It's not done, until it is...

One of the areas that both Master Achievers, and those who are working to become a Master Achiever struggle with, is the area of closure. Closure is when a task, goal, or project is completed – both in time and in the mind of the one who is performing it.  It seems like a simple concept, but has been famously said before; the devil is in the details.

There are two extremes that a Master Achiever must avoid when setting about to perform a task or a goal – the first, the lazy mans excuse: “It’s 99 percent done, that’s good enough…”

No, if the job is not done, then you have not reached your stated objective – no matter how close it is, if you know in your heart that last little bit that should be completed to give a polished, professional result is not there – then you have failed in accomplishing the thing, at least to the most important person: you.

You see if you know in your heart that you have not really completed the task, then you will carry that with you, and the next time you have a task to do, you are more likely to subconsciously accept the notion of compromise.  You are more likely to give up earlier because you have established that pattern.  You are moving away from being a Master Achiever.

On the other hand, you can be a perfectionist – never fully believing that you are done, never completing the task because you keep tweaking.  This is the perfectionist conundrum: “I just need to do one more thing…”

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The perfectionist has gone too far into thinking that a task or goal needs more features, more polish, more bits of this or that, until too much time has gone by and the task or goal is no longer meaningful.

Both extremes are deadly to the Master Achiever because we all have times where we just feel like we have worked so hard that we cannot do another thing and want to throw in the towel, or we obsess over some minor thing and cannot seem to say “IT IS TRULY DONE!”

This requires balance, and takes practice and a good partner or mentor who can tell you that you are being lazy or you are obsessing over something.  Closure is when, in our own minds and hearts we know we have done our best, given our all, and have now closed the book on some task or project so we can move on to the next one.

And now, this post is done!

David T. McKee

You made it, you eat it!

Most of you that read this have heard of “The Secret” if not, it is a book ( and later a movie) that purported to tell a story about how those few human beings that achieve great things in this life have a carefully guarded “secret” to their success – a secret of such a profound and mysterious nature that some even have killed to keep it a secret…

Wooo! That sounds so mystical-magical.  That sounds like “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and I half expect to be digging in an old musty tomb to find the ancient book about “the Secret”…. Hmmm, not so much.

As fun as it may be to imagine that there is some special secret to achievement and success, I have to defer to the “Pit-bull of Personal Development” Larry Wingate, who (and I quote) says “The Secret is a Total Load of Crap”:

“People love that book and the whole concept behind it because it promises you that you can achieve the results you have always dreamed of simply by focusing on what you want. Yeah right. Most people can’t turn the television off long enough to focus on their health, their work, their finances or their own children. Focus is not a strong suit for most people. Besides, I think it takes a whole lot more than “focus” to change your life and results. So I’m not buying it.”

The problem with The Secret, as Larry has so succinctly pointed out, is that just holding a concept or idea strongly in your mind is not enough.  While I do think there is some value in the ideas presented in The Secret, there are far too many people who stop at that point, or delude themselves into thinking that “focus” is all that is required.  It’s not.

Focus helps us see opportunity, it programs our own mental “filters” to tap us on the shoulder when something we need for our particular brand of success becomes available. But, and this is the crux of the issue, it will not substitute for action.

We will have to work for our success – and it will be hard work, make no mistake about that.

So –what do I mean when I say, “Success is only a sandwich away”?  Simple.  What do you do when you decide you are going to make a sandwich?  Do you focus on the sandwich?  Does that work for you?  It may make you more hungry to think about  the sandwich, but if that is all you do, you are going to starve.

No, you don’t think about it – it is like what “Yoda” the buddha-like character from “Star Wars” says to the young Luke Skywalker when he is trying to use the force to lift his ship from the swamp:

“But Master, I am trying!”

“Not try.  Do…or do not.”

In other words what Yoda was saying to Luke was: “Make a sandwich”.  “Just do it!”  You and I don’t think about such things as making a sandwich, we just get up, get the bread and the fillings, and make a sandwich.  I we come across problems such as dropping the bread, mayonnaise side down onto the floor, we clean up the mess and get another piece of bread and continue on.  We don’t whine about the fact that bread falls too easily on to the floor, or that spreading mayonnaise is just too much work, we don’t “try” to make a sandwich, we just do.

That is how we need to approach our own personal achievement.  Do.  Or do not. Make a sandwich – decide what you are going to do, hold it in your mind so that you notice opportunity, but just get busy getting the work done.  If a problem or issue gets in your path, you treat it like bread on the floor – just do the next thing that needs to be done.

That is the true path to achievement – do the tasks that have to be done.

David T. McKee

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

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