1. Make enough room in your life to accommodate your big dreams.

A lucky man once said – “You can’t make love on a cluttered desk.”

Clear a space for your next big opportunity. As anticipate all the things you wish to achieve, give them ample room to fit in your life.

Just like when you were a small kid getting ready to make an art project, clear a space, a buffer, for your next growth initiative. Give yourself plenty of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual breathing room to explore, experiment, spill, course correct, and expand. An open space, idle time, is like a welcome mat for new opportunity. If your plate is full, you can’t add anything new. This can involve getting rid of the things that don’t serve you or simply pushing aside things that you don’t want to focus on.

2. Fight FOMO by understanding the reasons behind your decisions.

FOMO, or fear of missing out, is a microscopic version of paralysis by analysis. You choose chocolate over vanilla and wonder if it were the right choice. It’s another way to describe self doubt. You can fight your own self doubt by reaffirming the reasons behind your decisions, and celebrate the fact that you’re being present enough to recognize you are choosing. Recognizing you’re making choices, and owning them, makes them that much easier to commit to and enjoy. Remember that life is full of opportunities, choices and trade-offs. So when you make a decision to venture down one path, focus your attention and imagination on enjoying it. Don’t worry what could have been. Owning your decisions, means focusing on the choices you make and making the most of them. Training your brain in such away will also help you be more discerning and make better decisions down the road.

Life is full of trade-offs. Vanilla today does not mean no chocolate tomorrow. We decide what has meaning and what brings us joy. So learn to love what you got, take what you get and give til you ain’t got nothing left.

3. FOCUS on improving 1 area of your life at a time. Move on to another after you’ve got some better/new/good habits running on autopilot.

Follow One Course Until Successful – FOCUS – I <3 Acronyms.

If you’re constantly trying to juggle multiple initiatives, projects, and tasks, you’ll likely make very slow progress, which will lead to a loss of motivation and passion. Avoid this by being discerning with your choices and committed to making them work for you. Batch your work by grouping similar tasks. If your energy gets low, take a break and come back to it later.

4. Create a plan with stepping stones, milestones, little rewards and breaks.

 

In my experience, people suck at planning, especially when it comes to exploring new things in life. It’s true that plans often don’t survive the first day on the job, but the preparation, the charted course, can help you navigate new situations as they arise and give you a baseline to navigate back to without having to make a new plan at every twist and turn. Milestones aren’t enough to get you through in the age of micro tasks and micro distractions. Identifying the daily stepping stones will help you visualize your progress between milestones. And counting a few steps before taking a break will build up your endurance.

5. Less is more – start with less at first to keep yourself lean and powerful, and keep things simple as long as you can.

When passion and motivations run high we feel we can build an empire in a day, and bite off more than we can chew. The feeling of defeat and frustration when we fail to achieve everything in a day, can set you back far more than the incomplete work itself. Don’t set yourself up for failure by persistently holding yourself to unrealistic timelines and/or workloads. If you’re starting a new business, keep it simple and give yourself 3x more time than you think you’ll need. So take your 1 year plan and stretch it into a 3 year plan. Map it out in an evolutionary approach; meaning think of it as starting as a single celled, solo organism, a microbusiness. Focus on being awesome at that before growing from there.

Separate your wants and needs and evaluate them rigorously. Let your wants be rewards for accomplishments obtained by using and meeting your needs. Enjoy the little things, smaller numbers of nicer business cards for example beat 1500 flimsy ones that collect dust.

Continue to steadily grow and improve yourself/business/project over a longer period. You’ll find that this simplified strategy is far more effective than trying to pretend you’re a big agency or firm overnight. Focus on being the best you, not an inflatable corporation. The hot air and hype required to maintain a facade and grow into it is often a waste of energy and it rarely helps the business grow.

Achieving simplicity is easier said than done. It requires a lot of critical thought to identify and cut back the unnecessary and draw focus to the important.

6. Stop Fighting the work and start shoveling. 

Getting motivated is great. Reading and learning is great. Planning is great. At the end of the day, the post holes won’t dig themselves. Stop procrastinating by consuming infotainment. Start working. The experience of actually committing to do the work to build your vision is a far better educator than any course, blog, book, video, or podcast you may find on the subject. Most people skim along anyway to claim a false sense of accomplishment. Knowing is only half the battle…doing is the other half.

7. Remember that opportunities to build The Great Life are endless.

The supply is infinite, and often lies beyond the visible horizon line. As long as you’re committed to leveraging opportunities to advance yourself and others, they’ll come to you at a faster pace and with bigger payloads. At a pragmatic level, this means focus on creating meaningful, substantive value in what you do, products and services that advance the condition of others with a highly visible return that is much appreciated. Clicking your heals and re-writing Think And Grow Rich, probably won’t make you millions. Dig deeper.

Cultivate a firm belief that opportunities are infinite and often hidden beyond the visible supply. Look for the hidden positives nested even beneath your critical and cynical thoughts, observations and ideas. Challenge yourself to see them. This will lead to new opportunities as well as help you cultivate a positive state of mind required to build, live, and enjoy The Great Life.