MBA1431 What Will Stop You From Making 2020 a Success

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Hey oh welcome to the 100 Arm MBA show your go To Business podcast for daily business coaching every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn what will stop you from making 2020 a success. It is January 2nd. We are into 2020. Let's make sure it's our best year ever. What will stop us from making it the best year ever? Well that's what we'll be talk that way you can totally avoid these things. These are some insights that I have picked up over the years. Planning out my year in advance, trying to make sure I make that year a success. If you want to make 2020 your best year ever, then you want to listen up. It's easy for you to have good intentions, good hopes and not really capitalize on your opportunities and then actually end up making the year a success. This is critical. There's some simple steps that you could follow to make sure that your work your efforts in 2020, your blood, sweat and tears don't go to waste. It's not that you're not working hard, it's just that you don't have a plan to implement that hard work. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Let's jump right into it. What's gonna stop you from being successful this year? I'm gonna start with the most important thing. Not having a clear definition of success. A lot of us are like, hey, I want to win in 2020, I want to crush it in 2020, I'm gonna kill it. But what does that really mean? What does it look like to be successful? You have to define it right now. And when you define it, you gotta get specific. Peter Drucker says, what gets measured gets managed. So if you can't measure the success, if you don't have something actually that you can look at and say, yes, I've hit the target, then you're in trouble. So whatever that is for you. Is it a number? Is it a dollar number, like I want to make X amount of dollars in revenue? Is it a customer number, number of users? Is it a task that needs to be accomplished, like launching your business or product? Get very clear about what success means to you and define it. This is so important, not only because you need to know what the finish line is, what's the goal, so you can work towards it. A lot of us were just like, we want this year to be better than last year. No, that's not good enough. Our minds need something specific to go after. Just like when you put your address in the gps, you've got to put an exact address. You can't just write anything down, otherwise you're just not going to get to the destination. And your mind works the same way. Not only does having a specific definition for success, a specific goal, help you get to the destination, but it gives you motivation. You have to have a vision. This is something that I learned from, from Arnold Schwarzenegger's autobiography, Total Recall. Arnold's very big on this about having a very clear vision. What does it look like to be successful? So I would say this is kind of step two. A lot of people skip this step because it seems a little bit woo woo, or maybe it just takes too much time. But it's important. It's very important because you need to make an emotional connection to your success or your vision of success. So you're gonna define your success. Say, for example, you say, I wanna make a million dollars in revenue this year. That's your success metric. This is a number, your goal, your target. Great. Now you have to have a clear vision of that success. And what Arnold recommends And he says really worked for him. And he's had a lot of success in his life, going from a poor young boy in Austria to the most famous and successful bodybuilder of all time at one point, one of the highest paid actors of all time and the governor of California for. For eight years. I think it's worth a try to try this so we have a defined understanding of success. In the example I gave a million dollars in revenue, envision yourself actually accomplishing that goal. You want to visualize it, have a clear vision in your head. This may take a few moments where you just sit down quietly and think about, how does it feel? Imagine you hit that goal. Let's pretend we fast forward and you hit that goal.

How do you.

How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel secure? Does it make you feel a sense of pride, accomplishment? What does your life look like? Just you want to pretend for a little bit, imagine for a little bit, dream a little bit, you know, how does your life look like when you hit that goal? Does that mean now you can, you know, put that deposit so you can buy your first home, what kind of car you're driving, what are you wearing, what do you do on the weekends? You have to really visualize what your life looks like when you hit that success. Really have a vision. And by doing that, you're actually making it real. You're actually convincing your mind, hey, this is a reality that can happen. I can actually make this happen. Because you're imagining it in your head and you're envisioning it, and you're also making an emotional connection to your actual goal. It's not just, hey, this is a number I want to hit. And it's just a number on a spreadsheet. It has a meaning behind it. It actually translates to reality. Number three, having one big goal. I really believe that this is a great strategy. And I learned this from Noah Kagan, who is an early employee at Facebook and now runs multiple nine figure businesses. And he said, at Facebook, we always had one goal, just one goal. And it was growth for them, number of users. And they did everything to work towards that goal. And everybody sang from the same song. She on the team. Anytime we made a decision, we asked ourselves, does it help us reach that goal? If yes, we do. If not, we don't. So I love this idea. And if your goal is a million dollars in revenue, that's your one goal. A lot of people, they try to put so much on their plate. They say, I want to have a Business that's, you know, a million dollar in revenue. But I also want to win a Grammy and I also want to sell a million albums of this thing, and I want to also produce a movie. And of course, here we're talking about professional goals, we're talking about the business here. We have personal goals that we all want to hit, but we're talking about right now, one singular professional goal for your business. This allows your whole team to understand this is what we're trying to do here. This is our goal. This is how we track it. This is how we make sure we're on track. And that is totally, totally a different experience. Everybody's focused on one thing. The next thing I want to share with you, that I want you to avoid like the plague, is being distracted by other metrics. What you want to do is every single day, you want to look at the metric for your success goal. So if it's a million dollars in revenue, you're looking at growth, you're looking at revenue, you're looking at the trajectory of your business when it comes to money. If the one goal is to launch your new software app, that's the one goal. What's the metric for doing that? Looking at your Trello board, looking at the progress of the project, seeing what's being completed, what's left on the to do list. You want to look at those metrics that, that will help you get to that goal. Every other metric you need to stop worrying about because it's going to overwhelm you. A lot of us, we worry about too many things at one time and we just want to focus on the metrics that matter to our goal. Some of us are worried about our Twitter followers or worried about our download numbers, or we're worried about how many teams times you spoke on stage. Not as much as last year. That's not good enough. Focus on one goal and get it done. Make your next year the Twitter follower year, right? Or the getting on stage year. The point here is, is that when you are being distracted by other metrics, your attention, big word here, your attention gets spread thin and you want your full attention on the metrics for your singular goal, your singular definition of success. Next thing, fear of failure. And when I say failure, I also want to include the idea or the concept of disappointment. As you're trying to reach your goal, you reach your success throughout the year, you will have disappointing days, you will have dips, you will have moments where you don't feel like you're going to make it. You're going to have times where you feel like maybe you're not cut out for this, all that kind of stuff. Doubts you're going to try things, they don't work, you're going to do things and they're not going to be as successful as you hoped. As you're trying to approach that goal, you can't let that stop you from moving forward. One of the best things that I learned along the years is to be very resilient and just let things slide off your back. It's not easy all the time. There are some really tough days sometimes where you really need to hit a goal for that month so you could be on track for next month and next month so you can hit your goal and you don't hit it and it's really disappointing and you feel like, man, this is tough. But you have to find the resolve and realize, hey, this is just a dip and I can make up for it. I can work harder next month, I can do other things to try to make up for this dip. Business is an up and down roller coaster ride, right? Sometimes you're high, sometimes you're low. But as long as we hit that goal at the end, this is the whole point of the ride. For example, I have some financial goals for the business and I have some milestones for every month. So I got to hit X amount of money for every month. Some months I surpass that milestone. So say, for example, you're supposed to hit a certain revenue number and we surpass it by a few thousand. Great. Awesome. We're ahead of the game. In the back of my mind, because of the experiences I've had in my life, I'm like, this is kind of like a reserve tank. Great that we have passed the, you know, the goal for this month to hit the goal for the year. Because there are going to be moments, are going to be months that things are going to not grow as fast or the pace is going to slow down. And I need that extra revenue that I made this month to make up for some, you know, down months. So expect failure, expect some dips. It's going to happen. So make sure you know that you are ready for it. And being ready for it emotionally is half the battle is half understanding, hey, when it happens, like, oh, I was expecting this, this is supposed to happen. And you know what? No problem. We're going to work harder, we're going to make up for it. I made up for it last month anyway, that kind of stuff. Now that tip leads me to the next One, not having. Now that last, now that last thing I just mentioned leads me to the next thing. I want you to avoid not having milestones for your goal. It's very hard for you to hit the destination without having milestones. I was speaking to a friend of mine who's a pilot, and he says that they plug in the coordinates for their destination, you know, for a flight that's maybe 14 hours. But throughout the flight, every few minutes, the program will auto correct, it will adjust the coordinates to make sure it's on track because there's winds, there's weather, there's things that, you know, the plane is avoiding, but it's constantly checking in. Hey, am I on track? Do I need to adjust? Do I need to change the coordinates a little bit so I can move to the, you know, east or the west or the north or the south? And that makes total sense. When it comes to a journey, a destination, same thing goes with your goals. You can't just expect that, hey, I said by the end of the year, in 12 months, I'm going to hit this goal. And it just should do it because I said it right. No, you got to measure it. And you have to have milestones along the way. So every month at least you should have a milestone. And basically you're just going to work backwards. So if you have a goal, say for example, you said, I want to launch my new app by the end of the year. What are all the tasks you have to do to launch this app, including all the marketing materials, the website, the social media profiles, all the things you need to do to launch a new business, List everything you have to do, break it into 12 months and make sure you've completed all those tasks at the end of each month. If you haven't, you know that you're not going to hit the goal if you don't make up for it. And guess what? If you can get ahead a little bit, that's even better because you might have some unforeseen situation in the future that you have to take some time off. So having milestones, no matter what the goal is, will help you hit the goal and stay on track and also give you that boost of confidence. Hey, I'm on track. I'm getting closer and closer to hitting that success, that vision that. That goal I plan to have accomplished by the end of 2020.

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To wrap up today's lesson, I want to make sure everybody who's listening to today's podcast to have the best year ever. But it's not going to happen by chance. I want you to really take to heart and take note of the things I mentioned today. These are things I learned the hard way by making mistakes, by not hitting my goals, by slacking off and not having a plan, by not having a clear success or in envisioning that success and really embodying it. These are really important things you need to implement to ensure it's not a failure, it's not a waste of a year, it's an absolute success. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now. That way you tell whatever you use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Radio, Overcast, whatever you use to listen to podcasts, by hitting subscribe, you tell that app, hey, when the next episode's available, make sure it's ready on my device. It also helps us grow as a podcast, so make sure you do that right now. Thank you in advance for that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It's a new year. It's a new beginning. It feels good. But understand every day that goes by. Right now we're in January 2nd, right? Tomorrow's January 3rd, January 4th. Every day that goes by, it's going to get harder and harder for you to reach your end of year goal. If you don't get started, every day that goes by is a day wasted and a day less that you can't work on that goal and contribute to that success of that goal. So get started right now. Make sure you take advantage of every day that you have in the year. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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