Saturday, September 18, 2010

Business principles #1

Making your dreams a reality takes much more than the realization of your goal.
After reading dozens of self-help books, hundreds of blogs and pursuing my own personal struggle for success, I have come up with a general recipe, or outline, of key ingredients.
Since all I seem to be doing lately is writing about business, I figured I may as well start listing what I have drawn up from my own introspective contemplations.
Today I will spell out three concepts that I feel make up the category of "Drive" in pursuing an objective.
These are, in chronological order: Inspiration, Motivation, and Determination.
Of these three concepts, inspiration is the easiest. It can come from a thought, something you heard, something you saw or something you experienced. The inspiration is the root of the dream. I haven't met many people who have trouble finding inspiration, although many people say they are searching for it.
What I have found is hoards of people, myself included, who perpetually search for the motivation to take action on what inspired them. Having done this myself, I spent hundreds of hours searching the internet and talking to people to find some way of sparking the motivation to get started on an objective and stay consistent.
Since consistency is key, motivation is what must be maintained to see a project through, right?
Wrong.
The third and most important element in this triad is determination. That is the driving force that underlies all of what it takes to be successful.
Many people find it easy to start a project, and some are even able to stay motivated to continue with it, but for any project, plan or agenda that will take real time and yield true results, determination is the key (or determining) factor.
That internal drive that forces you to see something through is more essential to the pursuit of success than any other factor, in my humble opinion.
So many people spend time searching for the external motivation to do something that they ignore what it will take to finish. I believe that if we see things from the end and map our plan of attack backwards, we are much more likely to start, and finish.