Your Personal Master Plan To help you become successful … to get you closer to where you want to be in life … you need to have a Master Plan. A Master Plan is what Jack Welch used to communicate and achieve his vision for General Electric. And it's what some professional sports coaches use to lead and motivate their teams when the prospect of winning a league championship that year or even the following one is next to zero. They know that instead of pumping up their players on the impossible dream, it's much more realistic – and can be just as exciting for them – to chart a longer-term success plan that will take them where they can hope to be. The same process can help you achieve your personal goals. Your personal Master Plan will be not only A Master Plan says that you are serious about your life goals. It is a formal contract between the visionary you and the daily, working you that lays out, point by point, what exactly has to be done to achieve all your major objectives over time. The Master Plan works because it takes very large, sometimes very nebulous, ambitions and breaks them down into specific tasks – things you have to learn, things you have to know, and things you have to do. Transforming dreams into tasks may take away some of the romance, but what you'll get instead is a growing excitement about how increasingly likely it is that you will accomplish your dreams. The reason most people don't achieve their ambitions is NOT that they aren't smart enough, shrewd enough, or complicated enough. It's that they are emotionally too complex, shrewd, and smart. They allow themselves too many subconscious conflicts of interest that stall their progress or derail them. Making a Master Plan work is about simplifying your interests and acting upon them in a very simple way. When you get the emotional gratification of taking one forward step toward one cherished goal, it will make it that much easier to take the next step. Think of your Master Plan as a behavior-response system for the ultra sophisticated (and highly interesting) YOU. To perform better than you have in the past (and achieve more than you have so far), you have to act differently now. And if you really want to achieve those dreams you dream about, you have to make sure that what you do today – this very day, not tomorrow – will move you closer to those dreams. Start today by selecting your Life Goals. Don't be cynical. This can definitely change your life. It has worked for me and for everyone who has tried it, including dozens of individuals I've personally coached. So let's get started. 1. Take out a sheet of paper. Title it "Life Goals" (if you have no shame) or "Stuff to Do Before I Croak" (if you are afraid someone will see it). 2. Make a list of everything you want to accomplish. Everything. Like making a lot of money. Writing books. Traveling to Rome. Learning to tap dance. Write till you are done. 3. Let your list sit for a few hours. Even a day. Then narrow it down to your top 10 choices. 4. Take another rest. Now make another cut. This time, you have to select your top four goals. (If you are having trouble figuring out what is really important to you, do this: Imagine your obituary. What would you want said about you?) These are your Life Goals, your ultimate priorities, the objectives that will make you the person you really want to be. Spend some time imagining yourself in the future, as you will be when you've accomplished them. 5. Now, pick the one Life Goal that is numero uno. 6. On a separate sheet of paper … or perhaps on an index card … write down your four Life Goals with your top choice on top. Highlight that one. Now you must make one final and very tough decision. Now you have to decide whether achieving your top goal is THE MOST important thing to you. You need to ask yourself if you would sacrifice everything else in order to achieve it. Here's why: There is a 99% chance you will achieve your top goal if you are willing to do anything to achieve it. That may mean compromising one or several of the other three goals. If you don't want to compromise the others, don't fret. You still have a very good (over 80%) chance of achieving all four of your Life Goals with my program. So decide: One goal and damn the rest? Or a balanced life? OK. Here's what you need to do now. Convert your four Life Goals into five-year objectives. For example, let's say that one of your goals is to have a net worth of $10 million. And let's say that you want to retire in 10 years. You might make "having a $5 million net worth" your five-year goal. You are going to use this five-year list to create your one-year list. And you will use your one-year list to create monthly lists. And you will use each monthly list to create weekly lists. And your weekly lists to create daily "to-do" lists. I know. I know. But it works. It really works. Next, I'll show you how to make this conversion from a five-year plan to a daily "to-do" list with a morning routine that will make it highly probable that you will achieve your four Life Goals. Rise Early and Catch the Golden Worm To read more of Michael Masterson's (MMF) Personal Productivity Secrets to becoming healthy, wealthy, and wise, or to sign up for a free trial subscription to his daily eletter, Early to Rise by visiting: http://www.agora-inc.com/reports/700SMMSB/W700D900/
by Michael Masterson
the foundation but also the blueprint of your success.
The rest is easy.