How can a missed opportunity be a golden opportunity?

Have you ever found yourself wondering what your life might be like if you had taken advantage of some opportunity of the past (”What if I had invested in Microsoft back when Bill Gates first did an IPO?”, “What if I had stayed in my high-school rock band and pushed through to stardom?”)…

We all have these moments of fantasy – and then the balloon pops and the poster shown in this picture becomes all too real (This poster is from a funny sight called “Demotivators.com” ), and most of us have a few missed opportunities where we know we should have “taken the leap”, where we almost did…but at the last minute we wimped out – and a great thing that we could have done passed us by like the train in the poster.

But that is the point that we can find a new opportunity… As “Opportunity” is not something that comes once in a while like you may have believed, but instead it is more like a “force” or a ephemeral “raw material” that is always around you.  Opportunity waits to be seen and then taken, it is not a lottery that rarely comes close to you…no, it is all around you.

But you have to learn to see it, and missed opportunities, weather real or fantasy, can be the impetus for creating new opportunities to succeed and grow.  So lets look at a few examples.

The greatest thing about a missed opportunity is that it provides you with a case study about yourself and how you missed that opportunity.  

• Did you see it but were too afraid of the risks to attempt it?
• Did you miss it altogether because you were too focused on something else?
• Did you notice the opportunity but dismiss it as “unimportant” because you did not think deeply enough about its implications?
• Did you think in your mind that you could make your own opportunity, but then allowed other things to crowd out your idea until it was too late and someone else grabbed it?
• Do you see lots of opportunities and are excited by them all and get distracted as you flit from one to another?

These five are the basic reason we miss opportunities. The last one is especially important to me – I call it “Opportunity ADD” I get myself involved in too many things and tend not to get any of them done if I don’t use some ruthless discipline.

The missed opportunity allows us to discover how we react and what areas of the five points above we need to work on.  Here are some opportunity “lock-in” suggestions:

1.) Realize that you are not the only one who will notice an opportunity, but also realize that few will act on one – make you choice, grab the reigns and create a plan to pursue your opportunity until you see it through.

2.) Make sure you have the time and resources to accomplish what needs to be done for this opportunity – if not perhaps you need to partner with someone or even leave it – finding something else.

3.) Don’t get distracted by other opportunities when you are working on one now – just write the ideas down and move on with what you are doing, otherwise you will never get anything done!

4.) Remember that as you work though an opportunity, you will create more opportunity – it is an inexhaustible resource that gets larger the more you use it up.

Opportunity is hazy when looked at in the present, but become crystal clear when seen from the past – you need to remember that the fantasy that you have of wishing you “knew then what you know now” can be a motivator to get you to “learn now what you will wish you knew” and make the fantasy a reality. You can make today’s opportunities become reality.

Many have done this, why not you?

David T. McKee

Once upon a time, many years ago, a young boy approached his wise old Cherokee grandfather.

“Grandfather, of all the things you have learned over your long life, what is the most important lesson?”

The old man looked at his grandson lovingly, thoughts moved across his wrinkled visage, and then, very slowly he began.

“The most important lesson I have learned is this: That there is a battle going on inside me – and there is one going on inside you as well, it is in all of us.  The battle is between two huge, wild dogs – one is dark and hides in the shadows.  He smells of decay and death, and his flesh hangs rotting from his bones, his eyes are red fire.  He whispers in your ears about wicked delights and unlawful things, and when you give into his temptations, he accuses you and stabs your own heart with guilt. His ways are always easy and filled with pleasures – but his paths always lead to your doom.

The other dog is noble and resides in the light. He is under control, he is clean, he is good. His breath is like cinnamon and honey, and life resides wherever ever his foot falls. He is humble, but make no mistake, he is a warrior and cannot be tamed.  He asks kindly but firmly and always tells the honest truth – even when it hurts terribly. He challenges you to follow difficult paths, but these paths will strengthen your soul and lead you ultimately to joy.

These two dogs fight continually within you.”

At that the boys grandfather went silent.  Finally, the boy asked, “Grandfather, which dog wins?”

And without hesitation the wise old Cherokee looked straight into the eyes of his grandson and answered, “The one I feed.”

Most of us have heard some variation of this story in our lives.  The point of the story is that both good and evil reside within us all and they both vie for our attention – the one we give attention to is the one that will, over time, dominate our lives and the outcome of our efforts.

How does this apply to Achievement and Success? It applies greatly and here is why: Intentional thinking is the willful focus of our attention on a particular outcome we desire.  This focus will allow our subconcious mind to become sensitized to the opportunities that exist in our environment that we can utilize to bring about our desired outcome.

That is essentially the “feeding” of the good dog, especially with regard to the creation of wealth, happiness, and a successful life.  Not setting goals, not intentionally thinking and improving ourselves is basically the feeding of the dark and destructive dog – and we will reap what we sow.

The story may be intended as a moral proverb, but it demonstrates exactly what happens with our success and failure with regard to our lives – we will reap reward based on the dog we feed.  If we see failure as a learning experience, get back up, brush ourselves off, and get going again – we have fed the good dog.  If we sit in the mud and whine – well, that is ignoring the hard lesson of failure and we will be doomed to repeat that lesson and the dark dog laughs.

The point is that we must be intentional about being intentional – about setting our goals and focusing our minds to the specific things we want to achieve – that is the feeding of the noble dog.

David T. McKee

Before I begin this post, I wanted to let everyone know that “yes…I am still alive”.  I have been heads down working on Achieve-Master, the Ultimate Life Mastery System – which, like many projects, seems to have taken on a life of its own and grown to an unwieldy size – which is a complete set of topics in and of itself.  More on Achieve-Master later.  I also experienced a down-size/merger of the start-up company I had been working at and had to find a new day job, so it has been crazy the last few months to say the least.  So I took a hiatus from “The Master Achiever” blog.  But I am back!  So without further ado, let us begin!

Todays Topic: Dress for Success

You may have heard of the book “Dress for Success” by John T. Molloy – you may even have read it. If you haven’t, you should. I say this advisedly basically because while I personally know the advice in this book is true – I am one of those people who would rather wear a t-shirt, blue jeans, and an old comfortable sweatshirt to work. However, while my favorite attire might be okay for writing software in a tiny cube or in a home office, that fact is: how you dress does affect your attitude!

Umm... No.

Molly’s contention in his book was two-fold, that how you dress affects the attitudes of those with whom you work, as well as your own self image of who you are. Remember, your subconscious gives you back what you program it – and if your self image is one of a smartly dressed, successful businessman, then that is what it will give back in self confidence, self image, and the way you carry yourself while working with your peers. They will see you as successful, and more importantly, so will you. If you don’t believe this (I didn’t when my father introduced me to Molloy’s book.), give it a try. Wear your usual or most comfortable cloths the first day and take notice of your own feelings and how able you are at your job – take down notes of how your colleagues at work act around you. Then take Molloy’s advice and dress for success and note ay differences. You will be convinced not so much about how it affects those around you (your peers may ask if you are going on job interviews – politely tell them you have meetings or something innocuous) but on how much it affects your own attitudes while at work.

The fact of the matter is, whether you consider it good or bad, most people are looking for someone who will be the leader and the one who will take responsibility. Most people don’t want responsibility – I believe it is an unfortunate outcome of our culture and educational system. This is why when you look the part of a leader, when you dress like a leader in whatever profession you in, you are subconsciously perceived as smarter, more experienced, and a more obvious choice for leadership roles – and that perception will also extend into your own subconscious!

Lets take a non-businessman example of this principle: If you are a welder, you are not going to wear a suit to work – but could you wear clean, well fitting, high quality welding uniforms? Perhaps purchase the very best automatic welding mask? If you feel like a top professional you will try to match that feeling with proper action – you do still need to keep abreast of the best techniques and processes of course, but the fact is when you are seen next to the welder who does not take care of his uniform, does not invest in the best mask, etc. you will be perceived as the leader.

While perception is not necessarily reality, the fact is, for better or worse, what we perceive does control to a large extent what we believe, especially subconsciously. So use this fact to your advantage as you become a Master Achiever!

David T. McKee

How do we deal with the array of tasks, sub-goals, goals, achievements, milestones, accomplishments, short, medium, and long term goals? The list is dizzying! But there is a simple formula when it comes to success:

Success happens because a series of tasks were done in some particular order, with and eye toward a particular final state.

That seems fairly straightforward, but the fact is in practice it can be an enormous burden, and can seem like an insurmountable undertaking. Why does such a simple concept become such a pile of spaghetti complexity in real life? Well there are three answers to this question:

• Lack of prioritization
• Lack of proper task breakdown
• Lack of proper ordering

Lack of prioritization: Most of us, if we are the few percent who actually create a “to-do” list, just write down our tasks randomly as they occur to us. “At least we got them down on paper!” we figure. Well, that is a great step forward from just “keeping them in our heads”, but the problem is we usually tackle the first in the list, or the easiest one, (or the ones we like) not giving much thought to any type of prioritization of these tasks.

That is a real problem. There are some specific questions we need to ask ourselves about every task we have on our list:

1. How important is it with regard to our ultimate life goals?
2. How important is it with regard to our short term and medium term goals?
3. How important is it with regard to what I want to accomplish today?
4. Is it important enough to even do at all?

When we don’t analyze our tasks like this we usually end up doing many tasks that are unimportant, and end up with tasks that we never got to – but that were really more important than the ones we did.

We end up feeling like we worked very hard, but did not get much accomplished. This frustrates us, and can eventually make us give up all too easily on our ultimate desires. The problem is, we know at some deep level we were going around in circles and did not progress very far for all of the effort we put out.

Lack of proper task breakdown: Another problematic area is not breaking our tasks down enough, or breaking them down too fine. Tasks should be units of work that we can accomplish in a day or less, but they should not be so small that they are really just bits of a single piece of work. An example would be the construction of a house. Building the entire house is not a task; it cannot be performed in a single day. Putting on the roof over the garage might be a single, day-long task. On the other hand, nailing down a single shingle would not be a task.

So the proper idea of a task is “something I can start doing now, and get done by at least days end.”

Lack of proper ordering: Sometimes tasks cannot be done effectively until some other task is done first. This is proper ordering. The problem is as humans we tend to like certain tasks and not like others so much. Sometimes the tasks we do not like are the ones that really need to be done before the tasks we like can be started. A proper perspective about the ordering of our tasks is needed here.

In addition to this, there are some tasks that need to be repeated at some rate. Exercise is an excellent example of a daily task that needs repeating and needs slow but constant change with regard to increasing weights, or increasing the repetitions of various workouts. Our task completion is much more effective when we know this specifically.

So it becomes clear as we think about tasks that there are more effective ways to deal with them before we actually start doing them. Ordering our tasks by priority, breaking up those that are too large, combining those that are too small, or simply dumping those that are not helping us makes our list of things “to-do” the most effective it can towards moving us quickly to our goal.

Don’t miss the next article where I will discuss how tasks are the children of goals, and what the significance of goals and milestones are.

- David T. McKee

P.S. So what is an important task you can do right now to jump start your business? Start by ordering a Huge box of E-Business books, Achievement and Success books, Copywriting and Pyschological Tactics to rocket your business to Success! Spend a mere $7.00 to get the Marketing Magic Collection 1with over 250 ebooks, reports, articles, by some of the most famous Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Gary Halbert, and so many more!  Get it here!

Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2008, David T. McKee

What’s that?!

Yeah, we have all heard the buzz-word phrase:

“To succeed you need to think outside the box…”

with the idea being that “the box” represents our own self-imposed blinders that tell us “this is the way we have always done it…”.  And sure, that is a good thing, we do need to explore different ways of thinking about how to succeed in our lives and our businesses.

So why would I say we need to think inside the box?

Well, to be perfectly honest, I am talking about a different box.  The box I am talking about is the one that separates the things you do have control over, and the things you do not.  And to be even more honest, my pastor gave me this idea from his last sermon (see my about page if you want more info on that).

You see one of the areas where we waste much energy (and I am as guilty as anyone on this count) is that we tend to focus on things we really don’t have too much control over.  Let’s take the recent election for example.  How much control do you have over the election? Well, unless you had several hundred million dollars to spend on nationwide advertising, not much.  Sure, you got a vote, and you could coordinate your country voter registration, perhaps volunteer for your party, go door to door, write blog posts, etc.  There are many things you can do, but in the end you don’t really have much control over the outcome.

Regardless of what you thought about the outcome of the election, this is something that is basically outside of your box.  And, in fact, most things in life are outside your box.  You may have some influence on some of these things, but really there are just a few things you can say are actually inside of your box.

In fact, even the length of you life is not inside that box of yours…

So what is inside?  Well, perhaps the most important thing in the universe: Your Attitude.

• Your attitude determines how you Perceive everything around you: and your perception of things profoundly affects what actions you take, what words you speak, and what feelings you allow into your life – and that directs the intentions you send out.
• Your attitude determines how you Plan your next move: Okay, so you have come up against a mountain and there is no way around it… now you need a plan on what to do next.  You have no control over the mountain, but you have control over what plan you will make!
• Your attitude determines what Priorities you will make: If you have a poor attitude you tend to prioritize those things that give you an immediate “high” instead of the things that will make a lasting and important change.

In short, attitude determines how you will react to the things you cannot control, and what you will do: will you stop dead, will you map your way around, or will you power through difficulties and unexpected challenges?  If you are alive and are planning on setting goals, you will face these things.

So you need to think inside your “box” so that you can have the kind of sustained attitude that allows you to move forward.  Your sustained attitude is one of the most important aspects of goal achievement, because while it is easy and fun to “imagine” yourself achieving a goal – it is the sustained attitude that will carry you through the tough times.  Goals are funny things that have a way of making you face your own insecurities and weaknesses.  If you don’t face them head on with an attitude of “whatever it takes” – then you are bound to fail.

So start thinking inside your box – to become a Master Achiever you need to take control fully of those things you are in control of.

- David T. McKee

P.S. So how can you start thinking inside your box right now? Start by ordering a Huge box of E-Business books, Achievement and Success books, Copywriting and Pyschological Tactics to rocket your business to Success! Spend a mere $7.00 to get the Marketing Magic Collection 1 with over 250 ebooks, reports, articles, by some of the most famous Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Gary Halbert, and so many more!  Get it here!

Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2008, David T. McKee