Strive to Beat Your Own Performance Over and over again!
Part 2 of 5
Editor’s Note: Follow Bharat’s entire Life Lessons Series HERE
DEVELOP A STRATEGY: Once you have made up your mind about the specific improvement you want to bring about in your lifestyle, your business environment, in your social standing or financial status, plan the stages of various actions that you will need to take from stage 1 to the next and further on.
It is only by taking small steps that one can get far but the pre-condition is that you must maintain a continuous momentum of consolidated steps in the right direction.
Your continued steps will gradually turn into a daily habit and help you create the distinctiveness to finally claim achievement. The mainstay of staying on course despite all adversities must become the backbone of your solemn intent.
Simply put: Your own admission of desired change followed by constructive steps in the right direction, against all odds, will create the momentum to forge ahead, slowly but surely.
In your quest to make a massive change, you need to start making some small change in the right direction each day of your life, without fail.
Please allow me to give an example that should help clarify this point further:
Let us assume your long-term goal is to have One Million Dollar worth of Savings in the bank by the time you retire in 25 years. Now, this is a specific goal with pre-determined time-line. You know it is your job to make it happen and you would rather not be influenced by any external pressures whatsoever.
The above goal tells you, in clear terms, that you will need to save minimum $40,000.00 every year over the next 25 years in order to attain this goal. The challenge is whether you make enough money every year to be able to put aside this much without fail. If not, here’s a simple strategy that will get you to the closest possible range of your goal, if not all the way.
In the event you are ready and willing to go the extra mile and put in the extra efforts explained in here with the help of a practicum, chances are more than fair that you will cross the barrier way sooner than that.
Take out your calculator and start to draw your Money-tree, how much you make, what percentage you spend out of your earnings forms the branches of the tree and how much is left is the trunk. You are the foundation of the tree while nutrients come in the shape of your recurring income. One Million Dollar Goal is the fruit you are striving to achieve out of your self-grown Money-tree.
Start to draw the various heads where your income is distributed. These are the leaves drawing energy from the roots through the trunk.
Once you have completed a rough sketch of the tree, the remainder should go to a Fixed Deposit Account out of each pay period towards the fruit. In the unfortunate event you have nothing remaining you need to find new ways and means to generate extra energy (extra income) for the roots.
There are but ONLY two ways to accomplish the above task:
- Boost your income or
- Cut expenses
What this exercise just established is an urgent need for you to generate enough savings to matchup with your time-line to get to the goal. However, you are not in a do or die situation even in the event you happen to be far short of the goal by as much as 100 percent, yes One Hundred Percent! The only determining factor is your continued efforts to take the First Step in the right direction.
Remember, you need to set achievable targets in your route map in order to get to the lofty goal. These targets will help you stay on course under challenging conditions and hostile environments. Worse comes to worst, you can always readjust the target so long as the ultimate goal is not compromised.
Lofty Goals need drastic change of direction alongside an undeterred commitment to the cause. So long as you can move from Negative Savings to Positive on a daily, weekly as well as monthly basis, your year-end results will help you see possibility of the fruit emerging.
Before we move ahead, here is a WORD of CAUTION:
The biggest mistake people generally make is that they continue to repeat the process, in some small way, and never challenge themselves to do a little better each time. One direct and sometimes negative result of this repetition is monotony. They get into the habit of doing the same thing over and over again and thus limit themselves to getting the same old result each time. The motto should be: avoid monotony at all costs.
The painstakingly acquired habit of gradual change will help ignite within you the fire to embrace the path of success, no matter how difficult and/or challenging. If the first year-end result is barely one percent positive, it will give you immense joy, personal sense of achievement as well as motivation to do better the next.
By the time you enter year 4 in your quest for the elusive goal, your entire personality would have undergone a sea-change forcing you to find additional resources to earn more, spend less and save even more up until the time you get there with a few years remaining.
Going by traditional mathematical calculation, by the end of year 10 you should have covered 55% of your goal at a modest rate of 1% extra coverage over the previous year.
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ALWAYS STRIVE TO BEAT YOUR PREVIOUS PERFORMANCE: Whether it is your own business or you work for someone else, always strive to beat your own performance and show that you can do better at every step. This is what creates a distinction between you and the common man; this is what makes you uncommon and this is what will make you appreciated. It is this particular habit that once inculcated into your system thoroughly will help you embark upon the road to success. On the other hand, those that fail to embrace this simple technique will still be languishing in their pipe dreams![/message] [su_spacer]
TRY IT, WHO KNOWS YOU MIGHT AS WELL LIKE IT!
