Soft-Innovation. (Part 3)

As Thomas Merton put it, “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” Don’t put your ladder against the wrong wall! If are meant to be a professional salesperson, you won’t feel successful as a “successful” investment banker.

People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

10 Keys To Success

So now that you know what success is, how do you get there? Believe it or not, although success may look different for everyone, there is a common list of strategies or keys to achieving that success. And here’s the really good news, once you learn how to succeed, you can apply these tools to bring about success in multiple areas of your life.

These keys or tools listed below will help you unlock success in your life. They are strategies used by successful athletes, businessmen, and artists. Make sure you have your clear vision of a successful life in front of you as work through them.

The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.”

1st Key: Make A Plan

The very first key to success is to make a plan. This means having a clear picture of what a successful life looks like to you and putting together a well-defined set of goals to get you to that life.

Planning well starts with figuring out what you want and writing it down in detail. It’s important to have clarity on your definition of success. This is the foundation for your plan.

To succeed means to accomplish a goal. By this definition, if you don’t set goals, you’ll never succeed.

2nd Key: Prepare For The Unexpected

Many of the best-laid plans have been derailed by a single misstep. Preparing for the unexpected can make the difference between your plans ending in failure or succeeding despite a bump in the road.

So how do you prepare for the unexpected? Start by making a list of things that could go wrong in your plan. Then create workarounds and backups for each potential problem. Even when I’m driving a route I know well, I usually keep my GPS up and running to help me navigate traffic jams, construction, or missed turns.

3th Key: Prioritize Your Goals

As you create your systems and put your good habits into practice, you’ll probably find there isn’t enough time in each day to work towards every goal. Manage your time wisely, so that the right activities take priority.

If you’re not sure how to prioritize goals, it may help to apply some techniques like a numerical ranking system or the Eisenhower Matrix. Prioritizing your goals also means not letting things that never even made your list get in front of pursuing what did. In other words, don’t let talking to a telemarketer derail your plans to work on your website.?

4rd Key: Develop Good Habits?

You can have big dreams, great goals, and still fail. The third key of success requires you to turn your goals into actions. Repeated actions in the right direction become helpful habits. And once you form the right habits, you create momentum.

Creating systems for your life as you are forming good habits can help you to stay on track. You can build systems by grouping good habits together. Having a system in place can keep you from having to make decisions on the fly or keep track of doing all your goal-oriented tasks one by one.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

Instead, you follow an intentional daily pattern that moves you towards your goals with less stress. This has the added benefits of reducing stress and freeing your attention to focus on the things that truly require more brainpower.

5th Key: Learn from Your Mistakes

They say “the road to success is paved with failure.” What they don’t say, is that each piece of failure on that road probably looks different than the other. Success most likely came by way of trying (and failing) many different ways. Yes, you can fail your way to success, but almost never by making the same mistake over and over.

Failure is a part of the process of becoming successful if you make it a teacher. Learning and growing after failure makes it useful.

For example, consider a runner. Every race a runner loses, they may still be improving. If they build up strength and try new running techniques, they will likely see progress. They may move up from 5th place to 3rd place to 2nd. Even though they aren’t first, each race is a part of the process of success, moving them closer to getting first place.

I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.

6th Key: Try Different Strategies

The road to success is not straight. There are stops and starts, turns, and detours. Anyone who says they’ve got the exact path to success for you is probably lying. As the (creepy) saying goes, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Heck, there’s more than one way to get the meaning of that saying across. Let’s make up a newer more pet-friendly one: “There’s more than one way to peel a banana.”

Any way you put it, there’s more than one way to do – just about everything. So, if at first, you don’t succeed, try another way.?Try a new strategy. Come at your goal from a new angle, at a different time, with a different person. There could in fact be many effective strategies. You just need to find the right one. The only way to find it is to keep changing and keep trying until you find one that works.

7th Key: Take Smart Risks

As you try out different strategies, you may find that you’re trying something entirely new. It might feel scary. Admittedly, taking risks is intimidating, but taking smart risks can have big payoffs. Taking a smart or calculated risk means researching potential outcomes and determining what your chances of success are and if the payoff is worth risking the harm that could be done.

It takes time to develop good risk-taking skills. You may have a few painful failures as you figure out how to take calculated risks in life. It’s best to start out taking small risks. As you get better at it, you’ll probably become more comfortable. But don’t let your comfort be the only deciding factor. Often, taking a risk is the only way to achieve success.

8th?Key: Learn from the Experts

Truthfully, there is no one path to success. Nevertheless, a lot can be learned from studying other successful people.?Even better is?to be mentored?or to study directly under someone. Recorded history doesn’t always catch all the details and nuances.

Start with doing some research and study successful people who did something in the same realm of what you are striving to achieve.

9th?Key: Master How to Say No

I think our culture undervalues the importance of saying no. It can be uncomfortable. If you listen to interviews with successful people, you’ll probably hear them talk about turning down great opportunities they knew aren’t right for them.

Learning how to say no is an essential key to success in life. Successful people say no all the time. Saying no means knowing yourself, your boundaries, and being able to determine what is worth your time and energy. Saying no to the wrong thing leaves space to say yes to the right thing. It leaves room for the?right?opportunity.

10th Key: Invest in Relationships

While the saying, “it’s not what you know it’s who you know” may overstate the importance of relationships to success, it’s certainly not without merit. As a rule, investing in relationships is quite valuable. People are made to be connected to a community. The benefits of being in a safe and encouraging community go beyond success in any one area of life. As James Clear says in Atomic Habits:

?One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.”

This the design process.

Design Tools (For example)

1. Value stream mapping (VSM) is defined as a lean tool that employs a flowchart documenting every step in the process. Many lean practitioners see VSM as a fundamental tool to identify waste, reduce process cycle times, and implement process improvement.

2. A business model canvas is a visual representation of a business model, highlighting all key strategic factors. In other words, it is a general, holistic and complete overview of the company’s workings, customers, revenue streams and more.

The actual business model canvas definition was first proposed by Alexander Osterwalder, a Swiss entrepreneur, and consultant, but has gone to be used around the world.?

3. Marketing Mix; Marketing is simply defined as putting "the right product at the right place, at the right price and at the right time. The concepts behind the marketing are product and service, its price, its promotion, its distribution, shortly "Marketing Mix" or " Four Ps".

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8 steps to problem solving

• Step 1. Define the problem. What exactly is going on? Sometimes a problem just seems too big to tackle. However, if you make a list and break it down into smaller parts that you can make a start on solving, it’ll feel more manageable.
• ?Step 2. Set some goals. Focus on the steps you can take to resolve things, rather than just thinking about what you’d like to happen. Maybe you wish you had more money. Make a list of all the ways you can save or earn more. It could mean walking to school rather than taking the bus, or applying for a part-time job.
• Step 3. Brainstorm possible solutions. Be creative and come up with as many solutions as you can think of. Some ideas may be way out there, but don’t worry about evaluating them yet. If you want to solve a conflict, you’re having with your parents by escaping on a rainbow unicorn, write it down! Keep an open mind and list anything that comes to mind, plausible or not.
• Step 4. Rule out any obvious poor options. Okay, reality check. Evaluate your list of ideas and rule out the ones that are unrealistic or unhelpful. Bye-bye, rainbow unicorn. But how about trying to see things from your parents’ point of view? That option should probably stay on your list.
• Step 5. Examine the consequences. Go through the options you’ve got left and for each one write a list of their pros and cons.
• Step 6. Identify the best solutions. Now it’s time to make a decision. Look at your list of options, and pick out the ones that are most practical and helpful. There may be one obvious solution, or some might work in combination.
• Step 7. Put your solutions into practice. Have faith in yourself and make the commitment to try out one of your solutions.
• Step 8. How did it go? So, you tried it out. What happened? If you had more than one solution and the first didn’t work, move on to another one.

Design Tools (For example)

Even if your job title doesn't include the word design. But you have to design it.

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I didn't explain the work life balance. If you can design success and problem solving. You will get work life balance results.

Are you in the category of designers who can design only (90%) or performed designer (+10% theory).

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