal we are pursuing is sufficiently inspiring to hold our attention naturally.  Keeping your mind on the goal is really about finding a big goal that is always on your mind, and consistently reminds of of the smaller goals that are a necessary part of its acquisition.

It is not possible to consistently focus our minds on everything.  Life is a serious of increasing and decreasing focus.  The wealth of information we live in the midst of creates a deficit of attention.  The power of a big, inspiring goal is that it regularly pulls our attention in the direction of our specific goals, and only requires a small amount of incremental focus.  In the end, holding to your goals requires both the existence of an inspiring end-goal, and many smaller goals that all contribute to the single, larger objective.  By keeping the power of inspiration and achievement in balance, it will allow you to steadily move toward achieving the goals and ambitions of your life.

 

Many people are familiar with the sentiment that “the end justifies the means” when pursuing goals and ambitions.  However, in the realm of business and life, ends and means are quite important.  In many cases, ‘how’ you go about doing something is equally (if not more) important than what you are doing in the first place.  Many times, it is easy to pursue short-term results by bending or breaking rules.  However, long-term success requires attention to both the goal and the methods used to reach it.

Most people recognize this fact in the natural world.  It is not difficult to see what happens if you attempt to plant and harvest wheat without following the right steps.  No matter how hard you try, it is not possible to ‘wing it’ to success in the natural world.  However, many people are gripped with a desire to fast-talk their way to success in the world of business and relationships.

The truth is that ends and means are a matter of natural law that hold equally true in the physical world as they do in the world of relationships.  The fundamental difference is that when dealing with people, it takes longer to see the impact.  However, the impact is always in effect regardless of whether it is immediately apparent.  The hard work must be done if ‘real’ success is every to be achieved.  It may be possible to temporarily gain the appearance of success through slick dealing and clever tricks, but there is no way to fool nature.

Ultimately, the way that each person chooses to pursue their goals is important.  Relentless pursuit of excellence sounds great in commercials, but if it causes you to sacrifice everything else in your life for the sake of one goal, is it really a worthy endeavor?  This is not to say that people should not have goals and ambitions . . . quite to the contrary.  However, it is imperative that the pursuit of those goals be done in such a way that it is part of a complete life and not an unbalanced obsession.  This will likely result in many goals that take longer to accomplish than some of us would like, but it will also result in greater happiness, contentment, and completeness in our lives.

 

Life can frequently feel out of control with a myriad of commitments, deadlines, and things that need to be done immediately.  Each of us have a list of things we would like to accomplish that exceeds our available time, effort and energy by a considerable margin.  In this situation, it frequently feels like we cannot afford to stop moving, because every minute gone by is one less minute to accomplish our goals and ambitions.

 

In the world of real estate investment, there is a term known as ‘highest and best use’ to describe the best possible use for a building or area of land.  When making decisions, many investors will stop to consider the highest and best use for the land that they are considering to purchase.  Would it be better to add another rental unit?  Would it be advantageous to add a garage or storage area?  It may be that the best use for a building is to tear it down and start over.  On the other hand, it may be that the current use of a property is the best use.

This same kind of analysis should be done for our personal decisions and the use of our time.  Every time you are doing something, ask yourself if it is the highest and best use of your time at that particular moment.  When you are undertaking a project, is it the best use of your efforts and energy?  The purpose of this analysis is to systematically replace the activities that do not represent the best use of your time with new ones that allow you to be more effective in accomplishing your goals.

When conducting this introspection and analysis, it is very important to keep your ‘true’ goals and objectives in perspective.  It can be easy to obsess on business or career goals, and forget personal and family priorities that are even more important to your long term well-being.  An example of this is taking time to play with your children.  As you replace more and more activities with the highest and best use for your time, you will find yourself moving closer and closer to your goals.

As time goes by, it is likely that your perceptions concerning the highest and best use of your time will change.  The important part is to be constantly thinking about your personal, professional, and financial priorities.  This thought process should guide the decisions you make concerning how to spend your time.  As you slowly change the priorities that guide each of your decisions, you will notice yourself moving closer and closer to your goals.  The movement is not necessarily the result of a grand strategy, but by consistent decisions that each bring you a little bit closer to your goals.

 

One of the notions that has come into vogue during the current generation of personal success literature is the idea of focusing on what is important.  It is difficult to argue against this premise, but when we are seeking to achieve success it is critical to really understand what important means.  Most of us think of important people as having places to go and things to do.  We also typically think that important people are busy.

However, there are a few things about pursuing the important that we should be certain to understand.  The first is that being good at something doesn’t necessarily make it important.  Many of us gain a feeling of importance from doing things that we are good at.  However, we do not necessarily know whether what we are good at is serving a useful purpose other than making us feel like we’re doing something that’s important.  Ultimately, what makes something important is not how good we are at it, but how much of an impact it has on our personal, professional, and financial priorities.

The second is that spending a lot of time on something doesn’t necessarily make it important.  This is especially important in office environments, where go-for assignments, meetings, and other rock fetching requests aggregate into an environment of professional tail spinning.  How many of these activities directly produce business results?  How many directly influence business decisions?  How many are just a glorified waste of time that serve the sole purpose of making whomever is in charge feel important because they have the authority to order an army of subordinates?

The third is that somebody wanting something right away doesn’t necessarily make it important.  This is what is frequently referred to as the “Tyranny of the Urgent” by people like Stephen Covey.  This is possibly the most typical and most dangerous mis-perception about importance.  The reason is because urgency makes us uncomfortable.  When something is expected to be done right away (regardless of whether it is important), it nags at our minds.  In many cases, the path of least resistance is to simply do the task so that people will stop nagging you.  It is worthwhile to point out that many urgent items are frequently important . . . however, urgency is not in and of itself a creator of importance.  The impact of something you are (or are not) doing is completely independent of its urgency.

By now, I’m sure that you’re wondering how to determine what is really important.  The critical factor that takes us out of the urgent, nice, and simple wastes of time to that which is truly important.  Fortunately, there is a very simple test that will quickly determine what is truly important for your life.  This test is to ask whether what you are doing is helping you accomplish your goals.  The exact goals to be accomplished are individual to each person, but it is the movement toward those goals that make something important.  Naturally, the more important the goal, the higher a priority we should place on accomplishing it.  By defining what is important, it will help us to systematically move toward our goals and priorities while minimizing the roadblocks that frequently impede our progress.

 

One of the most true axioms of life is that all things have their price.  This is true for things we want to buy, and also true for things we want to achieve.  For all things that we want in our lives, a price must be paid.  Sometimes this price is paid in money, other times it is paid in effort, but at all times it is paid in lost opportunity.

Any time that we take one action, it means that we are implicitly choosing not to take a different action.  Over time, these choices shape and define our future.   We decide to pursue our ambitions or we decide to stick with what feels safe.  We choose to prioritize our families or we allow the urgency of whatever we are doing at the moment to take precedent over that which we tell ourselves is most important.

As we go throughout our lives, each of us will need to forge our own definition of the success that we are seeking and the price that we are willing to pay in exchange for it.  These conscious decisions regarding the priorities of our life are what determine how we deal with conflicts between our personal, professional, and financial goals.  When two objectives are standing in opposition to one another, we must first seek a smarter solution that does not sacrifice one for the other.  When a smarter solution is not possible, we must ultimately choose.

Most people desire to maintain a successful family life and a prosperous career or business.  In most cases, these two goals compliment one another.  However, they can come into conflict if a particular family event conflicts with business.  In these cases, we must ultimately decide which tenet of our personal vision to pursue.  The important point to communicate is that this is a choice we should consciously make, lest we fall into the unconscious trap of prioritizing the seemingly urgent over that which is truly important.

This insidious form of lazy thinking is how many people end up extremely busy, but not remotely productive.  Decide what your vision of success looks like.  Decide what price you are willing to pay in order to achieve that vision.  Decide what price you are not willing to pay.  Actively do that which brings you closer to your vision of success.  Actively avoid that which takes your time, but does not achieve your goals.  Turn everything that you do into a conscious decision that consistently propels you closer to your goals.  By paying the price for success, you will also be laying the foundation for a more prosperous and fulfilling life.