Knowing Your "Why"

You Won’t Succeed If You Don’t Know Your “WHY”

Now for the power step – experiencing the underlying reason why each goal is really important to you. It’s one thing to make a list of goals.  It’s quite another to really get in touch with them; to walk with them and try them on for a time before committing yourself to the time and energy required to achieve your goals.  My friend John DiLemme calls this knowing your why.

For each major goal, ask yourself why it’s important to achieve it. Stay with the question for a while, delving deeper and deeper.  Why is it important to become a millionaire (assuming it is)? Is it the pride you’ll feel, the cars you’ll drive, the neighborhood you can live in?  Maybe it’s to prove yourself, or to provide special opportunity to your family.  Maybe it’s to retire to do community service or support your favorite charity. Keep repeating the question asking “what else” as new answers reveal themselves.  You may find that what really motivates you deep down surprises you.  When you’re sure that you’ve gotten to the bottom of it, write it down in a new column labeled “My Why”. Now, your long term planner looks like this:

It’s a good idea to review your entire list for internal consistency.  For example, if your goal is to have a net worth of $5 million within five years and under the 3 year goals you’ve listed net worth of $6 million, you’ve got an inconsistency.  Conversely, if your 3 year goal is to have a $5 million net worth and your 1 year goal is to increase your income to $100,000, you’ve got a different kind of inconsistency.  It’s incredibly important to make your goals realistic and consistent.  Otherwise, your subconscious will go to work against you.

Here’s a good guideline for setting each of your goals; choose a comfortable target for each one, and raise it by 5% -10%.  That way it’s a stretch without being intimidating.

Once this process is done, I transfer my daily action steps to a separate sheet.  You can do this to summarize the goals in all your major life areas into weekly, monthly and quarterly goals and action steps.

I prioritize each item using a dual system.  I call it the ABC, 123 System.  The first step is to categorize each item into its first level of importance.  The most important action steps (these are usually business items) are labeled “A”, the next most important are “B” and things like chores are labeled “C”. Within those categories, you will prioritize each item with a 1, 2, 3 etc. depending on its level of importance within the larger category.  So, the single most important thing for you to accomplish today is labeled “A-1”, the next most important item is labeled “A-2”. The least important thing to do that day might be “C-5” or “C-10” depending on how many items are in the “C” category. 

Mary Kay Ash (of Mary Kay cosmetics fame) is an extremely successful business woman.  She said that one of the keys to her success was to select the six most important things to accomplish each day and to complete them in order of importance. Then, she was finished for the day. 

In other words, success isn’t a matter of accomplishing everything you can think of. It's a matter of accomplishing the most important things.  Once you have done so, you are through for the day.  As you develop the skill of identifying the most important things to accomplish, you can work fewer hours, because the busyness goes down, while the impact of each item goes up.

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