How To Prosper In The New Year

What should you do to make this your best year ever?

As we come to the first of a new year, there is this unique opportunity where mentally in our minds we can start over again from scratch. It feels like a new lease on life.

We’re starting with a blank slate; we don’t have any of the baggage from the previous year and now can create the life, business and lifestyle we want without that excess baggage.

So, what do you do in order to make this your best year ever? I think there are several different fronts to making this happen for you.

1. There’s the business front, of course—what you want to achieve in business.
2. There’s the personal front (You!)
3. There is the relationship front.
4. There’s the family front.
5. There is the spiritual front.

In my opinion, these are the primary areas to look at. When you want to make a change, and when you’re looking to make yourself better, all of these pieces are going to interact with one another.

And when I say ‘personal’ I mean specifically you. This is going to be one of the primary keys that needs to be focused on because it’s how you think that is going to determine how far you succeed, and it’s a matter of thinking in a different way, in many cases.

What Do You Want &  Is it Realistic?

In each of the five fronts I mentioned above, the question is what do you want? As an example, the question might be what do you want in business? Each person is going to have a different answer, of course.

Now, the second part to that question is, is it realistic? You may wonder, why are you asking that?

I think very positively about almost everything, but I’m also very much a realist about most things. I’ll talk a good game, and I’ll have a lot of fun joking around, but in the end I’ll question is it realistic for me to want this? Is this realistic for me to do this? Is this realistic for me to achieve this? Could I possibly achieve this?

Of course, everything in the world is possible, but there are certain things I know.

For example, I know for a fact that I’m just not going to be able to slam-dunk a basketball. I’ve kind of accepted that. Yes, we can make the debate and say if I trained and if I did this, if I did that, I might be able to, but it’s typically not realistic for me to dunk a basketball.

When most people think about business, they think in terms of the bigger picture. They think, I want to make X number of dollars, and that’s fine.

Money is a great thing to track progress. I think that’s really what money is; it’s a way to determine how well we are doing in business. So whatever dollar amount you might write down, the question is, is it realistic?

So, the questions are a) what do we want and b) is it realistic? Once we’ve determined that what we want is good and that it is realistic, the next question we have to ask ourselves is, how are we going to do it?

How Are You Going To Do It?

You see, it’s fine to say that we are going to do things. It’s fine to say this is what I want. I want to do this and, yes, it is a realistic goal for me, and I fully believe in my heart I can do this, but then it has to be broken down.

I’ve met so many people that say, I’m going to make $1,000,000. Cool, awesome, but how are you going to do it? They have no idea how they are going to do it. Don’t you think that’s a big problem? You need to avoid that.

I want to remind you that all of these things are going to apply to each one of these aspects or fronts. It’s personal. I want to lose weight. I want to lose 30 pounds. Okay, great. Is it realistic? Yeah, that’s realistic. Okay, how are you going to do it? That’s the question.

It’s the same thing with a relationship. Okay, I want to be a better husband. Okay, that’s great. Is it realistic? Yes, I think it’s realistic. How are you going to do it?

I want to spend more time with my wife. I want to spend more time with my kids. I want to do things differently. Okay, is it realistic? Yes. How are you going to do it? Now it’s laying out that plan. It’s the same thing with the spiritual aspect of your life.

The part people have the biggest problem with is the ‘how’ aspect of what we’re going to do and that’s why we’re going to break this down into a few other further pieces. So, break down the task into smaller micro tasks to make it easier to do.

Let’s just take the idea of losing weight. It’s one thing to say that you want to lose 30 pounds. Well, as we all know, losing 30 pounds doesn’t happen overnight. We wish it would, but it just doesn’t.

What happens is you jump on the scale, and you’ve lost two pounds. Two pounds is awesome; it’s incredible, but many people set themselves up for failure.

We don’t look at the achievement of losing two pounds; instead, we look at the lack of not losing the 30 pounds. In other words, we don’t accept it and acknowledge it as an achievement and don’t feel good about it because we think about ‘the whole’ too much.

That’s why by breaking it down into micro tasks makes it easier to do.