Personal Success Pointers..

Today, while driving from Mysore to Bangalore, I was telling my son the two key pointers, two key catalysts to personal success.

"The first success factor is to have a personal goals, or multiple time-bound personal goals. You would be surprised to know how many people out there are leading their lives without any goals whatsoever. They spend  their lives in packets of time, in blocks of time.  Day after day, month after month, year after year, they will get up in the morning, go thru the motions, reach office, do the same work for 8 hours, come back home tired, freshen up, eat and sleep. This routines repeats over multiple time packets. 

More than 99.99% of the people in this world, live their lifes in this manner. However, some day in the future, they are bound to wake up and ask themselves the question, what have I been doing with my life? What have I achieved in my life? Are my achievements commensurate with the time that I spend so far? Do I have a goal to achieve in life that keeps me going day after day? What is the legacy that I am going to leave?

In most cases, by the time one ask these questions of oneself, it will be too late to make any changes.

Why did this situation develop? The reason is simple, these people do not have an overarching personal goal. The goal should be big, it should be exciting and it should be elevating. To design such a goal, you need to spend a lot of personal time. However, in their hurly-burly, day-to-day, paycheck-to-paycheck lives, they forget or overlook spending quality time for themselves. The result is ultimate frustration and sub-optimal performance.

So the success factor number one: Have a clear, documented, time-bound personal goals. They should be SMART - Specific / Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound - goals. Ideally you should have three goals, Short term, Medium term and Long term. Short term should span a time frame of less than a year, medium term should span from one year to three years and long-term should be goals over 5 years or less."

My son was all attentive..

Enthused, I continued. "The second success factor is also one which almost 99.99% do not practice. Most of the people are adept at catching people doing something wrong. That is a part of our evolution where we are equipped to find things going wrong. However, to be successful, you have to turn the tables around. You have to catch people doing things right. All of us do both right and wrong actions on a daily basis. The talent to be developed is to 'Catch people doing things right'. That is where you gain long-term gratitude of people. Unlike 'Catching people doing wrong' which is easy, since evolution has programmed us to do that, 'Catching people doing right' needs lot of practice. However, once you catch people doing right, you suddenly find that what you thought wrong was not wrong afterall, or its negative impact is not as significant as you thought it was. 

So, to achieve great personal success,  focus on two basic actions.

1. Have a clear goal (s)

2. Catch people doing right and ignore when people do wrong.

Hope my son is convinced...