Harvey, Jason - Achieve Anything In Just One Year - Be Inspired Daily to Live Your Dreams and Accomplish Your Goals

1. Have an innovative thought.

2. Organize that thought.

3. Make plans.

4. Transform the plans into reality.

First your imagination gives you a unique thought. Then, you have to organize that crazy idea into something that makes sense. The best way to do that is to spit that idea out of your head by drawing pictures, writing about it, or recording your thoughts. Once you have it on paper, your next move is to create plans around making it happen. Build your blueprints. Finally, when you are satisfied that you’ve completed the preparation, turn your plans into reality. Success is taking steps to craft your crazy innovative thoughts into real, tangible items.

DAY

227

“The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.”

— Michael Faraday

There are thousands of gurus out there who will tell you about the essential skills you need to achieve success. You get to choose which of their ideas will help you the most as you organize your innovations into actionable items. Take a look at the quote above and the quote from Day 226 as two examples of suggestions to help you turn your ideas into realities.

Now you get to practice being the guru. How can you organize your life so that you are better at turning your ideas into real actions that will help you achieve success? Come up with your own unique game plan using these quotes as templates. Write your own steps for success.

Your assignment does not end there. You have to try out your new plan to see if it works. Take one of your crazy ideas, and walk through the steps you have created to turn it into reality. Give yourself at least a month to make this happen, but make sure your deadline, whatever it is, is clear. What milestones can you set along the way that will help you gauge whether or not you are on track?

You are now getting into the nitty gritty of achieving success. You may not get this process right the first time, but don’t be discouraged. This is extremely rewarding work if you are up for the challenge. Be willing to tweak your process when you find parts that do not quite work, and you will be rewarded for your continual improvements. Good luck!

DAY

228

“Don’t agonize, organize.”

— Jim Hightower

If you want to achieve, you must do. Don’t spend too much time in the dreaming stages. Taking action is a high priority. In the quote above, Jim Hightower says it perfectly. Don’t agonize, organize. Don’t worry if you’re doing everything perfectly. You’ll never know how things are going to work out until you get organized and do something.

Agonizing over your plans leaves you with nothing. If you spend all of your time fretting over your decisions, what product do you have to show for your worries at the end of the day? Maybe the beginning of an ulcer, but that’s about it. Drop the worrying. It is useless.

Instead, spend your time on something you can hold on to. Organize your thoughts. Plan out how you are going to achieve your goals. You will be surprised at how exhilarating it is to see the process laid out. It will prove to you that you can achieve success. You can attain your dreams. You just need to organize a set of steps to get there.

Organize and get into action. If something doesn’t work, then re-organize and take action again. Concrete steps will give you concrete achievement. Ideas without organization are like dreams. They eventually fade, and you have nothing to prove they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to take this next and very important step in achieving success. You are done dreaming. It’s time to organize and attack.

DAY

229

“We give our lives to that which we give our time. I have learned that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to unclutter one’s life by starting at the top of the pile with the idea that the solution is to just get things sorted and better organized. It is nice to get better organized, but that is not enough. Much has to be discarded. We must actually get rid of it. To do this we need to develop a list of basics . . . . [This list] must be the product of inspiration and prayerful judgment between the things we really need and things we just want. It should separate need from greed. It must be our best understanding of those things that are important as opposed to those things that are just interesting.”

— William R. Bradford

Is your life cluttered? It is much harder to reach success if you allow yourself too many distractions. In order to remove the clutter from your life, you need to do more than organize. You must streamline your life.

Your assignment today is to sit down with a large piece of paper and map out what you did last week. Go through your calendar if that helps you remember, but divide the page into seven days and try, as accurately as possible, to account for all of your time.

How much time did you spend watching TV? How many hours (or minutes) did you dedicate to family? What percentage of your time was spent at work? Did you spend a lot of time surfing the Internet? You can record the events in your seven-day calendar any way you want, but find a clear way to identify the amount of time you spend on various activities throughout the day.

After you have completed this task, take a look at the entire week. Where do you see wasted time? Are there tasks you can cut from your routine to give you more time for creative growth? Part of organization is trimming off the excess. What can you do without?

DAY

230

“The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for.”

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder offers one final piece of advice for this section on organization: Make sure you do not lose sight of the big picture.

It’s a great idea to get organized. It will prepare the path for success and also help you get there faster than you would if your life was cluttered. However, sometimes you get so wrapped up in the organization that you forget why you’re organizing in the first place.

This problem is most plainly seen in a corporate setting. Have you ever been a member of a council, a board, or a club that is so wrapped up in the rules of the group that nothing is ever accomplished? It’s extremely frustrating to those members who joined the assembly to make a difference.

You can fall into the same trap personally. Your ultimate goal is to achieve success. Don’t get stuck picking out the right colors for the file folders in your new office or deciding which laptop to buy to record all of your latest creative brainstorms. Those are insignificant pieces of the whole picture.

Do you think you’ve lost sight of the big picture? Take a look at the seven-day map you made on Day 229. How much of that time was spent working directly on achieving success? If it’s less than 50 percent, then you may have detoured away from your true goals. It’s not too late to change your routine. Organization is not the ultimate goal. Success is your objective.

DAY

231

“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.”