Find success by blazing your own trail through life

The most successful people in life are those that have decided to blaze their own trail.  The further into uncharted territory they go, the more likely they are to make it into the history books if they reach their goal.  A post office employee blazed new trails into a discipline of physics most of us can't understand, and everyone know his name, Albert Einstein.

Some people blaze trails in territory everyone thought they already knew.  Michael Dell if famous for his trail in the PC business.  The PC wasn't anything new, Mr. Dell just focused on a target of delivering it better and cheaper than anyone else.  After he hit that target, he kept adjusting the target and today the Dell website is filled with technology offerings.

Starting a business needs to start with looking in the mirror.

So you are thinking of starting a business?  Before you do make sure you are ready.  Starting a business is a very exciting time and people get caught up in the romance of the idea every day.  Most people see something that looks like a good idea and they go for it.  Most business failures start here.

There is a funny dichotomy of people that start a side business in addition to their income and people that start a business to replace their income.  You would hope that the people looking to replace their job would spend the time to make sure they are doing something they will enjoy.  The funny thing is the people with the “hobby” business tend to have fun and do well because they only do things they want to do and getting a little extra money is a bonus.

Want to know an easy way to get other people to stop overloading your schedule?

Every day that you get out of bed you are faced with a growing number of events all begging for your time.  Each day there seems to be just one more thing to take care of.  Your life is cluttered with things that society, your family and friends think are “important” so you added them to your “to do” list.  Have you ever asked yourself why you do this to yourself?  Would you like to find a better way?

As humans, when we accumulate all of these things that we need to do “later” our minds become a mush of these events.  One day we wake up and wonder where the time went.  I call this process filling your “accumu-later”.  Each of us has an accumu-later that has at least a few tasks in it.  The more you have stuffed into your accumu-later the less effective you feel.

Reach Your Goals By Hitting Your Targets.

Receiving one of the most important lessons on focus very early in my military career turned out to be a very lucky break. When I enlisted in the military I asked for the shortest technical school available, and that turned out to be security police. I was assigned to a very small base and my primary job was to guard airplanes at night by myself in the middle of nowhere.  After doing this for a month where I was so cold, the outside of my uniform literally frosted over, I realized I needed to find something else. You could squeeze the arms of my outer jacket and watch the frost crack.