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.

They all Laughed when I said I would achieve success, but then I showed them my bank account… Success Perception is another category of “Affirmation” – Do you want a method of affirming your personal goals that really works – a way of reprogramming your own mind? Check out “The Sculptor Method” – you will be amazed!

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

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 continue to look at the part of Mr. Nightingales quote “the progressive realization…”

So…how do you break down a goal into a set of steps or tasks that you can begin doing immediately so you are always moving towards that goal?

I the last article we mentioned “Backwards Planning”. This is essentially breaking down a goal into individual steps or tasks by starting from the goal and working backwards to your current state.

To help you understand this process, think back to the last thing that you were intensely interested in. It needs to be something that got you going in the morning, and kept you awake at night thinking about, something that grabbed your attention every time anything remotely to do with it falls into your field of vision. Something that forces you to research it on the web or go to the library and check out books…

That should be the way you feel about your worthy goal, because you need to research it, and you need to understand everything about it, you need to mingle with other like minded people. At this point you may even want to seek out a mentor (more on that in another later article). You certainly need to know how others were successful doing what you want to do (or at least something similar). The fact is, to do a backwards break down of your goal into steps; you are going to have to understand as many details of it as you can. Start by imagining yourself already having achieved the stated goal.

In our earlier example of Jack Sprat and Joe Smith, both who claimed a goal of wanting to be a captain of a dinner cruise yacht, Mr. Smith actually decided to look into how yachts were constructed, how they were sailed, how dinner cruises were run, how to get chefs onto the boat to cook, etc. In other words he broke down his goal as best he could and then got to work. As he learned more about the various bit and pieces of his goal, he further broke them down. Sometimes, the things Mr. Smith thought were tasks turned out to be very large, they were actually more like “mini-goals” or “sub-goals”. They could not be done in a simple one day task, so they needed to be broken down further. This is what Mr. Smith did, revising his “map” from where he was to his goal.

And every day he got closer, every day the path to the goal got clearer, until one day Joe Smith was “Captain Joe Smith” happily serving his guests as he plied the inter-coastal water ways…and as he began planning his next achievement.

Unfortunately, Jack Sprat just kept dreaming about being a yacht captain, and after a few years, lost interest in the dream. He moved on to other things with equal success.

You see, full immersion into your goal will keep your interest long enough to achieve it. Dreaming about your goal is important, but not enough to keep the dream alive! You need to put those dreams on paper, you need to think about them, research them, noodle them in you mind. You need to see yourself already having achieved the goal.

You must discover how to break your worthy goals down into tasks, put those tasks into some sort of priority, and then do them in order. You must constantly update your tasks and your roadmap to your goal as you learn more about it. This can all be done on paper (and has been done this way for countless centuries) by the most successful people on earth. Today’s technology makes it even easier to track and update your success plans.

–David T. McKee

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Note: This is copy-righted content, Copyright  2009, David T. McKee

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