Pursuit... Your Divine Right-

Yes, It is Time to Choose!

- Get on the bus or, 

get left behind. 

If you miss this bus it will be more of the same; missed economic opportunities, hopelessness amid aimless wondering. Your job is to catch this bus! In the next few paragraphs we will buy you a ticket and find you a seat.

So let's establish the fundamentals to assure the obtainment of your desire.  

- In its most rudimentary form Success can be defined as; the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. If a man is working towards a predetermined goal and knows what he is doing... That person is a success! If they are not doing that then they are failing.

- The opposite of courage is not cowardice.  No, the opposite of courage is conformity. It takes no courage to conform; to do the same thing as everybody else, to think like everybody else, to achieve as everybody else.  Courage begins when you decide to differentiate your life from others.  To our demise, conformity will erase achievement...

- Every human has been given the Divine right to pursuit something.  Indeed, the creator allows each of us to Have, Be or Do, anything that we desire.  It is this fact that supports our existence.  Life then becomes a mission. On this mission, we all have something to pursuit!  It then becomes our duty to un-cover our purpose... To un-cover the 'something' that we pursuit.

- Everyone in serious pursuit of a goal,  at some point in life we all uncover this truth;  Success is an inside job!  Once discovered, it is what we do with this realization that greatly improves your odds of obtaining your desire.

If it is our Divine duty in life to un-cover our 'something', our pursuit, and if success is an inside job, then we must be self equipped with the features to succeed. So what then is the missing link between have something to pursue and Obtainment?

Zig-Zag-Zoom - Part II(a); WHAT... Before How

I am sure that at some time in your life, you have been blindfolded and asked to walk forward. Or have had to enter an unfamiliar room with no lights.  I am confident we can agree that, these were not comfortable circumstances. 

Reaching your Business-for-Self, Highest Potential, has much in common with walking around blindfolded or having to walk through a pitch-dark room.  Suddenly, you run into things that you had no idea even existed.  Even if you are headed in the right direction, clear of obstacles, you remain filled with anxiety, self-doubt and uncertainty.  If you remain in this state for an extended period, FEAR creeps-in, to distort your thinking, paralyze your intuition, and eventually render all action as useless. This is NOT a Good Place to be!!

So let's put into place a firm thought foundation that will afford you a course of repeatable and trainable action.  We have 3 fundamentals in the understanding of WHAT... Before How.  These include;

• The Need for Pacing
•  Creating Your Lighthouse in the Fog and
•  The Journey through 3 Ports of Repeat-ability / Part II(b)

The Need for Pacing
As we covered in Part I; WHO... Before What,  CHARGING is a highly desirable entrepreneurial trait. When you are ready to combine Action with watch words such as Focus, Determination, Attention-to-Detail, and Patience, you can begin to move forward. Filled with the need to Succeed, the tendency will be to CHARGE HARD. Attempting to move straight forward, rapidly, often without regard to potential negative effects. 

Pacing is required to insure three things;

1. You don't develop shaky knees and wobbly legs; which inhibit you from taking daily action. The world is filled with hopeful ambitions and dreams that never clear the runway. But, You are No Longer Dreaming! You are No Longer content to sit on the sidelines! You want your 767 to take-off, to clear the runway. You are willing to wake-up every morning take responsibility for the things that you do, and the things that you choose not to do.  As an entrepreneur, You are creating your reality.  
2. You are able to maintain a high level of Mental, Physical and Spiritual fortitude.  You don't want to charge so hard that you get halfway there and run out of resources. 
3. Pacing allows you to collect data, analyze the data, and then make corrective steps to maintain balance and forward progress. Remember, that your target is moving. Collecting and Analyzing data assures that you are running your race without blinders.  You need to look side-to-side; you’re attempting to fulfil an opportunity marked by time.  With the passage of time, the target may have moved, and if you are not prepared, the opportunity will be missed. Pacing affords you the flexibility to adjust in preparation for this.

 
The first critical Pacing step is Assessing Resources.  You need to have a firm inventory of what is in your pocket.  This is not a financially based statement. Many assume that they need money to succeed in business.  This is the wrong - CHARGE HARD mentality to adopt as you begin to undertake whatever you have set your sights on. YES, money, at some point, is often needed to reach the end.  More significant than money are the resources of knowledge, passion and relationships. This thought foundation is influenced by the factual success of many businesses that started in a basement or college dorm room with little more than a Passion.  Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard...  all started with little more than the smarts and the passion of their founders.  These founders achieved their Highest Potential by moving side-to-side; zig-zagging if you will, stringing together smarts, passion and the network of their friends and their financial resources. 
  Your ability to build relationships is the most important resource that you carry in your pocket. Money does not yield knowledge, passion or relationships. Knowledge, passion and relationships, will always yield money. While you attempt to build and maintain relationships, you are able to reduce stress if you remember two things... a) Do the right things for the right reasons.  b) NEVER use People - Have a genuine concern for others and constantly be on the lookout for ways that your product or service can serve those around you.

Creating Your Lighthouse in the Fog
As you prepare to set sail toward your highest potential, rest assured that there are many who will attempt to dissuade you.  So you need to be on guard!  You are looking for three types here: (1) Those that Never Do,   (2) Those that wish they could and are hoping that you don't, and,     (3) Those that say, You can't do it.  So, WHAT do you need to keep on course while you endure the fog of dissuasion?

Every Achiever, in order to claim their success, has had a set of values to work from.  Let’s go back to Part I, WHO... Before What - Your WHO Values are a set of behavioral traits that must be in place as you build toward your goal.  These behavioral traits, are Your Lighthouse in the Fog. Always shining in front of you, they keep you from running aground.  Tested through time they evolve to be the cultural foundation of your business. They serve to clearly define the rules you follow and they outline the direction that you are headed.
If you refuse to first establish your WHO behavioral traits, you leave yourself in jeopardy of allowing just anyone to join your efforts.  The goal here is to never let anyone into your intimate circle that does not fit with your values. Period! This applies to everyone - your important hires, your friends, your partners... everyone.

In Part II(b) of WHAT, before How...  We will pull up anchor and journey, along the Seas of Highest Potential. Our journey will lead us through 3 Ports of Repeat-ability...

Zig-Zag-Zoom / Part I; WHO, before What...

This week I found Great inspiration from a friend who is actively pursuing her Highest Potential, through the start-up of her own business.  During our phone conversation, she reveled to me that, she is pursuing this business start-up having never stepped into a business class while she was a college student.   Laughingly, I asked if she understood the term "huevos grande".  On a more serious note, business-for-self is not a laughing matter.  At times we find it difficult, but in most cases it is not impossible...

For today's College Grad, the traditional job market remains difficult to penetrate. In this environment, I am finding more and more of my college-aged friends faced with taking the plunge into business ownership. A comforting fact here is, there is a trainable and repeatable course of action to follow. This course of action greatly improves your potential to succeed. In order to cover this I will need to break this blog post into three parts:
       - Zig / Part I;  WHO, before What...
       - Zag / Part II;  WHAT, before How!
       - Zoom / Part III; HOW, Staying out of the Weeds.

So let's go over a few WHO details to help tip the success odds in your favor...

• On the path to claiming your Highest Potential, we know that the journey begins with a single step. It never hurts to load that first single step, filled with faith.  Faith is rooted in knowing that you ARE doing the right thing, for the right reasons. I often resolve myself to understanding that the universe has reveled to me an opportunity of need, I have accepted the opportunity to fill the need, and in this vein the universe will not allow me to fail.
• Balance;  guides your Attitude and Actions. The pursuit of your Highest Potential will require tremendous balance.   Avoid thinking of balance as an old-school, play-ground teeter-totter. Balance is more like a tripod. Think camera tripod... with three adjustable legs.  Rarely, have I seen a tripod tip over.  On your tripod, each leg has a name and each leg serves a specific purpose. The legs of your tripod are named;  Mental Growth, Physical Growth, and Spiritual Growth.  The tripod concept serves to maintain your balance in all terrain. It works like this - what you cannot understand Mentally, gains clarity Physically and Spiritually  -  what you cannot comprehend Physically, will appear  Mentally and Spiritually  -  what remains hidden from you Spiritually, will gain consciousness Physically and Mentally. 
• As you work to uncover your Business-for-self potential, you will need to arm yourself with watch words such as Focus, Determination, Attention-to-Detail, Patience, and Action.  Why are these watch words so important?  They are important because, Your values will always serve as the foundation for everything that you do. Staying with-in your values allows you the freedom to step on the accelerator while maintaining your balance.  Outside your values, you lose balance - increasing the potential of having to hit the brakes, stopping, backing-up, or killing the motor all together!

• In the physical world we know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  This principle holds true for the self-employed world also.  Often we are inclined to CHARGE straight forward. CHARGING forward is an entrepreneurial requirement, but you must use caution. When CHARGING too hard, we may deplete our resources too rapidly as well as  bulldoze over others. Bulldozing increases in the odds of crashing and burning, and we may lose the love and respect of those who mean the most to us. 

Keeping these fundamentals in place and before you, not only assures your footing, but they also serve as the turning point as you move from Zig, and set-up to Zag. In Part II; WHAT, before How, we will come to understand that Zig-Zagging is a deliberate process. Trainable and repeatable, this process will allow to you attain smaller goals first, while collecting data; which is used to correct and modify your course.

These days of Anxiety...

Anxiety - The Hope Zapper

Well, here we stand at the threshold of a New Year.  As with many years in the past, 2012 has not been without it's moments of Anxiety... Senseless Boarder Wars, Victim filled mass shootings, A EURO that continues to flounder, a US economy that appears driven aimlessly, Terrorist acts conducted in zealot spirituality. When I recall such moments I am overwhelmed with the resilience of human nature.

Let's face facts; we Cannot Stop moving forward! By now we all recognize that 'time waits for no man.' But in the constant bombardment of terrify news, or caught aimlessly drifting in the sea of despair, HOW will we ever cross the 2013 threshold? HOW will we renew our resolution; the improvement of the human condition?

We live by Faith or we do not live at all...
- Either we venture or we vegetate. If we venture we do so by Faith! Simply because we cannot know the end of anything at its beginning. Marriage, by Faith; or stay single. Professional achievement, by Faith; or we give-up before we start. Personal Growth, by Faith we move mountains or opposition; or we are stopped by mole hills. Improvement of the Human Condition, only by Faith can we venture, boldly forward.

Faith however is not tranquil and steady. At its foundation, this is the beauty of Faith. In Faith, You control the volume... Bounce level - Sleep level. You are in complete control! Faith has the ability to ebb and flow like the tides of the restless sea. It is ALWAYS there for your use. Never FAILING, waiting on your beckoned call.

Every triumph of the human spirit began with a single step taken in Faith. This single step serves as the small handle to great matters. In the pursuit of your worthy ambition you must learn to hang on to your handle of Faith, even if for just 5 more minutes. This is how you deliver your resolution.

My encouragement to you; make 2013 the year in which you venture in Faith, the year which marks your contribution to the improvement of the human condition.