“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” – Robert Heinlein

Why, I often wonder, do so many of us simply allow our dreams to evaporate like the morning mist? We dream of making something great out of our lives and then find it easier to settle for anything but greatness. We even inwardly chide ourselves for being so foolish to have had such lofty dreams in the first place. “Whatever was I thinking when I thought I could have done x…?” is something we might have told ourselves more than once. But why should we abandon our dreams so easily and settle for second best?

The answer lies in our passion and determination to succeed in making our dreams reality when things go wrong. And something always seems to go wrong. We may find that the amount of sacrifice we need to put in to make our dreams real is far more than we had bargained for. Maybe it takes too much time, or money, or mental effort or any one of a thousand other things. When this happens we just tend to quietly abandon those dreams and tell ourselves that it was never really meant to be.

Then we can all too easily lose our lives to mundane daily trivia which we willingly allow to consume our entire lives. We slavishly follow the fortunes of fictional characters on TV and then tell ourselves we don’t have any time to do anything about improving our own lives. We find fault in family members, work colleagues and friends and could debate their shortcomings for hours, while never giving our own shortcomings a second thought.

Now compare this to the person with a set of clearly-defined goals. We may often describe people like this as “driven” or “obsessed” because it seems that they allow nothing to ever get in their way. They don’t allow their dreams to fade away, but instead they put every ounce of effort into making them real. For these people when something goes wrong then this spurs them on to redouble their efforts to succeed. They make new goals to deal with the problem and they don’t stop making new goals until they have achieved the success they desire.

Make your life count for something. Don’t let life’s problems steal it away from you.

“It’s not what happens to you that determines how far you will go in life; it is how you handle what happens to you.” – Zig Ziglar

The night is dark and the seas are rough. A huge storm is raging and fierce waves crash against the rocks with explosive force. A piece of driftwood is picked up by the waves and splinters into a thousand pieces as it smashes into the rocks.. But amid all this chaos is a beacon of calm. A slender white lighthouse stands tall and strong amid the destructive power of wind and waves and beams out its warning signals to passing ships to remain clear of the rocks all around it. Once the storm passes all is calm and serene as the waves gently lap at the rocks below the lighthouse and there is no evidence of the frightening destructive power of the night before.

In life you want to be the lighthouse in the storm. You want to be the person who remains strong and steady even as chaos and confusion rages all around you. You can cope with the situation because you know your own inner strength and you can dig deep from within your mental resources to cope with all that life throws at you. And, just like the lighthouse, once the storm passes, nobody would ever know from looking at you that anything bad or frightening had ever happened.

We all have many storms to deal with in life but it is how we deal with them that is important. It does not matter to the storm whether we stand strong like the lighthouse or whether we panic and crumble when the going gets tough. But it matters to us and it matters to those close to us who rely on us for protection and leadership in bad times as well as good.

Standing up to adversity makes us stronger and, even if we feel frightened on the inside, the steely determination that has got us through life so far will get us through the storm and allow us to be a shining example to those who follow us. Become the lighthouse.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

There is something very comforting about the fact that excellence can become a habit in our lives. Sadly most people never even strive for excellence in anything they achieve and even those that do are content to experience the occasional moment of high achievement.

We all have certain skills that serve to set us apart from others around us and we should consider it our duty in life to make the most of our own particular skill set. If we have the ability to be excellent at something then we owe it to ourselves and to those around us to ensure that we excel at this, not just occasionally but all the time.

Repetition is the key to ensuring that excellence becomes a habit in our lives. Having the mental attitude that we always want to do things today a little better than we did them yesterday will keep us on the right track. Because of this we must take the time and effort to schedule success into our lives. It may seem a strange concept to “schedule success” but that is exactly what we need to do.

If we are content to be an employee then we can come into work on Monday morning with no ideas on how to make the most of the week ahead and we can just let our boss set the agenda for us. But as entrepreneurs and masters of our own destiny then we set our own agendas. By the time we start work on Monday morning we must already have a plan of action to propel us through the week ahead and other plans for the next month, the next quarter and beyond.

We must write down our goals, print them out and keep them where we can see them every day as reminders of where we want to be. Make excellence a habit as we drive our businesses forward in the direction we want to go and have a clear series of written goals to guide us.

If we set ourselves a series of challenging (but achievable) targets then we can make it a habit to constantly meet and exceed those targets as we strive ever upwards. We are what we repeatedly do so we might as well repeatedly strive for excellence rather than to repeatedly settle for second best.

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The process of learning is a life-long experience because things around us are constantly growing and evolving. This is why we need to constantly learn new skills and new ways of doing things to keep up with our changing environment. If we suddenly stop learning and sit back, content, with the attitude that we no longer need to learn any more than we are setting ourselves up for a big fall.

I like to picture our lives as having a series of walls we must climb to see what awaits us on the other side and as we learn new things we get to climb over another wall to see what new experiences await us on the other side. That way we can never feel tempted to sit back and say “that’s it, I think I know everything now” because we know there is a wall right in front us with things to be discovered right on the other side.

It is important to take a look over the wall because it is our curiosity about the world around us and our desire to discover new things which drives us on and keeps us mentally alert. It also helps keep us humble because there is nothing more arrogant in suddenly declaring one day: “I know it all now.”

Even if we have successfully grasped every opportunity which has come our way and built up a successful business for ourselves we cannot risk never seeking to go beyond what we have already mastered because standing still is not an option. If the world around us is constantly growing and evolving then by standing still we are actually moving backwards. Successful businesses stay successful because they adapt and innovate. These owners are always mastering new skills to keep one step ahead of the opposition. All it takes is for one of your competitors to be hungrier for success than you are and they will grow and prosper while you remain trapped behind a brick wall which you cannot even see over.

Moving beyond what we have already mastered is a life-long commitment which keeps us mentally alert and ready to face the new challenges which are presented to us each and every day.

“Look for the opportunities in the difficulties, not the difficulties in the opportunities.” – Victor Fiorelli

Many of us may pass up perfectly good opportunities which come our way because we wrongly think of them as being too complicated or too difficult for us. We give them little more than a passing nod before waving them off for the next person to discover. We can recognize when we do this because we tell ourselves things like: “I could never possibly do that,” or “I would love to do this but unfortunately I am not nearly clever enough.”

If this has happened to you then you have been focusing upon the difficulties in the opportunities and not the opportunities in the difficulties. If your primary focus is on how difficult something is then there is a huge temptation to give up without a fight. Switching your focus to the opportunity won’t make the problem any less real but it could have a massive impact on how you deal with that problem.

Now instead of telling yourself you can’t overcome the difficulty you are prepared to use all your mental skills and cunning to conquer the challenge at hand so that the opportunity you desire does not slip out of your grasp. You know that success is just over the next hill and all you have to do is get there, so now you redouble your efforts to defeat all that is standing between you and success.

Maybe there is one big difficulty you have to overcome or perhaps a series of smaller ones, but you can embrace the challenge as you relish the mental thrill of getting to your goal in life. Again the problems and difficulties are exactly the same as before but now a far tougher and far more focused you is the person dealing with them.

Nothing is more empowering than when you overcome adversity to take your prize and now that you have figured out how to do so you become a leader in your community. Now people want to hear your story. They want to learn how you were able to do what they failed at and how you turned your life around when they had to accept defeat.

Be the person who turns the piece of coal into a diamond and be prepared to reap the rewards you now so richly deserve. You have earned your success; now help others to follow in your footsteps.

“Computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1 1/2 tons.” -Popular Mechanics, 1949

It seems almost impossible to believe now, but when that quote was written in 1949 the author really was trying to imagine a time when a computer might be as advanced as he described. Imagine if you were to be transported back in time and you could meet the author as he wrote that article for Popular Mechanics. It would be even better if you could bring along one of today’s smart phones, an iPad or some similar electronic tablet. However even if all that were possible you would immediately run into problems.

How would you explain things like high-speed broadband, Wi-Fi, Twitter feeds, wireless hotspots and USB devices to someone who had no idea what any of that was? You might as well be speaking in a foreign language and the devices you brought with you could have been the work of alien technology to someone from 1949. And as intelligent and forward-looking as we are today how impossible it is for us to know what technology will have in store in another 60 years.

But let us leave technology to one side for now and look to our own lives. What improvements do you have planned for your own future? And more importantly what are you doing today to ensure that your improved future actually happens? If you don’t give your own life some defined purpose and structure then you are not planning for your future at all. You are letting other people make plans now for what your life will be like ten or 20 years down the road.

Technology has only moved on at such a fast pace because ultimately people have wanted it to happen and poured vast resources into making it happen. Now sadly there are no vast resources being targeted at planning for your future – how your life shapes up is left entirely in your own hands. The decisions you make today can have a profound effect on the life you will live tomorrow. Maybe you are disappointed with the life you have now because of poor decisions you made in the past but that is no reason to keep storing up problems for the future. It is never too late to get back on track and to make changes which will pay dividends in years to come. Start investing in your future today.