1. Discovering Core Identity
2. Awakening To Opportunity
   
3. Envisioning The Future
   
4. Developing Goals and Strategies
   
5. Building Healthy Support Systems
   
6. Taking Action and Making a Difference
   
7. Embracing Renewal and Reinvention
   

Discovering Core Identity
This is our compass. At its heart are our values and purpose. These are informed by external factors such as our personal history, current circumstances, and relationships as well as internal factors such as our needs, strengths, and passions. Establishing an authentic orientation (a “true north”) is a lifelong project. Without a strong core identity, the steps that follow are likely to lead us astray.

Awakening to Opportunity
With deep self-awareness, we become more aware of opportunities around us that resonate with our core identity. This includes being “switched on” to the world around us, being able to assess opportunities as they arise, and figuring out how to translate these promising ideas into attractive and actionable opportunities.

Envisioning the Future
The notion of vision is commonly applied to an organization, but it can also be applied to our lives: What do we envision we will be and what we will do with our lives? This is best imagined in long increments, such as a decade or even an entire lifetime. Our vision is unearthed from within even as it is informed by opportunity.

Developing Goals and Strategies
Successful entrepreneurs will tell you that without a well-informed game plan, as enterprise is likely to fall flat. The same can be true in life. Developing goals and strategies provides needed clarity and focus. Goals should be purposeful and prioritized, clear, and measureable, and challenging but achievable. Once our goals are established, we can identify the gaps between our current reality and envisioned future and start planning to fill those gaps by leveraging existing resources and attracting new ones.

Building Healthy Support Systems
None of us can create a life of significance on our own. Having a robust support system infused with healthy, diverse relationships helps us achieve our life goals. It can also provide shelter from the inevitable storms that roll in. If we are doing right by others, this web of support can create what we call positive network effect, enhancing our ability to make a difference in the world.

Taking Action and Making a Difference
The preceding steps are academic unless we assume risks and take action. The essential elements of taking action are having the courage to try, leaping through windows of opportunity, entering the arena, creatively finding new ways to serve, adapting and persisting, and erasing limits.  What’s more, we must avoid the common pitfalls that trap many entrepreneurs and recognize the cost of not taking action.

Embracing Renewal and Reinvention
Sometimes renew is necessary. At times we must step back and take a look around, assessing where we have come from and where we are going. It is vital to find regular times to reconnect with out core identity and prepare to initiate a new set of adventures. We must be careful not to push ourselves back into a “superhero” action mode before we are replenished and ready. And when renewal is insufficient, we turn to reinvention-making wholesale changes in the fabric of our lives, stitching them together with new material better suited to the days ahead.

By: Life Entrepreneurs – Christopher Gergen & Gregg Vanourek

By a sad attempt to emulate the great, you set yourself up for failure from the beginning. Your actions become based around what this individual has done, disregarding the uniqueness and differences that make you you. Outcomes will be rendered negatively. You lose sight of your own talents and capabilities. You create a unhealthy brain chatter that nags, “Well, he did it. Why can’t I? Maybe if I attend one of Trump’s seminars, he can teach me how to be rich. He’s more competent to run as president than those incompetent imbeciles, Obama and McCain…”  See the tragedy in this all-or-nothing train of thought?

1. Trump was born rich. His story goes like this: the rich just get richer.
2. By attending his seminars and giving him all the attention, you only make him richer and yourself poorer.
3. You give yourself false hopes, and by comparing yourself, you set the goal so high that you will feel miserable when you haven’t achieved it.

The 4 Sneaky Traps of Having Heroes:

1. They might not live up to your image of them.
2. It can make you feel like you are not worthy.
3. It can make it harder to connect to people.
4. You may develop tunnel vision.

Most everyone who practices the Drill & Grill can, within a few minutes, effortlessly flow through objection after objection. You get hit with an objection, then you need to Acknowledge it and follow-up with a Question so you get to the root of what their real issue is.

OBJECTION: “I need to think about it.”
ACKNOWLEDGE: That’s awesome.
QUESTION: What particular questions or issues do you need to
think over?

Now, you’re about to learn the Drill & Grill process so the next time you’re hit with an objection, you can handle it flawlessly… like a diamond.

Fair warning: this process, while simple, can be very intense. Do this regularly, though, and you’ll be a master.

You’re going to want a partner for this. Have them hit you with an objection. You’re going to Acknowledge and then ask a Question. At any moment you stumble, pause, or “umm…uhh…” they will yell “Stop!” and immediately hit you with the objection again.

The name of the game here is speed. Don’t try and answer conversationally. This isn’t about that. It’s about being quick and smooth. The Drill & Grill is about creating rapid-fire stress and pressure and you overcoming it with ease and confidence.Once you overcome the objection, your partner will fire another one at you. Keep this up for as long as you can. The best salespeople I know do this every day. If you’re average in sales now, even if you’re a pro, the Drill & Grill is proven to make you even better.

This is a guest post by Steven Missimer of Potomac Enterprises

Well, your time is yours. You decide who to give it to. A good friend once told me, time is something you can never get back. So now, take a step back and once again think.  These people I am giving my time to–do I need to give them my time? It’s best to only help those that are in NEED, not WANT help. To want is completely different than to need.

If you sit there and try to please everyone, you will find yourself in a rut. Its like social multitasking, being in a room with 500 people and trying to connect with each person. You can either speak to 500 people for 20 seconds each and barely get a glimpse of who they are, or you can connect with five individuals that night and have an intellectual and memorable conversation with each of them.

Thoughts?

Just as the title states that life is a marathon, however, marathons are not designed to be sprinted through. Sprinting is high energy and running at peak performance, its tiring. Marathons are long distance runs that are paced.  Life isn’t something that should be sprinted through. It’s important to take a moment every now and then, slow down, look around, use your senses, think calmly, and just feel present with the moment.

The mind, your tool to help interpret thoughts, feelings, and emotions that we receive and want to receive. But when you keep thinking and step away from actually doing you can get trapped further more leading to procrastination, a sense of incompleteness, and behind the rest. Then comparison comes to mind leading to more negativity.

As an entrepreneur, student, or just human the mind is constantly thinking work, school, innovation, what is next? Not fully indulging yourself in the moment. If you keep thinking about the future how can you enjoy now? If you thinking about wanting more, how can you enjoy what you have now?

What works for me

The greatest thoughts for me come when I take a step back, slow down, and disconnect from the world (cell phone on silent and no laptop) and focus on myself. The latest being when I was on a cruise with my family to the Bahamas. I made an effort to get up earlier than usual and just sit at the top deck of the ship as the sun came up.  The moment was beautiful as I was looking around; people were jogging, a little girl was playing with her toys, and an older couple were utilizing the peaceful moment to do Yoga together. That morning is one that I will never forget. I was completely present with what was going on around me.

Tools to help you get to the present

• Reading a Non-Fiction
• Dedicating a full day of just relaxation to yourself
• Slow soothing music (William Joseph is an artist I enjoy)
• A good comedy
• I tend to stay away from the television at moments like these.

What works for you?

Whenever you brain tells you, “I already know that.  Time to tune out,” ignore the inner chatter and stay tuned in.There is always someone out there than can do something better, faster, more efficiently than you can, so don’t let the “I-am-the-best mentality” damage your learning curve. Knowledge is a powerful tool, so keep learning and you will get ahead.  Knowledge is only useful when used.

When you are in business, and you believe yourself to be the best at what you do, this can prove nearly fatal for your business if you don’t keep your eyes, mind, and doors wide open to innovation and performance optimization. For instance, Salesforce.com believed themselves to be the best at eCRM tools, but when Zoho came into the picture, tying in a wide variety of products into one suite, Salesforce was forced to optimize their product and push for more features. Although Zoho’s market share is still considerably small compared to Salesforce.com’s, its still posed new threats as a competitor.

First, let’s get something straight:

A goal without a plan is only a wish.

In a 1979 survey of one thousand graduating Harvard students, 84% had no particular defined goals, while 13% had goals, but did not write them down. The remaining 3% had goals that were written down. When they were surveyed 10 years later, the results were unsurprisingly predictable:

• The 13% who had goals but never wrote them down, had average earnings nearly twice as much as those that didn’t have goals at all.
• The 3% that had written goals earned, on average, 10 times more than the remaining 97% of students

It isn’t rocket science — here’s how you put a plan together:

1. Write down your goals. Whether they be 1 year, 1 decade or even 1 week out from now, you need to put them on paper.
2. Work backwards. That is, write down the next, immediate step you can take towards your goal.
3. Measure repeatedly. Get into a routine of checking your progress toward your goals. I do this weekly and I strongly recommend doing it much more than that.

Get yourself into a routine today: all it takes is some discipline and a few minutes of your time. The results will be far more than you’re probably getting today. You’ll thank me later.

Paul Singh is an entrepreneur based in San Francisco, CA and Washington, DC. You can read more of his tips on his blog: Results Junkies.

MEASURE EVERYTHING!

When I heard this I was a bit confused at first, what is there to measure? However, when he went to break it down into simplistic terms for me it started to make sense. In the most basic terms: assign a goal, set a deadline, track progress, and then review.

Come to think of it, the practice is used everyday in many aspects of our lives. It is used at school, work, home, etc.

Examples:

• When you join a weight-loss program you go in with the intention to lose some weight, so what do you do? You weigh yourself before, figure out how much nutrition you are getting, etc. and then you design a plan to help you loose some weight and get healthy and then a few weeks later you see the results.
• In school you want to pass and want to ensure you meet your degree requirements so you can graduate. So you learn, study, take quizzes/exams. In this case your progress is measured by your grades. Then your course grades get thrown into your transcript which then becomes your over all GPA. If your GPA meets your degree requirements you graduate.
• You want to save $500 a month, to put into savings. So you figure out in which areas you can cut back spending, you take action, discipline yourself to do it.  Essentially designing a plan that works for you so you meet your goal and tracking progress. (FYI, you can visit Ramit’s website to get some more information on personal finance.)

Now the question is what if you don’t meet those goals, then what? Well if you have done your job and kept track of all activity you can go back and see which methods worked best. Take those strengths and build on them. For example in this blog, if I see a trend in traffic coming in from search engines with the keywords “Young Entrepreneur” I am going to want to leverage that data. I will then make sure that my next few posts are based around the “Young Entrepreneur.” Then repeat the process with the next set of keywords.

How have I used this tip to better myself?

I used this method with my business, I wanted to keep track of things I was getting done on a day to day basis and then be able to go back at the end of the week/month/year and say this is what I accomplished and I made $X by doing “XYZ.”

Next, I used it in my personal life, I found myself spending too much time looking for things that should have been easy to find. The goal was to get organized to a point so if I needed to find a receipt from July 2008 that was charged to American Express I can easily recall and pull it, rather than go through a box of receipts that were unorganized. Every hour spent looking for something was cutting back from my productivity. In other words — I wasn’t making $$$, therefore making me fall short of goal number 1.

If I didn’t figure out how much time I wasn’t using to bill, I would not have been able to conclude that for being the reason I wasn’t able to reach my goal of making more money and spending less time stressing over things because I can’t find them (Thank you, David Allen). A simple change can take you a long way.

So now that I’ve got you thinking, I am sure you are wondering how you can apply it to your life? Simple, take any one thing you would like to improve, set a goal and measure your progress towards it. What change do you plan on measuring?

Strategic entrepreneurs know that they need to have great communication skills and they use them to their benefit. Specifically, they’re constantly talking to real people (or customers) and finding out which problems their product or service solves. As a result, they know exactly which business they’re in.

Make sure you set aside time, at least weekly, to get out and meet your (future) customers. The knowledge you gain can become your strategic advantage, not only as a small business, but as an entrepreneur as well.

Paul Singh is an entrepreneur based in San Francisco, CA and Washington, DC. You can read more of his tips on his blog: Results Junkies.

Sitting around and:

• Watching 50 episodes of The Big Idea over and over.
• Reading 45698 blogs.
• Reading 56789 books.
• Taking 28 classes on different subjects.
• Researching your idea over and over until the opportunity passes by.
• Listening to 7890 pod casts.

…will get you absolutely nowhere except down on time, money, opportunities and dreams. It is almost like being stuck in that phase where all you are doing is research. Take action now!

Yes, education is important!  Get educated, take what you learn, and apply it to what you do. But, to be successful, you don’t need a degree in Neuroscience or ____________ (insert a degree of your choice).

An excessive push for “education” may make you overwhelmed and even discouraged, because:

• It becomes an information overload.
• You are attempting to absorb too much information at once that your brain cannot process nor implement it all.
• It becomes a norm, and you lose sight of the bigger picture.