Business Advice Blog – learn about business online

You achieve success when you meet a stretch goal overcoming problems, failures, and difficulties by conscious effort and by application of your capabilities, resources and methods.

Clarify What You Really Want

Succeeding requires a strong intention to succeed. “How to” is secondary. Get inspired first. If you really want something you’ll invent amazing ways to achieve it.

The Power of Passion

To be successful, you must have a clear compelling vision of what you want from life. Your vision performs both a directional and a motivational function. The purpose of your coherent vision of a desirable future is to focus you on those things you could do now to bring that future state about.

Be Different and Make a Difference!

Choose Success

Failure never “happens”, it’s your choice. If you believe that failure is not a choice, you’ll never fail. Test new ideas, learn from what works, and what doesn’t, and then apply these lessons to your next experiment, test or idea. Keep doing this until you get results you are satisfied with.

Don’t give up when things go wrong. Every costly lesson is going to result in exponentially greater success in the long term. Seek out the positive in every bad situation and ask, “What can I learn from this? How can do it again more intelligently?”

The Trap of Fixation on Success

Success is nearly a magical idea for most people. In his Book The Active Life, Parker Palmer points out that in the West fixation of people on success discourages them from risk taking “because it values success over learning, and it abhors failure whether we learn from it or not. It always wants to win but win or lose, it inhibits our learning. If we win, we think we know it all and have nothing more to learn. If we lose, we feel so defeated that learning is a hollow consolation… It traps us in a system of praise or blame, credit or shame, a system that gives primacy to goals and external evaluations, devalues the gift of self-knowledge, and diminishes our capacity to take risks that may yield growth,” writes Parker Palmer, the author of The Active Life.

The Tao of Success – Balance Action and Reflection

Creating success involves creating and a delicate and ongoing balance between two somewhat opposing forces – reflection of where you are now and action of pushing toward where you need to go. This balance between reflection and action is very similar to the balance of Yin and Yang in the Tao philosophy.

Stumbling blocks to success include acting too often without a clear sense of direction or spending too much time reflecting without creating outcomes. Truly successful people developed the ability to move effortlessly and quickly from reflection to action and back again. They know when action is necessary and they take action promptly (Yang) so that they can make progress, earn feedback and move back to analyzing their position (Yin) and acquiring the knowledge that they need to be able to move back to action.

Apply 80/20 Principle

The 80/20 Principle says that 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results, and vice versa.

Progress means moving resources from low-value to high-value uses. Your ability to choose between the high-value and the low-value activities is the key determinant of your success in life and business… More

Take Action

Success isn’t determined by genetics. It’s about persistent, consistent action.

Having dreams and passion is not enough. If you wish to achieve something, don’t let life just “happen” to you. Set stretch goals and take action. If you wish to live your dreams, act from a sense of urgency. There is no success without action. Don’t wait, attack to get things done. Ignite and catapult yourself to greater action and achievement.

Take Action!

Face Reality

Facing reality is one of most important rules in both life and business. Whether in life or in business, those who are able to face reality and acknowledge truth are usually successful. Yet, it is often difficult to face reality and so much easier to avoid the truth as it may hurt, embarrass, be painful or self-deflating. Yet, facing this truth is what makes success in both life and business so simple.

Case in Point Getting the Best out of Students

Benjamin Zander, a celebrated music teacher, a conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, and the author of the book called The Art of Possibility, has an effective strategy for getting best out of his students. In NLP terms, this strategy is called ‘Creating Inevitable Success’. On the first day of class, Zander tells his first year students that they all get an A. There is only one condition. Their first assignment is to write a letter to him – dated on the last day of class – explaining why they deserved the highest grade.

Zander believes there are several beneficial aspects of this dramatic role reversal:

It is a great confidence builder for his students.

It eliminates the often counterproductive sniping that people frequently engage in when they think only a few will win.

Students invariably knock themselves out for that A because they do more to earn their own personal A than they would ever do for the traditional A given by a teacher.