“If you don’t know where you are going any road can take you there”
Lewis Carroll
If you don’t have a plan, then anything goes. That’s exactly why you need a “success plan” in order for you to become successful.
I’ve heard many people say that the opposite of success is failure. That’s not true. In fact, failure is a necessary part of success. Every time you fail at something, you’re finding out another way that doesn’t work, which will ultimately bring you a step closer to finding success.
The opposite of success is not failure. It’s mediocrity. It’s not performing at your full potential and instead, settling on being average. It’s being robbed of your dreams, and following someone else’s instead.
Creating a Success Plan
To be successful and feel gratified, you will need to know what your dreams are and then taking action to make it a reality. This is not what other people want (e.g. popular career choices), or what you feel should be what you want (e.g. safe life choices). Find out what is it that really gets you excited — that’s your dream.
When I started my first business, I had a burning vision of what I needed to do. I’d attribute it to two things that caused this clarity of thought.
The first was that I was very into computers, and I was already designing websites on a freelance basis. Hosting was a necessary part of any website, so I knew first-hand what the problems of the hosting industry were. When I created my hosting business, I specifically targeted these pain points to solve.
Second, I was a broke student whose only choice was USD5/hour part-time jobs. It wasn’t very attractive to me, and I was constantly looking at ways to increase the income that I could have. Running a service-based business was logical, because the risks were low to me, and having projects immediately gave me a huge boost to the income I would otherwise have gotten with a part-time job.
The combination of these two things led me to really want to succeed at providing good web hosting services. The vision was 110% absolutely logical to me. So much so that there was no way I could be doing anything else.
How To Create a Success Plan For Yourself
Over the years, my company’s vision didn’t fade. It did evolve though, to become even stronger and well fleshed-out than what it started off as. It had slowly turned into a success plan. And I attribute most of the success that my company got due to the clarity that a success plan provided. This is something that you can use in your personal life as well. To create a success plan for yourself, you’ll need just 6 things.
Success Plan Basics #1: Know what you want
First of all, you need to know what is it that you’re working towards. A clear goal will provide you with the vision to get there. When dealing with goals, you need to set goals well, i.e. your goals have to be specific and actionable. An example of a bad goal is: “I want to be a successful entrepreneur”. This goal is not specific at all and too vague. An example of a better goal is: “I want to be able to fit into size 32 pants by July next year”, or “I want to have a salary of $10,000 a month in 5 years’ time”.
An example of a goal when I was running my company was: “To be the top Singapore registrar in terms of the number of domain name registrations by 2016”.
Success Plan Basics #2: Block out times
Now that you know what you want in very clearly defined terms, it’s time to take action. Just mindfully forcing yourself to take action every day is very difficult to sustain, and will most likely burn you out.
You’ll need to facilitate this process by making it easy to take action. The way to do this is to block out specific times in your calendar for tasks that you need to do. Think about it: You will block out time to meet up with friends, or for appointments with your doctor or dentist. Why not block out time for yourself?
Do this for anything that you plan to do. It could be a 2-hour block on Tuesday 8:30 pm after you get back from work so that you can work on your website. Or it could be waking up an hour earlier every day so that you can work out.
Success Plan Basics #3: Break Down Your Goals
The second part of a good plan is to break down your large goals into more manageable milestones. You should even come up with a daily to-do list of items that will get you moving towards your milestones.
For example, if you’re running a business and have a goal to hit more than $120,000 in revenue a year, you have got to be able to hit $10,000 in revenue a month first. In order to hit $10,000 a month, you’ll need to figure out the things that you’ll need to be doing on a daily basis to get you there. This to-do list could include things like testing out various marketing channels or improving your sales pitch, or cold-calling more clients a day, or developing your product.
Similarly, if you’re looking at losing 10kg in a year, then you will need a plan to lose a certain weight every month, and in order to do that, you’ll need a plan to control your calories in a day. This plan could involve not eating more than 2000 calories in a day, or skipping breakfast, or not eating past 8pm, and so on.
Success Plan Basics #4: Measure and review your progress
If you don’t know how well you’re doing, then you’re not going to be making the progress that you need. Have a system to measure your progress, and review it regularly – do it in terms of days, weeks, months, and years.
Success Plan Basics #5: Take Action
The key to a successful plan is action. You can have the best plan in the world, but nothing will happen if you don’t act on it. In fact, it’s even better if you have a plan that’s not perfect, but you are able to take action and be continually refining the plan as you go along.
Creating a Success Plan
Creating a success plan for yourself and constantly reviewing it will allow you to see some of the most significant results in your life. I highly recommend this tool to anyone interested in growth in their lives.