What Do You Need To Do To Achieve What You Want To Achieve?
We live in a world of achievers and non-achievers and of intentions and excuses. It fascinates me to study why some are focused on finding ways to achieve something they feel important, and others spend equal amounts of time and energy finding excuses for not achieving something.
I’ve met people born with no legs and one arm become body-builders, I’ve seen people grow up in terrible conditions and poverty become leaders of their own companies. I’ve seen people from stable, well off backgrounds in countries of abundance descend into drug and alcohol addiction.
Seeing that, I have come to passionately believe all human beings, no matter what their circumstances, ethnicity, age, sex or background, can achieve great things. So the question is, how do you do that? How do you go from where you are today to accomplishing everything you want to accomplish?
It starts with a vision and a question.
What do you want to accomplish? You need to know precisely what it is you want. Without a clear vision of what you want to achieve, you will drift through life. And it is here where most people fail.
It is effortless to coast through life. Go to school, get a job and follow the path others have set for you because it gives you an excuse. You can always blame the ‘system’ or blame your teachers and parents. Often parents and teachers, with good intentions, put you onto a path with the words; ‘you won’t achieve very much if you don’t follow this path’. Yet often this advice is the worst advice you could ever follow.
There are many paths towards accomplishment, and the one size fits all advice we are often given by society, our parents, teachers and friends is just one way of doing it. But the problem with this particular advice is the idea of accomplishment is not yours. It is your parents or teachers or friends idea of what achievement looks like.
The critical question here is what do you want to accomplish in life?
That’s a hard question to answer, I know. It took me around forty years to discover what I wanted to accomplish. But when I look back over my years, I realise that the one key factor that has helped me find out what it is I want to accomplish is my independent thinking. I have never felt pressured by my parents (or my teachers) to follow a particular path. I have had always felt that what I achieve (or not) in my life has always been my decision.
Every day I am faced with a choice. I could stay at home, spend all day entertaining myself with YouTube videos or hours of Netflix. Or I could write something, exercise, record a video or read. Every day I get that choice, and so do you.
And every day you get to choose whether to exercise or sit around. You get to decide whether to use the lift (elevator) or climb the stairs. You get to choose whether to eat fast food for lunch or prepare yourself a salad.
Every day we get these choices. What we choose to do is our responsibility. And because it is our responsibility, we must accept the consequences of these choices.
If you choose to overeat unhealthy food, do no exercise and complain about how busy you are, that’s fine. But you must also accept the consequences for those choices. You can’t blame anyone else. I have met so many people who complain about how they ‘cannot lose weight’, yet never seem to connect eating high levels of calories for breakfast lunch and dinner and not moving is the cause of their weight gain. All they need do is decide to change their eating habits and move more frequently, and losing weight will be easy.
If you have always dreamed of becoming a multi-millionaire, yet continue to work for a company as an employee, how will you ever turn your dream into reality? It is just not going to happen unless you have a plan to reach the very top.
Apple employs around 137,000 people around the world. To get to the very top at Apple, would take a lot of time and your chances are 1 in 137,000 even if you assume that the top 100 people at Apple earn millions of dollars per year, that still leaves you with a 1 in 1,370 chance of achieving it. A 0.07% chance. The odds are not favourable.
But there are many different ways to achieve income goals. It’s up to you to research, discover and apply your knowledge towards that goal.
So how do you do it?
First, discover what exactly it is you want to accomplish. Visualise it, think it through deeply and then work backwards. As Stephen Covey writes in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: “begin with the end in mind”.
If your goal is to become a teacher, then visualise yourself teaching.
Who would you teach? Kids? Adults? Business leaders?
What subject would you teach?
How will you gain the knowledge and skills required to teach that subject?
Do you need any qualifications?
What can you do to get teaching practice?
Once you know what you want to do, you have the foundations for all the right questions. It is those questions that will pull you towards the right path.
You may not know all the right answers at first. It takes time to develop the solutions, and you are going to wander off in wrong directions. But with a clear vision about what it is you want to accomplish, you will always be able to get yourself back on track.
You can achieve, and you can change direction at any time. But to do so successfully, you need that vision. You need to commit to making no more excuses, and you need to take action. Dreaming without execution is a delusion. You must take action. You must stay focused, and you must follow your path.
If you have always struggled with discovering what it is you want to accomplish in life, my Time And Life Mastery course is a course designed to help you find that path. Details of this course can be found here.
Good luck. You have amazing abilities and opportunities, now develop those abilities and take the opportunities when they come your way.
Thank you for reading my stories! 😊
My purpose is to help 1 million people by 2020 to live the lives they desire. To help people find happiness and become better organised and more productive so they can do more of the important things in life.
If you would like to learn more about the work I do, and how I can help you to become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website or you can say hello on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook and subscribe to my weekly newsletter right here.