Summary
Nobody who’s ever made it big was ever surprised when they crossed off a major milestone. That’s because the notion of “overnight success” is a myth. Most top performers rely on meticulous planning and consistent processes to reach their goals.
Behind every success you’ll find a well thought-out plan. That doesn’t just apply to football plays or business strategies, but to your own blueprint for how you are going to achieve financial independence.
Read on to learn more about how you can implement habits and processes each day that will help you achieve your vision of a life lived on your own terms.
Transcript
Prosperity doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t just emerge from happenstance and chance. It takes a plan and it takes a process.
Business plans may have some whimsical elements built into them, but Prosperity itself is anything but determined by whim. Beyond every great accomplishment, you will find a thoroughly thought-out, intricate blueprint for getting there.
We all want to reserve some room in our lives for spontaneity and surprise. But this should not be the rule of thumb when it comes to your financial freedom plan. You don’t want to be surprised when you arrive at your end goal. You want to be thinking, that all went pretty close to plan!
Focus On The Process
Sometimes we can spend a bit too much time thinking about that end goal and not enough about how we plan to get there. Scott Adams, who created the beloved comic strip “Dilbert” based on his own experiences in corporate America, has famously said that, “Goals are for losers.” He advises that more of us would be better off focusing on our regular systems, or what I would call processes, rather than the end result.
As an example, rather than setting a goal of being a best-selling author, you should set a process each day of writing and reading for four hours. By focusing on your inputs rather than your outputs, you are far more likely to be able to control what happens to you.
The same goes for your health. Instead of focusing on a different number of pounds you want to shed, put your emphasis on a number of hours exercising you aim to achieve each day or what you are eating. If your goal is too ambitious and can’t show results in the short term, you may be disappointed and discouraged enough that you give up. But there is nothing stopping you from accomplishing the tasks you set each day that you lay out in your process.
Creating and Adapting Your Process
So how can you go about devising your own roadmap and set of processes to fire your boss, stop worrying about revenue, and enjoy the gift of true Prosperity Freedom?
You need to deliberately set out to design the kind of life that you want. This entails that you continue to tinker and experiment with the process you have launched over time in response to new development and information. Figure out what works for you. Are you more likely to work, exercise, or contribute to your community if you do certain things at certain points in the day? Are there some activities that you can perform more effectively if you do them on the weekends? Figure out your comfort zone and the conditions in which you are more likely to follow your process. Once you are in the right groove, you can essentially put yourself on auto-pilot as you work toward your goals each day, practically without thinking.
For example, you might make it easier for you to hit the gym by setting out workout clothes each night so that you are predisposed to go out for a run the next morning. By using lifestyle design in a deliberate fashion, you minimize the likelihood that you will have an excuse for not following through on your goals.
You can use your calendar and event planner to manage your time by delegating certain activities to only be done during particular stretches of time. If you are looking for clients or managing investments, you can easily be led into doing it all of the time if you are not careful. If the work never ends, your time allotted for it may never end either. You would be better off by making the decision to only perform some activities during defined hours, so that Wednesday afternoon from 1-4 is devoted to catching up with potential clients you’ve identified in the past month, for example. Set boundaries and respect your time, or you can expect that nobody else will.
To help build effective processes, you may want to reflect on a time that you fell short on one of your behavior-related goals or quickly regressed. Ask yourself, why was my approach not effective? How did it feel when I did not succeed? And what behaviors will I avoid next time to have a better outcome in the future? Looking to the future, ask yourself what you would change about the processes you have begun to implement.
By focusing on these processes, you will likely find yourself with greater patience at how long it can take to reach the long-term goals on the horizon. You will look upon each day with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment rather than dismay that you have not yet reached your final goal line. These habits are repeatable which will give you the high of going after them every day.
Play The Long Game
Be invested in a longer stretch of time than the few weeks or months that we can usually focus on. We are a short-term focused society, so you need to push against the grain and commit to setting your process into motion over a sustained period, even years. You can start with tiny habits and build them out over that time period. The important issue is to just get started. So start with walking around the block before you commit to a marathon, write a paragraph before a book, and sell some of your child’s Scout cookies before you launch your business empire. These habits will help give you the confidence to make your process a permanent habit.
Above all, avoid the specter of magical thinking about how easy your accomplishments may be to reach. You can achieve a great peace of mind by patting yourself on the back for the hard work of remaining true to your process. It can be hard to tell on any particular day whether the process will lead to your desired level of success, but you can maintain perspective by knowing that you maintained your commitment to the process. That you did everything you could on a given day to drive closer toward your goals. Make it easier on yourself by implementing a predictable and ongoing system that allows you to keep making that progress without even having to stop and think about it. We truly are the sum results of the things that we do each and every day, so make sure that you are making a habit of chasing after your goals each day.
You can also learn more by visiting my website: tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books at https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
