Many of us have become accustomed to frequent ‘tips’ and ‘analysis’ about the new hot trade.  Most of us cannot open our email accounts or turn on the radio without being bombarded with an advertisement to buy gold.  What frequently gets lost in all of this noise about fast trades and quick profits is our long-term goals.  The way that this happens is that the daily grind becomes more important than the specific actions that take us to our goals and aspirations.

Because of this, it is critically important for astute individuals to shift their thinking.  Many of us are infected with a terminal desire to produce fast results.  This leads us to seek the “trade of the day” that will immediately shoot up and produce immediate profits.  However, successful people have come to understand that  it’s not about the trade of the day, it’s about the decision of the decade.  By simply making one major, meaningful, and high-impact decision each decade, and then following through on the execution of that decision.  By following this method, it will continually focus your mind on big, long-term goals.  Thus, each day ceases being about finding some new fad, and shifts over toward small, tangible steps that continually move you closer to your long-term goals.

Another advantage of thinking in this manner is that it can serve as a forcing function for prioritization.  If there is one major goal that you seek to accomplish each decade, it stands to reason that the goal deserves some consideration.  Implicit within selecting and pursuing this goal is deciding what will ‘not’ be prioritized while you are accomplishing these aspirations.  In many cases, deciding what you are ‘not’ doing can be just as powerful as deciding what you want to pursue.  The reason for this is that each day brings new distractions and more noise from things that are utterly unimportant to our long-term goals and most important priorities.

In the process of defining your goals, deciding to pursue them, and following through with your decision, eliminating noise will be a major factor in your success.  By systematically shifting focus back to your goals, it will help in eliminating the ‘noise’ that frequently stands in the way of great accomplishments.  Each of us has the ability to accomplish anything we want to do . . . however, we do not have the ability to accomplish everything we want to do.  Success requires that we decide, focus, and accomplish.