People who have clear, strong goals are far more likely to succeed than those who don’t. In fact, Harvard University once did a study where they surveyed a class of students for goals and ten years later found that the two percent of individuals with written goals had a higher net worth than the other ninety-eight percent combined.
Once you know what you want in your business, these are three smart ways to get you closer to achieving your goals:
Befriend Like-Minded People
Join organizations such as the Entrepreneurs Organization, Toastmasters and Business Networking International. Seek out people who are developing the same skills as you or aiming for the same goals as you. Share ideas and ambitions. Success is impossible to achieve alone. Behind every major success story is a brilliant team of people. Bill Gates once said: “If you took away our top 25 people, Microsoft would be a mediocre company.” Surround yourself with A-class players, whether they are colleagues, employees, business partners or friends.
Have Strong Metric-Based Goals
It is easy to fool yourself into thinking you are making more progress than you actually are. You could be reading a lot of books, building a lot of websites or making a lot of plans and somehow feel as though you are making progress, when you are actually not. Having strong, metric-based goals will help keep you on track towards your goals. These metrics should be easy to measure and have a direct impact on your bottom line.
Make sure your metrics are rooted in time as well. For example, “build a great business” is a poor goal to shoot for. On the other hand, “be making $10,000 a month after tax in 12 months” is a great, concrete goal.
Learn from Those Who’ve Done It, without Falling into the Guru Trap
In order to reach your business goals, it is crucial to study and learn from other people’s past successes and failures. If you want to make money in real estate, study Donald Trump. If you want earn money investing/trading, study Warren Buffett or George Soros, and so on and so forth.
The key with learning from others is to get as much knowledge from as many people as possible. Avoid falling into the “guru trap.” The guru trap comes primarily from very good speakers or marketers who convincingly promise to have all the answers. People who believe them end up following only one school of thought or method, believing it is “the answer”.
Unfortunately, real success rarely comes from following gurus. Instead, real success comes from absorbing knowledge from many different sources, then forming your own ideas and conclusions. Having strong business goals is a key ingredient to success. Surround yourself with others who also share similar ambitions, set measurable goals rooted in time, and learn from a wide range of people.
