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We’re going to kick this off with an exercise: Imagine a time where everything just seemed to go your way.
Oh, what a lucky time that must’ve been. Now, have you ever considered the theory that luck is just timing meeting preparation?
I am a firm believer in this age old wisdom. Timing + Preparation = Luck. After navigating a career change, I realized that I needed to implement this thinking into specific strategies to get the ball to bounce my way a few more times than not!
Introduction
Have you heard of ego depletion? It’s essentially the idea that your mind has a finite amount of resources that can be used. Understanding that made me realize that if I couldn’t make the resources larger, I had to make the way I utilized them smarter. After taking an inventory of how I spent my time and effort, I realized specific themes kept showing up.
Here’s the plan:
- Remove 20 anchors
- Be able to elevator pitch your vision
- Stop doing things tomorrow
- Thrive under preparation
- Fail forward
Remove 20 anchors
Keep in mind that Anchors are not always exclusively negative. There’s a great story about Warren Buffet advising his pilot, Mike Flint. One day he asked for advice on career priorities. He had Mike write down his top 25 goals. He then asked Mike to circle the 5 most important to accomplish and put them on List A, and the other 20 were to be on List B. Flint initially thought that List A was his primary focus and List B would be his intermittent list that wasn’t as urgent. Buffett replies, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle became your Avoid-At-All Cost list.” Meaning, List A is his new focus. Only List A. Remove List B from your prerogative.
Be able to elevator pitch your vision
The clearer your objective, the more opportunities you’ll find. Be able to state your intentions quick, direct, and easy to understand. When you’re sharing your vision with others, be receptive to feedback. Criticism leads to growth but only when you allow it. Be prepared for the following questions, and most importantly, have an answer:
What is your why? What is your ask?
Stop doing things tomorrow
You can do this by being specific and honest with yourself and your time commitments. Put those commitments on a calendar and block out the time that you need. Anything you truly care about will find its place. Take note of the tasks you consistently reschedule and gauge how you prioritize those tasks. With the repeat offenders - maybe they belong in List B.
Thriving under preparation
Remove “I could have done it if I tried harder” from your excuse log. Thriving under pressure sounds fantastic, and it’s fun to brag about after the fact, but manic preparation tends to make the easy moments few-and-far-between. The longevity in thriving under ill-prepared pressures is unsustainable. Preparation is all about hard work, sacrifice, discipline, organization, consistency, and more. It’s the classic Benjamin Franklin line, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
Fail forward
Accept that failure is a part of the process. To pull from personal experience, I was having the hardest time becoming a morning person. I kept changing the date I would start becoming a morning person strictly because I didn’t want to start 0 for 1. It was almost as if I cared about a batting average in a game that zero people cared about the analytics. But, once I gave up caring about starting with a win, I began changing my habits.
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
― Winston S. Churchill
I know that there is a lot more so I’d love to hear the tips you all have for creating your own momentum.
Is there anything I missed? Is there a topic you’d like me to cover? Feel free to shoot me a message by using any of the links included in the footer!
Thanks for reading!