Success Is Not an Accident

by Tommy Newberry

  • Would you like to conquer the fear of public speaking?

  • What character traits would you like to develop?

  • What silly things would you like to do?

  • If you had unlimited time, talent, finances, knowledge, self-confidence, and support from your family, how would your life change?

  • What would you like to witness taking place in your lifetime?

  • What one great thing would you dare to attempt if you absolutely knew you could not fail?

  Creating this list requires no resources other than a small amount of time, some mental effort, and a few sheets of paper. And it will provide the foundation for a more successful, exciting, and fulfilling life. It stimulates your creativity and will help you notice opportunities. As you’re brainstorming, it’s important not to impose any limitations—real or imagined—such as money, age, sex, race, family, children, education, connections, or anything else. Be careful of letting limits turn into excuses that eventually spoil your opportunities for getting more out of life. As we learned in lesson 1, no matter how big your favorite excuse is, somebody somewhere has had it far worse and still succeeded in spite of all perceived disadvantages. Limits have power over you and your future only to the degree that you let them.

  Suspend all judgment on whether you can achieve what you want or whether you are worthy of it. Just write it down!

  There is no limit, other than the power of your imagination, to the number of desires you can include on your personal wish list. The key to this exercise is to write down everything you can imagine without letting your mind stop. Think of your wish list as a grand script for the movie of your life! You are, after all, the writer, producer, director, and star. You can take your movie in any direction you choose, and you can fill the script with as much passion, adventure, joy, and positive experiences as you can imagine or desire. Remember that what you write down is your preview of life’s coming attractions.

  You will find that merely completing this simple brainstorming process will produce a renewed sense of enthusiasm for your future. You will experience an inner excitement, a surge of vitality, and positive anticipation.

  Once you’ve written down everything you could ever possibly want, look over your list and make sure you have some challenging financial goals. Make sure you have goals for your marriage and other key relationships. How about goals as a parent? Do you have fitness goals? Are there any new health habits you could develop? What about your personal growth? What new things do you want to learn? How many books do you want to read next year? Did you write down any spiritual goals? This time next year, where do you want to be in your faith? If you want to make it happen, you’d better write it down.

  Think about the many areas of your life: faith, family, health, energy, relationships, career, finances, and personal development. Make sure you have goals for each area where you want to experience growth. To lead a fully satisfying life, you need a balance of goals. So, whatever it is, write it down.

  Once you’ve written down your goals, take time to consider them carefully in prayer. Ask God to give you wisdom about which goals to pursue. He may bring ideas to your mind that aren’t already on your list, or he may show you that some of your dreams are not in line with his best for you. As people of faith, we should seek God’s blessing and approval. After all, “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1, NIV).

  Write it down, and then make it happen!

  At least once a year, revise and review your list. Many of my 1% Club clients have found this exercise so refreshing and stimulating that they practice it two or three times a year. Try it for yourself and see.

  Step #2: Create Your Ideal Lifestyle

  Proper planning requires that you look into the distant future and create a vivid mental image of the life you’d like to be leading. This will become your personal vision for the future. The number of years you project can vary depending on your experience with goals and your current comfort level. Some of my clients go as far out as thirty years; others go nine to twenty-one. The point is to be as clear as possible about the vital details of the life and lifestyle you’d like to enjoy in the future. The reason for looking so far ahead is that, eventually, you’re going to end up there. To make sure your actions and choices today match up with the life you want tomorrow, you must begin with the end result in mind. You have to know where you’re headed. You cannot live effectively if you have only short-term goals. It takes a long-term vision and long-range goals to reveal the most appropriate short-term goals. So look at your life as an integrated whole. Approach life with the big picture in mind, and mentally project yourself into the future. Try for at least nine years.

  Using the ideas generated from your brainstorm in step one, write a two- or three-paragraph description of your ideal lifestyle. A bullet- point list is fine, too. Write in the present tense, as if what you’re describing were already true.

  Be sure to include details about your health, marriage, faith, major accomplishments, things you’re grateful for, hobbies, energy level, net worth, amount of free time, peace of mind, and anything else you can think of. Now make a note of the most obvious milestones you need to see along the way in order to experience the life you have just described. You can view these benchmarks as the subgoals that need to be met before your long-term vision can become a reality.

  Step #3: Take the Three-Year Leap

  Now that you have some ideas about your future, let’s tackle the midterm by creating clear, specific, measurable, achievable, and, most important, written three-year goals and their corresponding plans for accomplishment. I’ve found that three years is the perfect amount of time to manage and do really big things with your life. It’s the ideal length of time to visualize your life being significantly different. Three years is long enough to achieve some gigantic goals but not so far out that they lose their motivational pull. Your three-year goals, stretching from today to three years out, are intended to be subgoals or milestones on the way to your long-term vision. Make sure they are in alignment by asking, “Will accomplishing these goals lead me to my vision?” If so, how exactly? Double-check yourself by asking, “Does pursuing my three-year goals represent the best route to my long-term vision?” After all, your vision of the future should determine your three-year goals.

  Once you have established that your three-year goals will carry you to your vision, it’s time to convince yourself why these goals are so important.

  The Goal-Achievment Formula

  Step #4: Convince Yourself

  Next, list all of the rewards of accomplishing your goals. What’s in it for you? Why do you want to achieve these goals? Keep in mind that the more and better reasons you have, the more motivated you will be. Each goal will present tangible rewards and intangible benefits. Think about the emotions you’ll enjoy as a result of achieving each goal, and think about the material rewards you’ll receive. Write them down. Exaggerate a little bit. The more powerful you can make this purpose—your “why”—the better. Make sure you have enough reasons for accomplishing your goals; if you have enough, you can accomplish anything. Keep in mind that reasons precede answers. First determine the what. Next figure out the why, and then the how! When you know what you want and when you want it, you can always find a way to make it happen.

  Step #5: Plan on Paper

  Planning is the hallmark of the mature, responsible, and self-reliant human being. In fact, almost every failure can be traced back to lack of proper planning.

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  Great leaders possess tremendous long-term clarity about what they’re trying to accomplish both personally and in their careers. And it’s this long-term perspective that builds character, wisdom, and self-discipline. Long-term thinking is the hallmark of high-performance living, yet it’s often neglected in favor of the treadmill of urgent activities of the moment.

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  P
lanning is the deliberate act of pulling the future into the present so you can do something about the future right now. You must change your habits and other behaviors now to reap rewards in the future. If you want your future to be different, you must make things different in the present. Things don’t improve by themselves! You must do something different to bring about the new results you are seeking.

  Many people don’t understand what planning is. They interpret the word planning as simply transferring into their calendar miscellaneous appointments and to-dos from the backside of envelopes, cocktail napkins, and Post-it notes without any regard to long-term goals or a personal mission.

  Planning really means evaluating your life in light of where you’ve been, where you are now, and where you intend to go. You must be willing to question how well you’ve managed your life until now. Effective planning allows you to avoid life management by crisis. Crises divert your attention from the vital people and activities in your life and are nearly always a result of inadequate planning. Systematic, long-term, yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily planning is absolutely critical to your success. Remind yourself that all successful people plan on paper. Unsuccessful people simply “can’t seem to find the time.”

  Be aware that plans are rarely 100 percent accurate. However, you must not fall into the trap of thinking, “Well, since I cannot have a perfect plan . . . since I cannot eliminate all interruptions . . . since I cannot eliminate all urgencies . . . why bother to eliminate any of them?” That’s crooked logic and a cop-out for failing to try. Let go of any tendencies you have toward misplaced perfectionism and focus instead on the strategic planning that will take your life to a higher level. Invest considerable time in your plan. Keep in mind that you will be rewriting, revising, and improving your plan as you progress toward your goals.

  The starting point of three-year planning is to envision yourself already in possession of your three-year goals and then work back to the present. This means that you must mentally project yourself into the future to the time and place where each goal will be a reality. From this vantage point, look back to the present and critically assess the steps you must take to reach the goal. This “back from the future” exercise sharpens your perception and solidifies your strategy. It develops the habit of outcome-based thinking, or results orientation. This is helpful for your short-term goals as well as your major lifetime goals. Constantly feed your mind a vivid picture of the end result you’re striving for. Then develop your plan by working from the accomplishment of a goal back to the present.

  Your three-year goals should be, in essence, action steps or subgoals leading up to your long-term vision. It’s easy to talk about what we want, but the hard part is putting plans on paper, where they actually mean something.

  So from the perspective of having accomplished your three-year goals, begin to work your way back to today. Consider what must be accomplished by the end of year two and then by the end of year one. At this point, the end of year one, you have a set of one-year goals. To translate this into action, think about what you need to accomplish in the fourth quarter. What do you need to accomplish by the third quarter? the second quarter? And finally, in the first quarter? This is the basic concept of strategic planning. As you can see, we’re counting backward in time from a midrange goal to an immediate plan of action. We’ve gone from three years down the road and backtracked to the end of the current year and so on, to the third, second, and first quarters—creating a chronological list of stepping-stones that will ultimately result in the accomplishment of your three-year goals.

  Step #6: List Available Resources

  Next, write down all the resources available to you to help you reach your three-year goals. Who or what could assist you? What books, CDs, mentors, coaches, seminars, information, technology, or other resources could you employ to accomplish your goals? Identify the organizations and groups with which you might need to create strategic alliances.

  Step #7: List Potential Obstacles

  Now that you’ve written down all the potential resources, take a moment to think about what could prevent you from reaching your goals. Do you have any habits, attitudes, or beliefs that may hinder your progress? How will you personally need to change and grow before this goal can be reached? What about your finances? What about undeveloped skills? Have you mastered the vital skill of time management? What else could keep you from reaching this goal? What might go wrong?

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  Envision yourself having accomplished your goals. Stand on the mountaintop and look down at where you have been. Observe what you have achieved to reach your goal. What was the last step you took? Write that down. The next-to-last step? Write that too. Retrace your steps back down the mountain, writing all the way. The words you write will become your landmarks as you climb the mountain in reality and achieve your goals.

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  List all the possible obstacles you may encounter. Think of this as contingency preparation or crisis-anticipation planning, and include anything that may hinder you in reaching a goal. This may seem pessimistic, but obstacles aren’t necessarily negative. It depends on how you interpret them and what you do with them. If you write down the obstacles and take a good look at each one, you often find many don’t even exist. And other obstacles that loom huge in your mind tend to shrink when they’re written on paper.

  Obstacles build your goal-achieving muscles. They hold the raw materials of exciting opportunities. Any major or worthwhile goal has barriers. If it doesn’t, it’s not even really a goal—it’s simply busywork and won’t bring many rewards.

  Step #8: Identify Ways to Overcome Obstacles

  The next step is to list some solutions to help you overcome the obstacles you just wrote down. Look at each obstacle as a problem waiting to be solved, and approach each one assuming that you already have a good solution. Though we may not realize it, we frequently come face-to-face with the exact obstacle we need at just the right time to sharpen us where we need it the most. All challenges, if dealt with directly and swiftly, will make us stronger, better, and wiser.

  Challenges and setbacks are intended to teach us something. They prepare us to perform more effectively at the next level. Just as it’s necessary to bench-press 150 pounds before you try 200 pounds, it’s also necessary to overcome obstacles along the path to your goals. And the more ambitious you are, the more challenges will be thrown your way. Again, many times great opportunities arise when you encounter obstacles, and these opportunities become more apparent when you maintain a positive, resourceful attitude and when you take time to analyze the situation in a relaxed state of mind. To paraphrase Booker T. Washington, success is not measured so much by our accomplishments in life but by what we had to overcome in the process. Keep in mind that we are goal-striving organisms. We’re engineered to solve problems, and we function best and are happiest when we’re moving toward a goal.

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  Remember, your ninety-day milestones lead to the accomplishment of your three-year goals.

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  Following Through after the Workshop

  To implement and coordinate a concrete system for keeping up with your goal-directed activities, use three lists: First, maintain a quarterly strategy list of everything you must do to accomplish each of your ninety-day milestones. From that, select the most important items to create your weekly objectives or weekly master list. Next, plan each day from your weekly list. As a result, you move from a long, quarterly strategy list to a weekly master list to a few manageable items for each day—all leading you toward your three-year vision.

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  Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow.

  —James 1:2-3, NLT

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  Lesson 3 Questions for Reflection

  In what areas of your life have you grown the most over the past ten years?

  In what areas of your life have you grown the least in the past ten years?

  Why do you think goals aren’t emphasized more in school or church?

  What could be the benefits of introducing your kids to goal setting early in life?

  How do you envision that a marriage could be strengthened through goal setting?

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  Whom can you influence with the ideas from this lesson in the next forty-eight hours?

  Lesson 3 Assignments

  1 | Brainstorm 150 goals for the next thirty years of your life, and write them down.

  2 | Choose five goals to focus on for the next three years. Make sure you have a well-balanced set of goals.

  3 | Using the “back from the future” technique, plan on paper how you will accomplish your goals.

  4 | Begin the powerful habit of rewriting your top five goals each morning.

  Lesson 4

  Choose to Invest Your Time Wisely

  You can’t make more time, only better choices.

  In this lesson, you will learn to

  • Minimize wasted time