The One Word Answer To Achieving More

The One Word Answer To Achieving More

October 2nd, 2020 // 11:13 am @

The One Word Answer To Achieving More

What sure seems like a very long time ago, I heard one of my great mentors (whom many reading this message today have heard of), Dan Kennedy, said he promised to give the ‘secret to life’ in one word at a seminar.  That word was?

DECIDE.

At the end of the day, you could pick a lot of words… dream, imagine, believe, or even action and the words that I learned from my Grandmaster in the Martial Arts about discipline, confidence, self-control, perseverance, and so many others.  However, even all of those powerful words first begin with a decision.

The catalyst for all change is first you must decide.  The point Dan Kennedy made was simple: without decision you remain stagnant, you straddle the fence with no foot on either side, and you sit idle never taking any decision.

If you DECIDE with conviction and you are true to yourself then you have done the hardest part of all – you’ve committed to a path forward – now all that is left is making it happen.

There is great power in decision; far more power than most people ever realize because they often avoid them as much as possible.

Instead, welcome decisions – decisions drive progress and progress drives results.  The more comfortable you become with deciding, the more opportunity moves to you, the more success you will inevitably have, and the more skilled you become at overcoming even the toughest challenges.

Yesterday, I wrote about the debate you have with yourself – the most important one, far more so than any you would have with anyone else about anything else – and those internal debates are your mechanism for making decisions in your life and business.

Having a system that takes two or more options and delivers a consistent result is the difference between those who succeed at high levels and those that never get started.

So, how do you do this?

It really begins by having clarity over what you want, what outcome you are driving towards, and what is your primary objectives are at the moment.

The clearer you are, the easier decisions will come.

From there, you get to decide the ‘how to’ once you know what you want and where you are headed.

In dentistry, for the most part, my doctors come to me to work less, make more, see fewer, earn greater, do meaningful dentistry, reward their teams, and keep their practice as relatively simple as they can so they can enjoy as much of their life as possible.

You’d think that would be everybody but it isn’t.  Some want more and bigger, or they want multiple practices and that’s fine too.

There are many models to operate within and many ways to get achieve your goals.  That is why everything must come from you – it must be personalized for your own vision.  No one can tell you what your vision should be because they don’t understand the context of your life.

Which leads me to the most critical way to evaluate decisions… you have to weigh them against the two things.  First, your principles – what are your guiding principles for your life and your business?  These relate standards of integrity that you feel strongly about never breaking.  They provide the quickest way to rule out most decisions.  You likely do this without even noticing.

When you have a guiding list of principles and preferences to operate within then you don’t have to sit around pondering and wasting time because you’ll be able to short cut the process by relying on your pre-determined structure around your decision making.

The second aspect to consider is weighing the alternatives.  And this is very important, I have written about ‘opportunity cost’ here many times and it’s the greatest ‘cost’ of anything in life and business that you ever experience.

It is what you decide not to do as a result of what you decide to do.  Eliminating options is a form of decision making.  Being aware of what you don’t want is just as critical as understanding what you do want.

And that is where the contemplation and calculation comes into play; vetting the options by thinking into the future of what each decision will bring you as a result.

Now, there are certainly different degrees of importance here.  Where to eat or even where to go on vacation, don’t carry significant impacts to your life.

Whereas, business and investing decisions (and of course major life decisions) are much more final and carry greater consequences.

So, the morale of the story is the greater the decision, the more important it is to have a system for how you evaluate and ultimately commit.

I like to think of every decision opening up the path that makes it possible for you to move from where you are right now to where you want to go next.  We’ll spend time in the coming weeks examining some of the toughest decisions you face.

Remember, whether they are financial decisions inside your business, life decisions inside your home, big or little, frequent or one time – nothing changes, nothing progresses, nothing improves, nothing gets experienced, and most of all nothing gets done until something gets decided!

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