Eat That Frog | Day 04

Everything we do has consequences, short term and long term. Today, we are going to look at our goals and see which ones have the greatest impact in our long-term goals.

When taking this from a business standpoint, it is important to have an end goal in mind. A long-term goal for me would have been something like Superstar Director, but I need to have goals that are far past that. How many years would I like to have my business? Is this just something I want to do while my kids are home?  For me, this is something I want to do 20 years from now. So how do my short-term goals impact that in the long run?  What are the things I need to be doing today to make sure that in 20 years I still have a booming business.

So I want to start thinking in the long-term versus the short-term perspective. Something important has long-term consequences. Things like training, teaching my recruits, and always selling will help me build a long-term business. Unimportant things have few or no consequences. Those things typically happen when I am throwing things together last minute. It’s the frivolous things I waste my time on that do nothing to benefit my business or my personal life.

Training yourself to be a long-term thinker in today’s society can be hard. We tend to do most everything with instant gratification in mind. Well, long-term thinkers function quite the opposite, they delay gratification knowing the end result can be much greater. Short-term thinkers often function in the here and now. They go for the instant gratification and the end result is short-term success. In my business world, operating the short-term would be party to party, or sale to sale. But I know that long term I need to always be building a team. I need to work on a base of customers and consultants, to grow my own mind and train my team. In the long run my team will function at a higher success rate and for a longer period of time.

So what makes a difference in your business or personal life? What kind of actions do you take that will give you a longer outcome? Or what is the most valuable use of your time?  Peter F. Drucker said, “Make your first things first and your second things never.”  Accomplish your biggest task first, the one that has the most valued outcome. Once that is done, move on to your next; one step at a time, one bite at a time.

Review your list of tasks regularly. Set clear priorities and make sure you focus on your most valued task first. Decide which is the most important thing you can be doing every hour of every day. Train yourself to work on that daily.