Considering your self assessed goal of success in life

Success is different to different people. It's important to first set a goal for yourself. What you consider to be a successful life or a career. We related most of our success with our career, business, job, or whatever we do we earn our living. But it's important to understand that success encompasses many other factors as well including family, social, health, spiritual and other goals.

So you have to decide what mix of goals makes you feel successful in life.

We spend a whole lot of our life doing a job or earning our living. It's very important to do what you love to do. When you do what you love, you can do it with passion and happiness. And this can bring a lot of joy along with sure shot success. If you're doing a job, make sure you're working in a field that you like or better love. if you do not like, or worse, hate your job. It will make you stressful and then make you unsuccessful. If your job does not give you satisfaction then either make it work so that it gives you joy and you can create success out of it, or try doing something different. Try changing your profession, learn some new field or trade.

Indeed, research by the Gallup Institute believes that happy workers have a tendency to earn more in later life, have a better social lives, and be more supportive to their colleagues. Not only that but some psychologists including, but not limited to, Patricia Chen, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, and Norbert Schwarz believe that there are actually two different models for meaningful career. In first, we fit well and do what we love to do. This sounds good, but is difficult to achieve when the job market is not favorable or you are not quite sure what your vocation can be. The other way around is start liking what you do.

It's like if you can't change your circumstances, change your way of thinking about it. This will make you positive and bring success and now the scientists are her to confirm that!

Even if you do not like your job much, you can still bring meaning to it. After all, your job brings you all the bread and butter for you and your family. This helps to educate your kids, to provide health needs, bring food on the table and many other things can be affoarded with your job. So this is a good way to think about it and can bring quite a meaning to your dull and boring job and you'll ultimately start liking it.

Another important quality for success is the ability to learn. If you like learning new things and improve your skills and knowledge, it can help you grow professionally and then become successful. With the changing job market, new technology coming up every day, and changing needs of the work environment, your ability to learn new things, tools, and skills can make you unstoppable and bring you success. The ability to learn new things is not genetic and not related to a particular stage of life. It can be cultivated by anyone and at any stage in life.

Creating a success plan for your future

A success plan is a helpful tool for thinking through the key steps you need to take to achieve your
goals. To create your success plan start from the top, that is, your ultimate goal. Write your ultimate goal at the top of the plan. Think about how you will achieve goal.

For example, imagine your vision is to become managing director for a major information technology company. To achieve this goal, you need to become a manager for a couple of years, then senior manager and then more senior roles. You also need to perform more professional and advanced jobs to show your expertise.

These smaller goals become the second-level goals on your success plan. Next, ask yourself how to achieve
these objectives, and fill in the next level of your plan. At all stages, use arrows to connect later objectives that are dependent on you having first achieved earlier objectives.

To check that your success plan is complete and follows a logical progression, work up from the bottom. For each objective, ask “Why am I doing this?”—the answer should be to obtain your main ultimate goal.

Setting goals to achieve success

Goal setting is a process of thinking, analyzing, and deciding what to achieve in your life. It means that you rationally go through a thinking process to see what you have to gain in your life. Goal setting involves setting short-term and long-term goals. It encompasses the goals to achieve regarding your personal life, professional life, your attitude, your interpersonal skills, your family life, business, religion, and almost all the aspects of your life.

Goal setting can provide a lot of benefits, one of the best of which is being focused on the target. By setting your short-term and long-term goals you are fully aware with the fact that where you are right now and where you’ll be heading for in the future. You know the track you have to move on. You know the target and you understand the point where you need to focus and invest your energies.

The lack of any target in a person’s life makes her go astray very easily. This way she doesn’t know what really to achieve in life; where to invest the energies; how to make life successful. She doesn’t have any idea of the output being gained from any effort. This way a lot of efforts and energies are wasted for nothing at all.

All the successful people in this world had mastered this skill to achieve there targets. These people include the successful sports men, athletes, leaders, and businessmen etc. They had planned and set their goals in advance. They knew what they had to achieve. This is a skill which can be learned and used by any one to be successful in life.


So, how can you define and set your goals? First of all, you need to know the desires deep in yourself. What you really want to gain in life.
Be precise, and be realistic and just try to figure out smart goals. There could be one major goal to be achieved at the end or there could be multiple goals. The goals can also be long-term like they may span up to 25 years or more or they may be short-term goals which may span up to one or two years or even six months, or even more shorter periods like one month or one week. Even if you set a goal which is long-term and spans many years, you can break this goal into smaller short-term goals, which in return become milestones for your long-term goals. For example one of your long-term goals is to become a successful business man in life. So, you can break it into small pieces. You can set your short-term goals spanning up to one or more years. For example one of your short-term goals could be to learn the business skills in the first year. The second year’s goal can be to get the good enough investment for the start up cost of the business. These short-term goals will eventually lead you towards the long-term goals.

The major problem in achieving your goals is not the lack of resources, but the lack of wisdom and habit of losing your track during the course of action. So, the first and the foremost rule of the success after setting your goals is staying on track. There would be a lot of obstacles and other things to keep you away from your track, but don’t you let them overcome your purpose. You may need to make adjustments due to the changing conditions, but you are not supposed to change your goals due to the circumstances once you have established them after thorough brainstorming.

In short the simplest method of setting and achieving your goals is to find out the deepest desires in yourself, making them your objective or the target, breaking them apart into short-term achievable goals, staying on track in any kind of circumstances, putting your best efforts into it, analyzing your achievements after achieving your short-term goals, adjusting the things appropriately and keep moving.

Time Management for Success

Time is the greatest resource and wealth in any person’s life, but this is the most neglected and ignored asset by most of the people. People do care about the tangible things like money, house, bike, car, gadgets etc but they don’t ever care about the most valuable resource and asset which is time. Well, why is it so important? Let say you don’t have a car, bike, or a gadget right now – no problem – you can get it at any time later, but what about time? What if you waist the current moment? What if you would have lost today, this month, or this year? Will you be able to get it back ever again? No. Never! Then why is it not considered so important, why is it so ignored thing in life?

Okay, let me tell you the truth. This is so unimportant thing just because you can’t find it in the stores, whenever you go to the store you don’t find any section related to time. Hey, don’t you compare time with a gadget like a watch – this is not the true representation of the time, I think, rather it gives you more confidence to waist time – like you say it’s 9:30 – Oh, I have half an hour more to play this game then I’ll be back to work! Anyway, joke apart -You should think time in itself an individual entity that can do some great things for you.

Time management is the way to organize not only the things you have to do but also the order, the preferences, and the duration in which you have to do those things. Time management involves different techniques which can let you organize the tasks you have to do and also prioritize those tasks with respect to the preference they have, and to assign the duration to each task depending upon it’s importance and then analyze that how much output you gained in the specified duration. I’ll discuss these techniques in this article.

I would like to disclose the disadvantage you have to face due to the lack of time management before discussing the techniques which can be utilized to manage your time. When your time is not managed you are most probably supposed to be caught up by procrastination. I mean to say that you put off things until later, and never finish your tasks on time. This kind of approach puts a stack of activities on you and you start feeling overburden and then ultimately exhausted. In some other situations you put a lot of time in doing certain things just to find out that you have achieved nothing. It is just because you don’t make it sure that which things are more important than other ones. So, actually you put most of your time doing things which are of little or no importance at all. This kind of situation again makes you feel tense and nervous.

Does time management make any difference? It is a very important question for those who don’t usually manage their time. Well, just try to compare two people who are given equal duration to finish certain task, one does much better than the other one. Why so? There could be the affect of some natural tendency, but this is not the sole thing which impacts the most. If you study the routine of the both people during this period of time you’ll notice one had managed her time properly while the other one didn’t. This kind of situations is very common in the society. You can study the lives of the great people in the world like prophets, great leaders, writers, poets, scientists, inventors, discoverers etc.
You’ll notice that those people had managed their time very properly and achieved a great success in life, whereby achieving their goals. However, the people who don’t succeed in life are always found complaining that they couldn’t get enough time to finish the things. Actually, they got enough time but failed to manage it.

What are the things which cause the wastage of time? There are few reasons due to which people waist a lot of time doing nothing. They don’t have a list of the tasks they have to finish. They don’t know which tasks are more important than the other one. They don’t understand what times are when their potentials are full blown. They don’t have any idea how to analyze their time with the output they gained from it. An important point is that they don’t have a goal to achieve as a whole. In some later article I’ll discuss how we can set our goals, but for now I’ll discuss the techniques which can be used to manage time effectively.

Well, you can try these techniques – a process as a whole – for one day and see how it affects your output. First of all you need to have a list of your tasks, called to do list. It’s very simple, take a pen and a paper and put all the things you have to do today. At this point don’t think that you can do certain things today and some other things tomorrow or even some other day. Just put all the things on the paper which you have to do today, but remember, be realistic and don’t you ever put the tasks of the whole month on this list! Okay, you have got a pretty handsome list of tasks. Now, you have to prioritize the tasks. There is a little difference between priority and urgency. There is a tradeoff between the both. Sometimes some tasks may be urgent but not so important – like there is a show about to be on air on the TV, if you miss this show you are really gonna miss it, but there is some other task which is important like you have to finish a chapter of your course book because your exams are about to start in a month or so, now here you’ll have to see what is important. Well, sometimes some urgent tasks may also be important like there is someone ill in the family and you have to take her to the doctor. Now, here you can ignore some important task over this urgent task because this is not only urgent but also important. So, while prioritizing your tasks you’ll have to keep these points in mind. Take a paper and draw four columns on it, first one for the tasks and the second one for the priority. Now, take the tasks one by one from your tasks list and add it on this list with the priority calculated from the above formula we discussed. After you had prioritized the tasks, in the third column add time required for each task. Remember, you don’t always need to do this kind of lengthy process; it’s just to take a start once you are used to with the process you’ll never have to write it down somewhere. So, for now, carry on with it. Next technique is to keep the activity log for the whole day. As you complete a task just put how much time you spent on it in the fourth column. The last step in the process is to analyze the activities at the end of the day. In start you’ll find that you had spent more time on the things which were less important and less or no time at all on the things which were more important. The next day try to overcome your week areas and carry on with this process for some time. Gradually you’ll, not only, be used to with the process, but also, you’ll see that you have more time to complete your important tasks and ultimately this will guide you towards the success.

Will Power and Self-Discipline for Success

Will power and self-discipline are two very important inner powers for anybody to achieve success. If we look at the lives of the people who have gained a lot of success, we’ll see these two things working behind the scenes. These both are the skills like any other skill a person can have, rather let me say, these are the habits that can be learned if not possessed naturally. Some people might be having these skills and using them in their lives while some other people might be having these skills but not using them to achieve success, and there could be some other people who might not be having these skills at all. Let me tell you a good news right here. These skills, not only, can be put to work for your success, but can also be learned from the scratch. That’s not a big deal! First of all I would like to let you know what these two skills are, and then I’ll give you the tips to achieve both skills.

Will power is, actually, an inner strength to make decisions on what you have planned, to take actions according to your plan to execute the task on hand to achieve the goal, and to do all this regardless of inner and outer resistance and discomfort. It is the ability to overcome laziness, bad habits, negative thoughts and other things like these; Even if it require a lots of effort and hard work in contrast to one’s habit.

Self-discipline is the instant gratification in favor of something better. It is the giving up of instant pleasure and satisfaction for a higher and better goal. It manifests as the ability to stick to actions, thoughts and behavior which leads to success. Self-discipline means self control and this self control encompasses mental, spiritual and physical control over oneself. Purpose of self-discipline doesn’t mean to live a limiting lifestyle and it doesn’t mean being narrow minded. It just makes you capable of focusing all of your energy on achieving your goals and to preserve it until it is accomplished.

How do these two work for achieving success? Good question! Isn’t it?
Well, you always have some kind of plans to be executed, but don’t you think you don’t find enough time to execute those plans? Sometimes, you think or even see that things are not going in your favor so it’s not the right time to work on your plan. Some other times you just throw your plans away because nothing is going to work for you! Let me tell you, no matter how much worse the situation could be for you it’s never too bad!

Now, if you have the abilities like will power you’ll always try to make right decisions for your plan and then you’ll find enough confidence and courage to execute those plans. This is how the successful people always work. When things start going wrong, and working against them they just start working harder and at the end they achieve the goal. They put off laziness and fasten their belts! Similar is the case with the self-discipline. When you think that you need more and more rest – even after doing nothing! – You just decide the other way. You say to yourself that still I have not done enough to complete my job. I have to do a lot more to achieve my goals. It doesn’t mean to sacrifice your rest, No…Never! I just want to say take proper rest and good enough rest but don’t over rest! This can be done with a lot of other things that make you feel bad and you put off your plans.

Now, I would like to give a few tips that’ll really work for you to learn or sharpen these skills. The tips are really simple and you don’t have to do a lot more extra work.

- If you are going somewhere, not far away, then don’t take any conveyance. You can walk for some time. At first you’ll find it a little difficult but with some effort and with the passage of time you’ll feel good and if you continue with it you’ll be having more control over yourself.
- Deprive yourself off, sometimes, the things you like most. For example you like ice cream and you can have ice cream but just resist your desire for one or two days. It’ll build up your self-discipline which eventually is control over your self.
- Most of the times you take lift while going upstairs. Well, some times just walk up and down the stairs to put you in trouble for a while.
- Try to wake up early if you already don’t do that and would be better if you go to bed early sometimes than the usual time.
- Take responsibilities, a little bit extra, in office or at home. Try to help other people in their task or do some of their work if you don’t have much of yours. You don’t need to make them too lazy; just to make yourself a little bit more active!
- Anything which looks like the above list you can add into this list and can act upon that.

After sometime you’ll start feeling that things have started working in favor of you and that you have enough time to do your extra tasks. You’ll find enough confidence to work on plans and this will eventually lead you to success.