To Achieve Your Goals, Do The Right First Steps

The ability for you to achieve the goals in your mind is an absolutely necessary skill for you to develop.

If you can’t make things happen, your life is not going to amount to much. The rewards, the joys, the satisfaction of achieving only goes to the people who actually make it happen.

There’s No Reason To Start A Trip Unless You Are Going To Get There

Just because you want to be a piano player, just because you want to travel, just because you want to have a business on your own, or any of the other hundreds of thousands of vocations or activities in life that people get involved in—none of that matters unless you can make it happen.

The choice is simple: win or lose. Achieve or fail. Move forward to that better life you want, or get stalled out and stay frustrated and miserable.

Achieving your goals is how you develop confidence. It’s how to develop new friends. It’s how you add quality and achievement to your life.

It’s not enough just to want to do great things. Everybody wants to do great things. But the rewards go to the people who can make it happen.

This doesn’t just apply to wild, crazy dreams—like I want to be an astronaut, or the first person on Mars, or I want to be CEO of the world’s greatest corporation, or I want to be a world-renowned concert pianist, or the President of the United States of America. This has to do with every single thing you have to do in your life, and it starts with the little things.

You have to discipline yourself—if you can’t clear your mind . . . if you can’t organize what resources you have available to you to move yourself forward, you’re never going to have a successful day—much less a successful life.

There are fundamentals in winning. Of course, life is more complicated than this, but, in many ways, it’s like a game.

There is a logic to being successful. There are successful patterns, strategies, and methods.

Now, the way people implement these in their lives have infinite variations, but the patterns and strategies are consistent.

What’s confusing is that most of these actions and decisions take place in the mind of people, and from the outside, you may look at successful people and feel like they’re some kind of magicians. Like watching a magician perform, no matter how hard you look and how carefully you pay attention, you can’t make out what they’re doing.

But in almost every case, when a magician explains their magic, the mystery is gone . . . and you realize with practice that you could pull off the same trick—I could do the same thing.

In the same way, you can learn how to win. It’s a skill.

Of course, aptitude helps—but what’s more important is a burning desire to do something special and in a particular area that appeals to you. Not everything appeals to everybody, but we all have things that interest us more . . . that we notice more . . . that we think about more. Things that tickle our natural curiosity. Things we want to find out more about. Things we want to do. Things we want to meet people who do that.

We want to watch people who can do that particular thing at a high level—if it’s a sport, music, art, whatever it is. We all have different areas of fascination that we want to pursue, because it turns us on inside.

Where does that come from? People that don’t believe in God say, “Who knows?” People who believe in God, like I do, say it comes from God—it comes from your creator. It’s in there because you were created to do certain things, and when you get around those things it turns on a certain switch inside of you.

It lights your pilot light. Your internal motivation kicks on. Something inside of you tells you this is for me.

Why do some little girls grow up and want to be ballerinas, but others are wanting to dive in the pool and swim, while others want to go to the barn and ride horses? Still, others are fascinated with music and will spend hundreds of hours at the piano.

Where does this motivation come from? I think it comes from God, because you were put on this earth as a unique individual to do unique things.

I don’t know what your opinion is, but the reality is that this phenomenon is real, and it exists inside you. You can deny it, but you can’t escape it—and you will either pursue it and move forward in this arena, or you’ll be frustrated.

My point is, why not take charge of your life? Why not learn the patterns the ideas that other people use and get on the same road so you can get to the same place?

There are literally hundreds of thousands of people that have driven from New York City, New York to Los Angeles, California, but guess what? Most of them went on the same roads.

There are roads, there are concepts, there are strategies, there are reactions, there are patterns that you can adopt and integrate into your life that will totally transform the results you get from your daily, weekly, and monthly activities. We all have places we want to go, and we’re all going to be frustrated if we don’t get there—so why live a frustrated life?

The Cycle of Winning

10 years ago, I realized how fortunate I was in life, because I met some really special people who, over the years, shared incredibly powerful ideas and information with me that has allowed me to achieve things that otherwise would have never been possible.

I realized that I was sitting on a mountain of powerful and positive life-changing information. I decided to do something that I never thought I’d do, and that was to write a book, so I could pass it on to the next generation—the millions of upcoming, talented, bright, aggressive people who had the potential and desire to do great things and a complete willingness to work and make it happen.

I realized that by writing these principles down in a short, simple, easy to read format, they could get the fundamentals of winning down quickly and save decades of trial and error that many of us have done to integrate it into our lives.

When you don’t know these things, and when you’re trying to figure them out, you’re doing a lot of unnecessary failing and floundering. But when you’re determined enough, eventually you put the successful pattern together.

I decided to simplify the patterns and put it down in writing so that those who were interested could accelerate their growth.

I spent a lot of time speaking about how to describe this process and how to describe the people I was talking about, and I came up with the term serial winner. The reason is that in a world full of people who want to do great things, very few ever do. And of those few, very few repeat their success—yet we all know people that seem to bounce through life going from one success to another. No matter what happens to them, they have this strange ability to minimize setbacks and maximize the positive things that come their way.

They have the same 24 hours in a day we all have, yet they accomplish mountains more than everyone else. What’s the difference? It’s how they look at life, how they evaluate life, what they focus on, how they react to what’s in front of them.

Just like a master chef on television, when you use the same recipes and approximately the same ingredients, you’re going to be able to duplicate their success.

It’s the same thing in life—the patterns of winning are used by all successful people. Most of them really don’t understand what separates them from everyone else because it’s taken them years to get into that pattern. They don’t spend a lot of time talking about it—they spend their time doing it. It becomes instinctive, automatic. The same can happen to you!

I played sports all my life, and the biggest lesson I learned was that winning was a whole lot better than losing. In sports, you’re limited by your physical ability. In life, you don’t have that limitation. You can find your area to excel in and keep on winning bigger and bigger to the end.

I always understood in playing sports why certain people were better than me, and no matter how hard I practiced, if their physical makeup allowed them to be quicker and faster, they were probably always going to be better. But that did not hold up in the business world, because I didn’t see anyone running and jumping. I saw people doing things—thinking, doing things, solving problems. No one I met seemed to be any more gifted than I was, and so I always felt there had to be a way to compete once I knew what they were doing and once I developed the same skills.

Somewhere along the way, I heard the idea that great ideas are a dime a dozen, but the people who use them are priceless. That gave me my mission. I was going to look day and night for those ideas, and then use them to make the things happen that I wanted to in my life.

My advantage is that I spent my entire career teaching these concepts to others in my primary business of helping to build a nationwide organization of successful independent leaders running their own businesses. From hundreds of hours of explaining from start to finish exactly how to organize your mind for success, eventually the lightbulb went on in my mind when I realized—wait a minute, this is a cycle, it’s simple.

Until I started getting into writing the book, that lightbulb didn’t go off in my mind. I was teaching it—I understood it, but I didn’t have the complete picture. Once I saw it, I got very excited about passing this on to you. It’s how you can not only become successful—achieve small, medium, and large goals—but how you can make winning a pattern in your life.

Serial winners are people of action—not just any action, specific action designed to help them move forward. They do something every day that puts them or keeps them on course for the things they want in life (especially career success). The result? Lots of winning. To increase the odds that you’ll achieve your goals, learn from them.

The great news is that nothing can keep us from doing what winners do. There’s no copyright on wisdom, and there’s no patent on action. If you leverage the same Cycle of Winning that serial winners use, you can greatly increase your chances of achieving whatever you set out to achieve.

Your best opportunity to get the cycle going is at the beginning of a new project or goal.

Serial Winner has become a best seller, and I’ve released “The Serial Winner Workbook” to give you some exercises for applying the Cycle of Winning in your life. (Download your free copy now.) You’ll see great results if you use it at the start of some new, big project. Here are just five of the activities that can help you dramatically increase your chances of success. They’ll prepare you for overcoming obstacles, developing mental toughness, and moving forward when you find yourself saying, “I feel stuck.”

1. Decide: You may already have a goal or project in mind. If not, write down five things you could imagine defining your future, based on your natural curiosity and passion. Now take the one idea or theme that most excites you and create a specific, related goal for this year, or even this month.

2. Overdo: Make a list of everything you have available to you—talents, experience, skills, resources, relationships, etc.—that you can leverage to create a strong start or foundation for your goal or project. You’re most vulnerable at the beginning, so have lots of help identified to access if needed.

3. Adjust: Facts are a competitive edge, and winners use them to make smart adjustments. Where will you turn for relevant, accurate, helpful information when you face challenges in your project or goal? When you know the facts, you are mentally tougher when challenges come.

4. Finish: Toward the end of your project or goal, where or how will you be vulnerable? Be specific to prepare yourself for pitfalls. (For instance, if I’m trying to lose 15 pounds and I hit 12, I might convince myself that that’s good enough. If I’ve committed to 15, it isn’t. If it was, my original goal would have been 12, not 15. If I locked in on 15, I’m not finished until I get to 15!)

5. Keep Improving: To get yourself in the right mindset, assume you’re going to win. Once you do, you’ll want to avoid the winner’s trap—a slide into mediocrity after one good win. Decide now on a bigger goal that you’ll go for after you achieve this one, one that will push you to keep improving. Don’t get distracted by it. Just write it down somewhere so that you have some inspiration when you’ve finished this goal.