Running In Place!

I recently talked with a friend who said he'd turned his $50,000 per year business into a $300,000 per year business in just 2 years! He asked if I wanted to know how he did it. I replied that of course I wanted to know.

His answer was quite simple. In fact, it's so simple that you're likely to dismiss it as too obvious. I agree that it sounds like common sense, but it's not commonly applied. When you really put this idea into action, you can take your results to a whole new level.

In a nutshell this was the lesson:

In life you will always have your ups and downs, your successes and failures. Sometimes things go well for you. Sometimes they go poorly.

When you succeed or fail, there's always a CAUSE. You can backtrack your results to figure out what caused them. You might not be able to do this perfectly, but you'll usually have a pretty good idea of the contributing factors.

What caused your income, your health, and your relationships to improve over the past few years?

What caused things to get worse?

Can you identify the specific causes of your best and worst results?

Once you know the contributing factors to your hits and your misses, your goal is to deliberately do more of what causes the successes and deliberately do less of what caused the failures.

Of course some of the contributing factors may not be under your direct control, but some of those factors will be. Focus your efforts on what you can control, and don't worry about what's outside your control.

I must admit that it was hard for me. I thought this was an oversimplification, but I decided to try it anyway. I thought maybe he knew something I didn't. I figured I had nothing to lose.

What I discovered was there were several things that I was doing that were not working very well, but I kept doing the same thing. Also, there were several things that I was doing that worked really well, but they were often neutralized by the things that were not working so well. In the end it seemed like I was running in place or advancing very slowly.

You can apply this same idea to improve your results in any area of your life -- your income, your career, your relationships, your health -- even your spiritual development. Notice what creates a success for you, and do more of it. Notice what causes less than desirable results or a dry spell, and do less of it.

If you haven't had a success experience for a long time, you can basically throw out whatever you're currently doing in that area because it clearly isn't working. You'll have to experiment more to figure out what does work. If you already know that your current efforts aren't working, there's no point in continuing along the same path.

You aren't doomed to become a victim of your past, but your past surely contains clues that can help you enjoy an even better present and future. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best.

Truly Caring for Your Success!

By Dr. Robert Anthony