Earl Nightingale said that “Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal.” Because he was instrumental in the realization of my success through the many books and tapes he produced (and that my successful father encouraged me to read and listen to), I wanted to dedicate this first of the Achieve Master series of articles.

In this article we will look at the part of Mr. Nightingales quote “the progressive realization…” If you have not, please read my other article “A Worthy Goal – Part1: Cutting the Crap…”

Once we have established a worthy goal, we must then make the journey to get to it. If our goal is truly worthy (ie: it is a true goal, it is an uplifting goal, and it is inherently a good goal), then we must ask ourselves: “Is this something stretch me as a person to achieve?” Or “Is this something I can do right now without much effort?”

It’s not a goal if you can do it now; it is just a task in that case.

I have developed a software system that helps people achieve their greatest dreams, and the primary “memory mnemonic” (if you will) is the statement “Do This Now™”. But this refers to Tasks. Goals, on the other hand are things you cannot do “now”, but that will requires you grow or change in some way (learning a skill, strengthening muscles, practice at a skill you have to get to the next level, etc.)

Once a goal is perceived it must be crystallized. There is no room for vagueness, as best as you can you must visualize every detail and nuance of your goal. It should excite you and generate intense interest for you to do this. Here are some examples:

Example 1:
Jack Sprat says: “One day I’d like to be a captain of a dinner cruise boat.” When his friends ask what he has done about this dream of his he says he has a few magazines with boats and once went on a dinner cruise with his wife.

Example 2:
Joe Smith wants to own his own dinner yacht where he can ply the inter-coastal waters around the Carolinas and have several well paying guests on board. He loves the idea of being on the water and socializing with guests while feeding them marvelously prepared dinners using local cuisine and telling them about the sites and history of the area. He has gone to several yacht makers to see what kinds of boats are available. He is currently taking a course on the history of the area and has started an account where he is saving as much money as he can spare. He has also begun talking to a business friend about how to write up a business plan so he can raise more money for equipment. In addition to this he has called up several cooks he knows of at various local restaurants to see if they would be interested in such an idea. Joe has gone on all of the dinner cruises in the area and written down his observations about how they work, what methods are better than others, and how he could differentiate his idea from theirs for a truly unique experience. When his friends ask what he has done about his dream, Joe pulls out his large folder of pictures and business plans, showing them his latest list of things he needs to do and those that he has completed.

Now after reading these two examples, which one strikes you as most likely to succeed?
Now, to be fair, Jack Sprat has done some correct things (getting boating magazines, going on a cruise) but his statement of what he is doing is very fuzzy (he still calls a yacht a “boat”). He is dreaming, but he is not doing much about the dream, and really does not know where to begin or what to do next. Joe, on the other hand has a crystal clear set of goals and tasks, and is always updating and re-clarifying so he can move towards that goal. Joe is always making sure that he is doing something to move him closer. Jack, not so much.

I am not sure Jack would ever reach this goal, but nothing short of death is going to keep Joe away from it.

And that is the secret of “the progressive realization”, daily making a concerted effort to do something NOW that will move you, if only just a little, towards your goal.

If you have ever used a navigational system or an online map system like Google Maps or Map-quest, you know how this basically works. You tell the system where you are now, and where you want to go. These are the two endpoints. Goals are the same, you need to know where you are now (your situation, education, finances, skills, etc), and where you will need to be to achieve your goal (to the best of your knowledge).

The mapping applications always give you a list of points you must reach, turns you must take, and the good ones can help with obstacles and alternate routes. In the same way you must break down the steps to reach your goal so you know what things you need to learn, what money you will need to raise, what skills you will need to develop, etc. You will also have obstacles, and alternate routes. You need to know all of this, or as much as possible,

The best possible way to do this is to use “backwards planning”. Backwards planning is starting where you want to end up (your goal) and moving backwards one simple task at a time, until you arrive back to where you are at now. How to perform backwards planning is the subject of my next article so don’t miss it!

- David T. McKee

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

(This is a reprint of an article I wrote a year or so ago on ezine articles…)

Nightingale-Conant corporation has been producing audio tapes, and disks for many years, ever since Earl Nightingale recorded his famous “The Strangest Secret”. That secret was that “We become what we think about”. Today we see the new book and movie “The Secret”, which is basically a rehash of the same principle with lost of intrigue and Hollywood graphics (oh, yes, and don’t forget Oprah fawning all over it as if it were some new thing….)

The truth is this secret is not. It has been know for thousands of years, it is even in the Bible (Proverbs 23:7). It is not so surprising that we become the person that reflects what we think about, because it is the ability to think that is so uniquely human. It is what gives us the ability to create vehicles, and skyscrapers, and artificial hearts, and poems and music, etc. It is not so surprising that our success or failure is also tightly linked to this capability.

James Allen wrote the classic book “As a Man Thinketh” way back in 1902 and gathered together many of the important aspects of how thinking correctly and with focused intent is so very important. Many great men and woman have recognized this little book as a starting point of their personal success.

Thinking is hard work, at least focused thinking is. Most people do as little of it as possible, the problem is, the thinking motor of the mind never really stops, so if a person is not thinking in a focused way, then that motor is just running wildly and grabbing any unrelated impulse and sense that floats by. When this happens the person becomes unfocused, and his life becomes unfocused.

The analogy of a rudderless boat has been used in the past, but I submit the boat has a rudder, just that no-one is holding onto it. The rudder handle is flailing back and forth, and the ship is meandering all over the waters until it runs into a reef and the boat, like the life, sinks.

I have discovered in my own life, that when I listen, I am gripping the rudder. If I listen to something worthwhile, I am not only gripping the rudder, I am steering it. If I listen with the intent of going to a specific location (or achieving a specific goal) I am steering the boat for all it’s worth. But first I listen because that focuses my thinking motor. I have discovered that listening to audio about success or business opportunity, or uplifting music, or news or what ever is a very good way to get into tune. This gets the hands on the rudder and starts the mental juices flowing. That is why I personally like success tapes so much, and talk radio, and my MP3 player!

It is so much better than TV which to me seems to just take the place of the thinking motor, you feel like a zombie many times…

Getting back to the original premise of this article, I wanted to show how listening to success oriented material is a good way to put into practice the principles that James Allen laid out so well in his book. While I don’t agree 100% with everything Mr. Allen wrote, I agree with much of it and have used it myself.

- David T. McKee

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

We all have many things to do each day – pick up the kids from school, go get the groceries, mow the lawn.  And in our business life as  well as our goal plan, we also have many tasks.

The problem is, we usually do not prioritize these tasks.  Most of us have a vague notion of what our priorities are – what is important… but usually what drives us is something else: urgency.

Now urgency is not a bad thing, in fact is is quite useful, but when it is sitting in the seat of importance, it will screw up your life.  Most of us live this way though, we do what is most urgent on our list regardless of how important it is.

And that is a major reason we seem so hopelessly behind in our efforts to achieve ultimate success, and grasp our dreams.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower used a particular methodology to solve this problem for himself.  He was the 1st Supreme Allied Commander Europe during WWII, was the 1st Military Governor of the American Occupation Zone in Germany, and the 34th President of the United States. He accomplished many great things in his life.  His special method for achieving success has since been nicknamed “The Eisenhower Matrix“.

The Eisenhower matrix is fairly easy to understand: Take your list of things you need to do, and put them on a 2 by 2 grid labeled “Urgency” vs “Importance”.  An example is shown below:

Importance of an item increases from left to right, and urgency increases from bottom to top.

Basically you must make subjective decisions on where your daily tasks fall within this matrix, but it forces you to think about your tasks and make important decisions about if you should even be doing some of them. If something is neither important or urgent, dump it. If it is both important and urgent, do it first. If it is important, but not urgent, do that later, after your important and urgent things are complete. Finally, if something is urgent, but not so important to you, you may either want to dump it, or at most, delegate it to someone else if possible.

You could eliminate many of your unimportant tasks and free up you most valuable asset, time. Doing this allowed President Eisenhower to accomplish so much in his life, and can do the same for you.

The Impact Effort Matrix…

There is a variation on the Eisenhower matrix called the “Impact/Effort” matrix.  What the Impact Effort matrix attempts so do is allow you to discover the tasks that will give the greatest impact for the least effort.  The best possible world is to use both matrices when evaluating your task list.  Then you would want to do your most important, most urgent, least effort tasks first.

Prioritization of tasks is one of your most powerful tools for leveraging your time.

David T. McKee

P.S. Achieve-Master the software contains both priority matrices in the prioritization tab, sign up to be an Achieve-Master beta tester!

P.P.S. Are you trying to start an online or home based business? Are you afraid of the current economic madness? Then 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

How, in this highly competitive Internet Market, with billions of web pages and millions more being added each and every day (it is estimated that 150,000 blogs alone are added each day), with economies around the world reeling from the global credit crisis, how do people like you and me make any money?

Now more than ever, with banks and governments stealing through taxes and inflation the dreams of millions – some who thought that they had achieved the dream seeing it dribble away, we must discover how to make money, and then how to grow it and protect it.

With so many challenges in front of us, when we try to start our Internet business we face one especially monumental one: how do we get our first customers?

I call this particular issue “The Bootstrap Problem“.  Like a computer that must “Boot Up” from the initial switch of the power supply and the initial spin of the primary disk, our online businesses must start up and grab initial customers – customers that, through word of mouth, through testimonials, through blog comments, etc. get our business snowball rolling down the hill.

I believe (from experience) that this initial problem may be one of the main reasons that so many beginning online business starts end up in failure.  You are told that to sell products you need to have a site with testimonials and “a buzz” but if you have not even sold your first unit, how do you do that?  It’s a catch-22! you can’t put up testimonials if you have never sold anything, and buzz requires several people who have a presence of their own talking about you and your product.

So how do you get to that place?

There are some practical steps to do this, here is three of them:

1. Give your product away for free.
2. Do something radical.
3. Use every channel to broadcast yourself.

Give your product away for free: Obviously you want to make money on your product, so what this step is really addressing is giving your product away to a small group of “beta testers” – people who agree to give you a real, honest appraisal of your product.  This helps you do two things:

• - find bugs in your product and fix them.
• - get testimonials from actual users which you can put on your sales pages.

Do something radical: People like to read about new, weird, radical, strange, controversial things, that is why when things are sane, good, comfortable, nice – you never see that in the news!  You want to be searched for you got to be different, and hopefully just a bit over the edge.  There is an Internet marketer out there I just hate, and that is the way he likes it!  You may have heard of the so-called “rich jerk” or seen his sites. The thing is, the debauched person who talks on the site, and the garbage he spouts about being so incredibly wealthy, having several girls in his hot-tub, etc…is mostly just crap.  The actual owner does not show his face on the site, those are actors, playing a part to create a sense of Vegas style playboy-isms.  This has been a brilliant marketing strategy because it is so radical compared to “normal” strategies.  There are many other ways, however, that you can create a sense of “this is different” – just as long as you are attracting the kinds of people who will also want what you have to sell.

Use every channel to broadcast yourself: You need to look into all the possibilities, even those you may not have yet considered.  Today, with Web 2.0 we have tons of social networks (if you look in the upper right hand of this blog you will see “LinkedIn” and various feeds and below each post a “ShareThis” link to social networks).  There are a variety of auction and promotion sites (most people never even consider advertising their business on craigslist for example). There is Twitter, and other phone based applications, the list is almost endless and growing daily.

I have a report on using social networking to establish yourself in the Internet business world, and you can get it free with your purchase of my super sized Business E-Book collection “Marketing Magic Collection 1” which has over 250 ebooks, reports, and articles from some of the most influential writers and Internet marketers, copywriters, etc. such as Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Dan Lok, Brian Keith Voiles, etc.  For only $7.00!

Seven bucks, the price of a combo meal at McDonald’s.  Order one today and you will be reading and mining awesome ideas for years – just check out the post on this collection here.  Order the collection here.

Use these ideas to bootstrap your success!

David T. McKee

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

If you have been awake for the last couple of weeks you are, no doubt, wondering what is going to happen to the free market and the free world.  How can one achieve success and self improvement in a world that seems to be going insane, and moreover – if you are an internet marketer, what does all of this mean for you?

…two things mark those that succeeded during great depressions and in uncertain markets: Accurate Information and Good Value…

Well, frankly I think it is a golden opportunity.  You may wonder how I can say that, but lets consider a few things: People being insecure will start looking for opportunities, and in today’s world that means the internet.  If you, as a business person are offering those opportunities, you stand a much greater chance than ever before to be standing in a river of success and opportunity.

It’s simple really, in ever recession and depression this country (The United States) there have been those who succeeded regardless of how bad it “seemed” in the economy.

There are two things that marked those that succeeded during great depressions and in uncertain markets:

• Accurate Information.
• Good Value.

These things never change.  If you want to succeed in this crazy market you absolutely must have good information (and act on it), and then give good value.  You cannot shot circuit these things, you cannot cheat, you must provide excellent value in your products and services, and you must operate using good, current information.

Period.

In that vein, I Just created a very inexpensive offer called Market Magic Collection I that combines a huge number of tips, articles, reports, an ebooks that contain some of the most successful techniques ever used to create wealth on the internet and in ordinary business.  It’s only $7.00!

It’s a great value as some of these books and reports have earned their authors millions of dollars!

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