The Ultimate Guide to Achieving Massive Success in Business

They say that charity begins at home. This is not just any other meaningless proverb that people through around. It is deeper than we all want to imagine. Because at the end of your life you will realize one simple truth of life: Everything you achieve in life starts with you.

You cannot dominate the world of business unless you can dominate yourself. Warren Buffet, one of the most eminent investors of our time, once said that you cannot win in the world of business unless you can control your emotions. But dominating yourself is not just about your emotions. You have to take charge of your mind, your emotions and your actions and everything else about your life.?This can be easier said than done for most people. However, if you do the right thing to dominate yourself then you will rip more benefits than you ever imagined.

Having gained success in business and having many successful entrepreneurs as my close associates, I can confirm that you don't need many things to build a successful enterprise. You only need about five things: dominate your mind, raise your emotional intelligence, set the right goals, have concrete plans and take action. Many people have built multibillion-dollar enterprises without having enough capital. Many others have achieved tremendous success in other fields not because they had all the support they needed but because they focused on these five principles.

Principle 1: Dominate your Mind

If you stop doing anything for a moment and just focus on your mind you will realize that your mind is eternally busy. Thousands of thoughts cross your mind every minute. That is the nature of our mind and there is little you can do about it. However, some thoughts will cross your mind hundreds of times in a day. These are the dominant thoughts. They are the ones that dictate how you feel, what you do and how you react to given situations. In short, you manifest your most dominant thoughts. If you think more about failure, then soon you begin to fail. If you think more about success and the good things you can achieve soon you begin to see results.

While you cannot stop the thoughts that cross your mind you have the power to take charge of your mind and determine the most dominant thoughts you will have. This is important because if you want to achieve success in business and life you have to think more about what you want to achieve. You have to focus on your goals, your aspirations and the actions you need to take. This requires that you dominate your mind and not let it dominate you.

A vast majority of people fail not because they have no goals they want to achieve or plans to achieve those goals. They fail because they let their mind dominate them. They don't make an effort to manage what they think about. When they experience any problem the negative thoughts take over their mind and this ruin their plans.

To take charge of your mind you need to take some simple actions.?Here are some of the things you should do:

1)?????Make Friends with People doing what you want to do

If you are in real estate, make sure that you become friends with some of the most successful real estate agents and investors in your locality.?This way you will spend more time with people in the same business and will share more ideas on how to scale and grow your business. When you are alone your mind will drift to the ideas you share. This will form your dominant thoughts and will help you grow your business.

This applies to any other business. If you want to invest in crypto-currency become friends with people who are successful investors, if you are setting up a fintech become friends with people who have been through that path. If it is entirely a new industry find successful people in related industries and be their friends.?This way you will have more knowledgeable people to talk to when in doubt and you will share many great ideas that will occupy your mind and help you remain motivated to work on your goals.

2)?????Avoid watching too Much News

Today, cable channels have specialized in negative news. People in the media industry are focused on competing for viewership ratings. This has made negative news more appealing because a vast majority of us are driven by fear.?Negative news about disasters, politicians bickering and many other fear-mongering events attract more viewership.

If you want to remain sane in today's world where everyone is letting the media take their sanity avoid the media. This is because when you watch too much bad news your mind goes into a panic mode and focuses on everything that is falling apart around you. It becomes very difficult to achieve anything with such dominant thoughts.

Successful people limit how much TV they watch, how much time they spend on social media and the radio channels they listen to. Remember the media is not all bad. There are many educative programs both on the radio and on TV. You should therefore make time for such and especially business news that will have a direct impact on your business. But to take charge of your mind you need to make a deliberate effort to avoid those programs that feed you with negative news.

3)?????Seek an outlet

Building a successful business is not easy. There are days when things will go wrong even if you thought your plan was foolproof. When such happens many people like to recoil and lock themselves in a room to contemplate their problems.?While it is healthy to have alone time from time to time to contemplate issues affecting your reality, you also need an outlet. When you take on too much stress they build up in your mind and body and can destroy you.

It is therefore important to seek an outlet. One most effective way is finding a support group. This could be your siblings, friends or a professional coach. Someone you can talk to freely about your plans, ideas and problems. This will help you let out some of the issues disturbing you while at the same time helping you gather ideas on how to move forward.

Another interesting outlet is meditation. Many highly successful people meditate regularly. This is done to calm their minds so that they can think more clearly and work on their goals. Meditation has been practised for centuries all across the world because it offers many benefits.?Meditating once a day can help you dominate your mind so that you can achieve success.

Another important outlet for your mind is your hobbies. What are your hobbies? Don't be too busy for your hobbies as they will help manage your mind. If you love hiking, painting, playing music, dancing or whatever steels your attention and can keep you focused for days do it. Most successful people have time for their hobbies and if you want to join them consider doing the same. Hobbies have the power to distract you from random thoughts and let loose any energy bolted up in your body. This way you will go back to work when you are fresh and can think more clearly.

4)?????Develop a Reading Habit

Reading is one of the best antidotes to a restless mind. Reading is also the only way you will keep learning about yourself, your mind and your goals and your sphere of influence.?Make an effort to read every day. Focus on reading on topics that will help you grow. Remember reading a newspaper does not count here. You need to read educative books that will give you better ideas to occupy your mind instead of the negative ones that love to creep up on you when you are not paying attention.

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Principle 2: Develop your Emotional Intelligence

Another Important principle you need to work on to dominate yourself is your emotional intelligence. In the past, people use to think that the intelligence quotient was enough for one to succeed in business and life. However, if you are not emotionally stable it will be impossible to achieve any meaningful success in life.

While we all want to have an easy life, achieving success is not always easy. You have to put in more work than what an average person does. But most importantly you need the emotional intelligence to deal with difficult individuals and to navigate the rough spots along the way.?Some of the steps you need to improve your emotional intelligence include:

1)?????Self-awareness

You cannot be emotionally intelligent if you don't know who you are. You need to assess yourself and find out how you behave under certain conditions. Most often we overestimate our emotional intelligence. This is what holds us down most of the time. As you begin your journey towards success make sure that you audit your reactions to stressful situations in your life. This will give you an idea of the level of your emotional intelligence and how best to further develop it.

Besides knowing your level of emotional intelligence you need to identify your stressor. If you know what throws you off-balance emotionally it is easy to anticipate your reaction to any situation and work out a mechanism to manage the situation. Find out what pushes you to the edge emotionally and work around minimizing those episodes and being alert to your behaviour during such events. For example, if a dress down from a customer pushes you to give the customer a piece of your mind then you need to recognize such encounters as a trigger. By identifying such triggers the next time a customer becomes rude to you will be aware that you might be tempted to say more than you need to. This way you will be able to control your reaction because you knew the stressor and anticipated your reaction.

Selfsameness is not a one-time event. It is a continuous process throughout your life. Therefore make it your goal to keep learning about your life and things that affect you emotionally. You should also keep looking into your reaction to such situations and how best to improve so that you navigate the problematic situations better.

2)?????Social Awareness

Besides knowing yourself you also need to know others around you. This is what social awareness is all about. If a customer is rude you need to empathize with them and try to find out why they are rude. Knowing why people react in a given way will prepare you well to handle nasty situations.?This way you will be able to build bridges and forge forward a stronger individual.

Take time to study the people you interact with regularly and find out how emotionally intelligent they are.?This way you will be able to handle any nasty situation involving them more maturely. In addition, learn more about the local cultures. Sometimes culture clashes lead to situations that call on your emotional intelligence to navigate them. By understanding local cultures, individual expectations and common stressors you will be in a better position to navigate emotionally tense situations better.

3)?????Develop your Social Skills

Reflect on your early days in school. If you remember then you can remember the kids that often found themselves in problems with almost everyone, right? Who were they? They were individuals who had the least social skills, right? As kids people who were easygoing and could be friends with anyone rarely found themselves in conflict with others. They were not involved in fights and were often the teacher's favourite. However, the kids who had a problem making friends often had a rash of emotions in tense situations and would end up in a fight or other trouble.

This also happens in adulthood. Individuals with poorly developed social skills have it heard containing their emotions and often get crushed when their emotions are on the line. To succeed you need to manage your emotions. The easiest way to do this is to develop your social skills. This will help you build great friendships and handle emotionally intense situations better. Social skills will also help you learn more about other people and be more empathetic.

4)?????Maintain a Positive Attitude

A positive mental attitude can carry you through almost any situation in life.?If you want to improve your emotional intelligence then you need to work on maintaining a positive mental attitude. With a positive mental attitude, you will be able to have a better perspective of every situation and thus be able to take the right action despite the emotional stress the situation might cause you.

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Principle 3: Set the Right Goals

Setting goals is a powerful tool that can be the difference between success and failure. A majority of successful individuals set and work on their goals throughout their lives. It is because of having goals that they succeed. Most of those who struggle in life do so because they rarely set goals.

Goals act as your destination. What you are reaching towards. If you jump into your car and start driving without any clear destination in mind, you will drive around and eventually get tired and go back to where you started. However, if you had a goal of moving from one town into the next you will keep driving until you reach your destination. Goals tell you where you want to be at what time and this is the key to success.

If you don't set goals you will move in a circle and not get anywhere. You all have seen people who begin saving money at the beginning of the year to improve their well-being. Those who set a target of how much they want to save by the end of the year are more likely to reach that target. However, those that do not set the target save for the first few months and then once the motivation dies they stop saving and forget about it.

The same happens when starting a business. People who set clear goals for the business in terms of target revenue, customer base etc. keep working on their business and grow those businesses because they have targets (goals) they are tracking. However, those individuals who do not set goals or set some vague goals such as "build a successful business" have no way to track their goals and therefore when they don't feel like making progress they stop working on those goals and quickly their business fail.

How to Set the Right Goals

If you want to succeed in business your goals have to be specific to your business. Imagine your friend started a small software sales business. In two years your friend grows the business to serve so many customers that the business is now worth millions of dollars. You meet your friend and he tells you all about his business and how he became a millionaire in two years.

You feel that you are ways smarter than your friend and can pull off the same success as he has done with much less effort. You go home and decide to set a goal for yourself: "to become a millionaire in 18 months."?Next, you liquidate all your assets and start the same business as your friend with the main goal of becoming a millionaire through the business.

Do you think the business will succeed? No way. You have no goal for your business. You have a goal for yourself, not your business. Without goals for your business, you won't know what to do and how to move forward. You won't have metrics to measure to know if you are making the right progress. As a result, you will move in circles and when the market gets tight your business will fail. To succeed in business and life you need the right goals, not just any goals. Your goals must be specific to what you are doing not something else.

The key to setting the right goal is to have a specific destination for your endeavour.?If you want to become a CEO your goals should be career-specific not general goals about your life. If you want to build a business in a given industry your goals should be specific to your business and that industry not general about your business finances. This is what the right goals are. If your goals don't touch on the metrics that govern your operating environment then probably that is not the right goal for your business.?To set the right goals for your business follow these steps:

Step 1: Identify what matters

Let's say you want to own a billion dollars real estate business in London. This simply means your business should own properties worth at least a billion dollars. For this reason, you need to consider important metrics such as the value of properties you would buy, the location of those properties and the potential growth in value, the tenants, types of properties to acquire and financing for those properties.

Step 2: Identify the action you need to take

You can achieve absolutely nothing if you don't take action. To achieve anything action is your main fuel. Before you set the right goals for your business you need to consider the action you will have to take to reach the goals you are setting. Let's say your long term goal is "to build a 1 billion dollars worth of real estate Company in London by 2031". But you have a little problem, you don't have the money to make such a huge investment.

By considering the actions needed to reach your ambitious ten-year goal you will start by setting shorter-term goals that you can easily achieve. For example, your one-year goal can be "Earn 100,000 dollars by January 2023 (1 year period) from being a successful real estate agent in London".?Because you have don't have money to make large investments, you will start by going to school to become a real estate agent and then working your butts off in 12 months to earn a specified amount of money.?This is a very realistic goal and easily fits your long term goal.

From here you can then set your medium-term goals such as "Build a 10,000,000 dollars real estate investment company consisting of investments in physical properties and REITs on the London stock exchange by 2026." This is another realistic goal because by investing part of your real estate agent's income you can grow your investment and combine it with strategic debt financing options you can slowly build your investment portfolio for your company over 5 years.

By considering the actions you need to take to reach your goals you will be able to be more realistic in your goal settings. More importantly, you will set goals that support each other. This way it will be easier for you to achieve your goals.

Step 3: Make your goals smart

The final step to take when setting the right goals for your business is to make your goals smart.?Smart goals are:

1.?????Specific

2.?????Measurable

3.?????Attainable

4.?????Relevant

5.?????Time-Bound

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v?Specific: your goal should be clear and specific not vague. For example, it should be specific about the revenue levels you want to attain let's say a Million dollars annual revenue or if you want to measure it in terms of customers served you can say serve "50,000 customers per month" or even attain a 50% market share if you want to measure it in terms of market share. However, saying things like "grow revenue" or "increase market" share without mentioning the specific figures you want to work towards will not make your goals specific. Make sure your goals specially define the target you want to reach

v?Measurable: can you measure the metrics that define the target your goal is aiming at??Many people use vague terms such as "to become a market leader". This can problem when it comes to measuring your goal at the end of the period specified. How do you measure market leadership? Is it by revenue or by customer base? You need to make your goals easy to measure by using the right terms for example "grow revenue to 50,000,000 dollars".

v?Attainable: Your goals should be attainable. Imagine you just graduated from Oxford University and you have zero work experience and your net worth is negative 100,000 dollars. Then you set a goal of building a billion dollars real estate Company in one year.?Is your goal realistic? Of course not. You have no experience in real estate in the UK and you have no money to pull it off. Chances are you will fail terribly at achieving that goal.

v?Instead, your goal for your first year after college should be to earn a given income from a real estate agent's job. This will give you the experience you need and some money that you can now use to build the multibillion-dollar real estate company you want to build over the years.?This is important because setting an unattainable goal can demoralize you and make it impossible for you to even consider such a goal again in future.

v?Relevant: your goals have to be relevant. If you want to make a fortune in real estate you cannot have a goal about owning cars. The truth is that you may want to use the fortune from your real estate business to buy a couple of supercars and even a superyacht but goals on such things are not relevant to building your business. When setting goals focus on what you want to do in a given period to reach your vision.

v?Time-Bound: your goals should be time-bound. In business and life, you will have many goals. Some will be short term usually achievable in under one year. Others will be long term requiring one or more years to be achieved. Having the time frame attached to your goals is important as it will help you easily reach them.

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Principle 4: Develop Concrete Plans

With the right goals in place, you need a concrete plan of action to reach those goals. A goal can be a huge undertaking to attack blindly. You need a plan with simple and systematic steps to take.?Let's say your goal is to earn 100,000 dollars by the end of the year from real estate. But you have no money to give make investments that will guarantee such an income. In this case, your plan of action will be to take a short term real estate agents course, get the right registration and certification to operate in the country, get a real estate agent job in a reputable organization and work your butt off to earn the income. By following this plan you will be able to reach your goal. However, without a plan, it will be impossible to even start working on the goal.

Writing an Action Plan

To write a workable action plan for your goals follow these steps:

Step 1: List down the tasks

To achieve any goal you need to undertake some tasks. You need to list down these tasks. For example, to set up a small retail store you will need to rent a business premise in the right location, get government licensing, fit the fixtures, buy and display the merchandise to sell, set up cash registers and open the store to the public. These are easy tasks to follow.?In this step, you need to think of all the tasks you will do to achieve your goal and then list all those tasks down.

Step 2: Prioritize the tasks

Once you have all the tasks listed down now you need to prioritize your tasks.?For example, in setting up a retail store you cannot acquire merchandise before getting the right business premise. Make sure you arrange the tasks in chronological order from the first that needs to be undertaken to the last. Remember some tasks may have to be carried out concurrently, don't worry about this when prioritizing your list. Just make sure your list makes sense when considering the order in which the tasks have to be undertaken.

Step 3: Delegate

You cannot do everything by yourself. You will have to delegate some of the tasks to your associates and other dependable individuals. Make sure you mark this in your action plan.

Step 4: Set Milestones

To achieve the goals you need to have short term milestones that will help you measure your progress. As you think of the task you need to come up with reasonable milestones. Clearly showing a measurable metric you will be tracking and the desired outcome after a given period. For short term goals consider setting quarterly milestones. For long term goals, you may set yearly goals.

Step 5: Identify resources needed

To achieve your goal you will need some resources. Identify the resources needed for each task and the source of those resources. This is important to ensure that the resources will be available when needed.

Principle 5: Developing the Habit of Taking Action

The final action of dominating yourself is developing the habit of doing things when they are supposed to be done. Being Lazy is a habit and so is taking action. One of the major dream killers for many people across the world is procrastination. This is the habit of putting off action that needs to be done until it is too late to do a good job. To dominate yourself you need to eliminate the habit of procrastination and replace it with the habit of taking action. This is important because to achieve significant success, you will have to do more than what an average person is willing to do.

The difference between a successful person and a failure is the level of action each take. To achieve a significant goal requires more than ten times the effort required to do the task to satisfactory levels. This means that you have to work on yourself to become a super worker. Because success requires more work than anything else.