So you want to have your own business…or you want to have a million dollars…or you want to have a girlfriend…
Okay, so why don’t you have those things?
I blame it all on a phenomenon I call Goal Blindness. Goal Blindness is that experience of being so singularly focused on the end result that you forget to actually start working towards it. Most people get frustrated, and then just give up.
How many of you know someone who is constantly talking about [Read More…]
Check out the following video featuring a speech by Randy Garutti, the COO of the cult-like burger joint Shake Shack, talking about his business, and more importantly his passion. Listen closely and you’ll hear many of the lessons I preach here: focus on goals rather than abject success, do what you do best, simplicity, and making goals that matter to you in order to make yourself more accountable to achieving success.
It’s a really interesting speech with a lot in it [Read More…]
Is it just me or is there something Freudian about this image?
Common wisdom tells us that when we want to achieve something we should tell someone or take on a partner in our own success to make ourselves accountable, but does that really help, or could it actually be doing more harm than good?
An article in the July/August 2011 issue of Scientific American examines studies that seem [Read More…]
If I asked you why you wanted to succeed, what would you say? Would it be because of some innate desire to prove yourself? Or possibly because you want to achieve a childhood dream?
What about because you think it will be sexy?
Before you jump all over my wording, imagine your ideal world AFTER you succeed. Is it a world surrounded by dinners with well connected people, a $500k sports car in the driveway, and a former supermodel wife?
Now, obviously these [Read More…]
Seth Godin wrote a blog post yesterday about the half-life of a book’s sales cycle. And it got me thinking.
I think we would all acknowledge that nothing can top the excitement that surrounds a brand new venture or goal, but what happens as time goes on? Can our excitement towards our goals be described in terms of a “rate of decay?”
I say yes, and I believe that some of the same rules governing scientific rates of decay can be applied [Read More…]
Failure…it happens to the best of us.
While talking with a friend today about a goal of his, I was reminded that if we’re going to talk about success, we inevitably have to talk about failure too.
…I know, it’s not a pretty subject, and it’s never fun to dwell on our failures, but maybe we should.
With the popularity of sites such as Failblog and [Read More…]