An Ode to the Details, or, How to Sabotage your Success

Unless you know EXACTLY what you want, you might as well just shoot yourself in the foot, because hobbling towards success is all you are going to be doing unless you get 100% clear on exactly what you want to accomplish or achieve.

It seems simplistic to say that in order to get what we want, we need to first know exactly what that is, yet defining the exact details of our desires is often not as easily done as we think. Without a proper understanding of the specifics of our desires, it is very easy to end up wasting time as well as mental capital focusing our attention in the wrong direction.

The missing piece to the success puzzle is not so much having the opportunities to achieve success, but rather first knowing exactly what it is that we want. It is critical to not only have a “general” idea of our desires, but to also plug in the very specific factors that need to be present – or absent – once the desired goal has been obtained.

It is very easy once we have decided to make lifestyle improvements to then get caught up in the excitement of those improvements, and not perform our “due diligence” in order to determine precisely what our success will look like. Without knowing exactly what success entails, we will:

• Lack the ability to track our progress to see if we are moving towards our goal
• Waste time focusing both physical and mental efforts on tasks that are not directly related to our specific goal.

Some common examples include:

The person who decides to lose weight – What exactly does “lose weight” look like? If you don’t know how much weight you want to lose, or what clothing size you are wanting to fit into, how will you know if you are making progress? How will you know which type of fitness program to get involved with? How will you even know when you have attained your goal?

The person who wants to become wealthy – Well, “wealthy” to a homeless person is a few clean outfits to wear, the occasional shower, and a consistently full belly. What exactly is wealthy to YOU? You need to define a very specific lifestyle that defines what wealthy means in your mind, so that you can both work towards that goal, as well as measure your progress along the way.

The person who wants a great relationship – Try to draw a great relationship on paper, and you’ll see that illustrating such a vague concept is challenging at best. Is it a romantic relationship? What type of intimacy are you looking for? What type of companionship do you want? What things are you NOT willing to have in that relationship?

The above are just some general examples in order to give you an idea of what I’m talking about here, but this same concept can – and should – be applied to every area of your life where you are looking to make improvements.

Why is it important to define what you don’t want in addition to the details about what you do? Simple: in order to keep from wasting time and energy on tasks, plans, or circumstances that are not in alignment with your preferred end result!

Visualization

One of the most effective (and proven) ways to get what you want out of life is to practice visualization. In short, whenever you go somewhere enough times in your mind, you will eventually go there in the body as well.

If you use visualization in order to bring about positive changes in your life, how can you visualize effectively if you don’t know exactly what those changes are? Moreover, what happens whenever you effectively visualize something, yet when it arrives, it isn’t exactly what you wanted? You’ll have to go right back to the visualization drawing board!

Productivity Practices

The idea behind productivity practices is to achieve some desired end result. Sometimes it is something specific like a project that you are working on, while at the same time productivity practices can be used to effectively work towards positive lifestyle changes.

How do you remain productively working toward a lifestyle goal if you don’t know exactly what that goal is? How do you keep from wasting time on tasks that will not take you to your desired end result if you don’t know precisely what that end result is?

Crunch Time

When it comes down to the wire and you are getting very close to the attainment of your goal, you will find yourself needing to make critical decisions about how to move forward.

• Am I at my goal body weight? If so, what’s next?
• Have I attained “wealth” as I define it? If so, what do I do with it?
• Have I secured a wonderful relationship? If so, how do I keep it?
• Have I {insert any other life goal here}? If so, what are my next steps?

How can you know how to move on to a new goal in your life if you can’t even say for sure whether or not you attained the last one? What if you “sort of” got what you wanted, but sort of didn’t at the same time?

Do you then just settle for whatever you got, or do you reassess and then decide how to move forward? Either way, you can’t make that determination until you first determine whether or not you even attained your original goal.

All of these ideas about how to properly stay focused on success in order to then attain it share this common trait:

How do YOU define success?