Quick Roundup

Clarify Your Goals
The clarity of your goals will ultimately have a large impact on your ability to achieve those goals. Vague goals only lead to confusion, and often send us in the wrong direction. For example, a goal to spend more time with your family in 2009 is much different from a goal to achieve the financial position to be able to spend more time with your family. On the surface, they may seem the same, but the latter specifies the more fundamental goal. In other words, achieving a certain financial position makes more free time possible.

Brian Tracy addresses this in The Law of Clarity:

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine. This is true everywhere and under all circumstances.

No matter our goal, we must identify the cause and the effect. And we must focus in on the real effect we want. That will often help us identify and clarify the specific steps we must take to achieve that goal.


What Was That Bump?
In working with other contractors I am often struck by how resistant they are to try a new idea. They seem overwhelmed by the potential for making a mistake or failing, and this fear stops them from attempting something new. For example, many contractors are extremely reluctant to raise their prices.

Certainly, nobody enjoys making a mistake or failing. But it is a part of life and business. As Dan Miller writes in Go Ahead--Make More Mistakes:

Here’s what Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad) has to say about “bad luck.” He says, “Making mistakes and becoming smarter is the job of an entrepreneur; not making mistakes is the job of an employee.”

An essential part of entrepreneurism is taking calculated risks. Doing what you've always done will continue to get you the same results. Getting different--better--results means doing something different, and that necessarily involves the risk of making a mistake or failing. Taking calculated risks won't eliminate mistakes, but it often reduces them to minor bumps.


Five Essential Skills
Michael Gerber's new book, The Power Point, lists 5 essential skills that every entrepreneur must possess. Mastering these skills, he says, is necessary to create a great business. The skills are:

1. Concentration--The inner force and energy that allows you to focus your attention.
2. Discrimination--The ability to choose upon what, where and who our attention (or concentration) is directed.
3. Organization--This is the ability to turn chaos into order.
4. Innovation--Innovation is that spark of genius that all entrepreneurs have and should be seen as an asset.
5. Communication--The ability to transmit ideas with clarity, precision, passion and purpose.

These skills are crucial to achieving our goals, no matter what they are. We must identify our goals (discrimination), prioritize those goals and the methods for achieving them (organization), focus our efforts on the goals (concentration), seek creative ways to accomplish the goals (innovation), and share the goals with the relevant people (communication).

Not only do these skills help us achieve our goals, they also help us clarify those goals and develop a plan that will minimize the risks involved.


The Two-Minute Rule
One of the biggest obstacles to achieving our goals is procrastination. While there are many causes of procrastination, they all result in delaying work on some task or project. We may write the task down, or swear that we will remember it, or whatever. But we delay doing it, and suddenly we can have a very long list of tasks. David Allen, of Getting Things Done, developed the Two-Minute Rule--if a task will take less than 2 minutes to complete, do it now. Here is a short video--it is only 2 minutes long--on how to apply the Two-Minute Rule.