The following is as Steve Pavlina suggests, stating the obvious. But not what we normally do.
“When you succeed or fail, there’s always a cause. You can backtrack your results to figure out what caused them. You might not be able to do this perfectly, but you’ll usually have a pretty good idea of the contributing factors.
What caused your income, your health, and your relationships to improve over the past several years? What caused things to get worse? Can you identify the specific causes of your best and worst results?
Once you know the contributing factors to your hits and your misses, your goal is to deliberately do more of what causes the successes and deliberately do less of what caused the failures.
Of course some of the contributing factors may not be under your direct control, but some of those factors will be. Focus your efforts on what you can control, and don’t worry about what’s outside your control.
I must admit that it was hard for me to take this exercise seriously, but I decided to try it anyway. The businessman was certainly doing a lot better than I was, so maybe he knew something I didn’t. I figured I had nothing to lose.”
Steve goes on to describe how with just this one thing, he dramatically increased his income and reduced his work load. This was from his latest, occasional newsletter. Steve’s site, in case you’ve never been, is packed with great posts. He has one of those rare personal blogs that actually brings in an income. He started early.
Davidya
Hi Davidya,
I see you’re a Steve Pavlina fan too. I just got that newsletter today and it has me thinking, too.
Like you, I’ll give it a try. What can it hurt?
Its funny how the easy things are the most powerful. We like to try and tell ourselves that life is hard and we can blame it on others. But really, the solutions are pretty easy. Certainly they may need work, but easy, especially if we’re choosing to have fun along the way.