Edward George Bulwer-Lytton once said: “The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who early in life clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers.”
Abraham Maslow, the transpersonal psychologist, once wrote, “The ultimate end of human life is to become everything you are capable of becoming. Your purpose should be to fulfill your potential as a human being and to accomplish every goal that you can possibly set for yourself. Your aim should be to get the very most out of yourself in every area of your life.”
There are some people who accomplish an extraordinary amount with their lives, as opposed to the great majority who accomplish very little. These peak performers or self-actualisers seem to earn more money, have better families, friends and relationships, enjoy higher levels of health and energy, achieve much higher levels of success, esteem and prestige in their fields, and live longer, happier lives than the average. This should be your goal as well.
The determinant of high performance
The only difference between the high performers and the low performers is their habits. High performing, successful, happy people are those who have taken the time and disciplined themselves to develop the habits that lead them onward and upward in every area of their lives. Unsuccessful, unhappy people, on the other hand, are those who have not yet developed those habits.
If you are willing to work on yourself long enough and hard enough, you can form and shape yourself into the kind of excellent person that you are designed to be. No matter what you have done or not done in the past, at any time, you can draw a line under your previous life and make the decision that your future is going to be different. You can begin thinking different thoughts, making different choices and decisions, taking different actions, and developing different habits that will lead you inevitably to the successes that are possible for you.
Personal strategic planning
The purpose of strategic planning in a business is to increase “return on equity” or R.O.E. It is to improve the financial results of the business over what they would have been in the absence of the new strategy. In the same way, the purpose of personal strategic planning is to increase R.O.E., or “return on energy.” It is to increase your “return on life.”
The aim is for you to organise and reorganise your life in such a way that you are earning the highest returns on your mental, emotional and physical equity invested in your life. Your goal is to organise yourself and use your time to achieve the greatest amount of pleasure, satisfaction and rewards from everything you do, every time; and this is very much under your own personal control.
The first habit therefore that you must develop to insure a great life is the habit of personal strategic planning. You invest the time and effort to think through and plan out your life, in advance, to assure that you get the very most that is possible for you in every area.
With personal strategic planning, you develop the habits of future orientation and long-time perspective. These habits enable you to project forward in your life several years and determine exactly what it is that you want to accomplish and where it is that you want to end up at a specific time in the future.
Think Long Term
The greater clarity that you have regarding your long-term goals, the better and more accurate decisions you will make in the short-term to assure that you achieve your goals on schedule. For example, if you decide that you are going to be a self-made millionaire 10 to 20 years from now, you set that as your long-term financial goal. You then assess your current situation, and determine how much you are worth today. You draw a line from where you are today to where you want to be at a certain date in the future. You then plan out a strategy or roadmap of exactly how you are going to get to your goal of financial independence in the time that you have allotted.
The rule is this: be clear about the goal but be flexible about the process. Be open to the fact that a thousand things will change on the road to your long-term goal. As long as your goal is clear, you can continue to remain flexible and open-minded. You can reevaluate and try different things. You can accept feedback and self-correct. You can go over, around and through obstacles, and even change and go in a completely different direction. This is the normal and natural process of getting from wherever you are to any long-term goal.
Think on paper
One of the most important habits that you can develop to increase your return on energy is the habit of thinking on paper. Always have a pen in hand when you think, plan and organise. Writing things down clarifies your thinking and crystallises your ideas.
There is something miraculous that happens between the head and the hand. The very act of writing something down activates your visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses. You see it, you sub-vocalize it, or say it to yourself, and you physically write out the words. These three modalities in combination seem to impress what you are writing deeper and deeper into your subconscious mind. This has an ever greater impact on your thinking, feeling and behaviour afterwards.
You Only
Develop the habit of asking the question, “What can I, and only I do, that if done well, will make a real difference?” The answer to this question is something that you and only you can do. If you do not do it, it will not be done by someone else. But if you do it, and you do it well, it can make the greatest single contribution to your work and to your company at that moment. What is it?
Secondly, develop the habit of asking this question, “If I could only do one thing all day long, what one thing do I do that contributes the greatest value to my company?” If you were to list everything that you do on a piece of paper, you would find that there is one task that, if you did it consistently well, repeatedly, over and over, all day long, this one task would contribute more value than any of your other tasks, or all of your other tasks put together.
What one task or activity, which is the highest use of your talents and abilities, if you could do it all day long, would contribute the very most to your work and your life? How could you organise your time and your work so that you are focusing more and more on this single task?
One of the most important keys to personal effectiveness is for you to develop the habit of spending more time, and becoming more skilled, at those few activities that contribute the greatest value to your work. Everything else you do is usually of lower value than these essential tasks.
Your highest and best use of time
Perhaps the most important habit you can develop in personal management is the habit of asking, “What is the most valuable use of my time, right now?” There is always an answer to this question, for every minute and every hour. Your ability to accurately ask and answer this question is the key to high performance, maximum productivity, personal effectiveness and great success.
In its simplest terms, people succeed because they develop the habit of consistently working on the one thing that can give them the highest rate of return on energy, and life, out of all the things they could possibly be doing at the moment. People fail because they are unable or unwilling to determine their true priorities, or they are not then disciplined enough to work on their key tasks exclusively until they are complete.
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