Setting the Stage
Welcome to week two of Afterburner Success Partners. If you have not signed up to receive our weekly blog posts, please sign up below. If you would like to refer our post to a friend or family member, please forward the email or share this webpage.
As I mentioned in last week’s post, each weekly post will end with four little sections entitled “What’s in it for me”, “A Call to Action”, “Recommended Resources” and “What’s Up Next?” The purpose of these sections are to prompt you to take action to achieve your dreams and provide you with a tool or resource to either help you make this possible or to reinforce what I am telling you here in these weekly posts. You don’t need to believe me; you can follow others who have already done it! That’s a very important concept at ASP. Little of our material is original. It’s just that we’ve put it together in a way that seems original, or at least it is to me. As I mentioned last week, many people will tell you to set goals, but few will guide you through to personally (that’s one-on-one) help you set the goals and develop the action plans you want and need that will achieve the dreams important to you. Finally, we then end each post with a little teaser to whet your appetite for what to expect next time. I’d like to dig a little into these concepts and how these three important sections can help you achieve your dreams and live your best life.
What’s in it for me
What’s in it for me: Your time is valuable; you are probably very busy, and you want to get the most out of every minute. Are you selfish? This may be the popular view for those who look out for themselves first, but that’s not my take on it. Is wanting to provide for your family, ensure a comfortable retirement, have resources to help others, and enjoy life, selfish? I don’t think so and I’ll bet you don’t either. To me, greed would be selfish, but wanting the best for your family, not being a burden on society, and having resources to help others are not selfish. So, when we think “What’s in it for me?” I see it as making the best use of your limited time and resources. And that’s what this section is about.
Call to action
Call to Action: We are all bombarded with information and distractions that draw our attention away from important activities we should be doing. Yup, I’m mostly talking about your device; your phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. You know I’m right! I saw a statistic that said we check our phones between about 96 and 144 times a day, or about every 10 minutes during the waking day (Note 1). How can we not be distracted and take away from doing important things? Do we really need that much “information?”
Let me provide a little definition of what “important activities that we should be doing” means. I am a huge advocate of living life intentionally. As you read more of my recommended resources, you will notice that the authors of these books, movies, or other publications typically are intentional as well. Living intentionally means living a life that is aligned with my values. That I am not distracted, nor do I waste time on, other activities that do not advance my interests or get in the way of achieving what I want to achieve. Living intentionally means that I spend my time on what’s important to me, to achieve the things in life I want to achieve, and not waste it away on frivolous activities. We’ve all done this, me included. If we spend too much time on these types of activities and fail to intentionally use our time to achieve what is important to us, we can end up with regret. Regret is a terrible experience. Sadly, regret is often experienced by folks who have missed opportunities when it is too late to have a redo. I’m sad to tell you we have numerous family and friends who have passed away in the last 5 years and some of them experienced regret. It’s hard to watch them go through it. They wish they could go back and do things differently. What we’re trying to do here at ASP is give you everything you need so you can live your best life and don’t experience regrets when it’s too late to do anything about them. Some of you may be watching friends and family making poor choices right in front of you. You pretty much know how it will turn out but are powerless to do anything about it. We’re not going to let that be you.
I want to introduce a very important concept here; one you will hear about more down the road. If you are an employee or a business owner, to be successful, you must satisfy your boss. If you are a business owner, your boss is the customer. Now I’m going to say something here that sounds self-serving and perhaps selfish but stick with me for a minute. Your achievement plan for success should be to satisfy your dreams first and foremost. When you do that, I can promise you, you will not only satisfy your boss but likely far exceed what they want from you. Let me tell you what I mean. If you work for an employer and set a goal to be promoted so you can earn more money, so you can have and do more, you will work very hard to achieve that. Working hard to achieve your individual goal will mean that you will excel in your job. You will make your boss or your customers happy. Do you see how this works? All of this means if we want to achieve our dreams and live our best life, we must act daily. My prompt to you is to take intentional action in that direction. To do something and stick with it. For the moment, I want you to get your mind in the right place to set the stage for success. We’ll get into the details later and I’ll tell you how. Or, if I don’t tell you directly, by reading my recommended resources you can learn in that way from others who have already done it. Call to Action is to get you to do something intentional as one thing on your path to achieving your dreams and living your best life.
Recommended Resources
Recommended Resources: Recommended resources are materials that will reinforce the concepts I explain here. As I said, you don’t need to believe me necessarily, and I’ll always reinforce my concepts with other experts in the field. Once you start reading and following these accomplished folks, you will see they reference other accomplished and successful folks and then it all starts to build on itself and grow. These resources will also provide affirmation you are on the right path and encourage you to keep going. OK, so there may be an elephant in the room here we need to address. Not everyone enjoys reading, especially books. I get that, I do. I have family members who don’t like to read books. But consider this famous quote from President Harry S. Truman- “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Simply that means to be a leader, frankly, to achieve your dreams, you must be continually learning, and coupled with experience, and formal and non-formal training, reading is the way to learn and grow. Today, we can read in various manners. Besides physical books, we can read on a tablet via an e-book, or we can listen to an audiobook. This is what I mean by living intentionally. It’s deciding to do what is necessary to achieve your dreams. This leads us to another famous quote to reinforce the point. Winston Churchill once said, “It is not enough to say we are doing all we can, we must be successful in doing what is necessary.” So, I hope I’ve convinced you to purposely take advantage of the recommended resources as a necessary step in your success.
What’s next
What’s Next: I think it’s important to provide a little primer or incentive for you to come back again. If you are of a certain age and remember sitcom television shows, each show ended not quite finished, but with an unfinished scene designed to bring you back the next week so the ratings could stay up. That’s what I’m trying to do with this section as well. Provide you a little primer of what’s to come.
OK, so now you better understand the structure of these posts and what to expect as we get more into developing plans to live your dreams and your best life. Ideally, you have purchased the book I mentioned last week, The Power of Positive Thinking by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale (Note 2), and are now well into it, learning that how you think is the basis of just about everything going forward. Think in a manner of success and guess what? You will achieve success. Think in a manner of failure or negativity and guess what you will achieve?
That’s all for this week, I look forward to getting together with you again soon!
What’s in it for Me
Would you like to have your own written plan to achieve your dreams and live your best life? Of course, you would. Everyone would. Now you have the opportunity and that’s what’s in it for you.
Call to Action
First, make sure you are signed up for the email list to continue receiving these emails. Then, sign up for the online or virtual Zoom courses. Or both. Better yet if you are a leader of an organization, arrange for me to come and teach your group.
Are you living life intentionally? What important activities should you be doing? What frivolous activities do you need to stop doing? Are all your activities directed in such a way as to satisfy your dreams first? Why is a desire to satisfy yourself first NOT selfish like it sounds?
Recommended Resources
Secrets of the World Class by Steve Siebold (Note 3). Steve Seibold is absolutely one of my favorite authors and this rates right up there as one of my favorite books. Steve has spent many years researching and interviewing successful people and put all that information in his books. Absolutely an amazing amount of useful information, along with many other references, for just a little bit of money. Order your copy here (affiliate link here).
Up Next
Why am I doing this, anyway?
Notes
Please note that as an Amazon Affiliate, I may earn a small commission on the sale of any of these recommended resources.
I won’t be citing a lot of sources in my work. If you are interested in checking it out a quick Google search should give you what you need.
“The Power of Positive Thinking” by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale: https://amzn.to/3YsLw0c
“Secrets of the World Class” by Steve Siebold: https://amzn.to/3BN5NEV