MM170 - Let Success Sneak Up On You | MM Book Study Pt. 28

It is important to have goals, but we cannot simply fixate our goals, we need to focus on the process that gets us there. Goals and success are products of the process and work that go into achieving them.

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[INTRO]

♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Welcome to Morning Mindset. A daily dose of practical wit and wisdom with a professional educator & trainer, Amazon best selling author, United States Marine, Television, and Radio host, Paul G. Markel. Each episode will focus on positive and productive ways to strengthen your mindset and help you improve your relationships, career goals, and overall well-being. Please welcome your host; Paul G. Markel.

*Professor Paul*

Well, here we are and here we go again. It's time for another episode of the Morning Mindset podcast. Thank you very much for joining me, for being out there for listening louder and paying attention, and if you bought the book, thank you very much. I appreciate it, if you didn't buy the book, well I can't really thank you because you didn't.

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But it is available on Amazon as a paperback or Kindle version and we are going to continue with our Morning Mindset book study, and also I would like to remind you that you can leave a review if you bought the book on Amazon. You can leave a review and I truly would appreciate it if you would do so, if you enjoyed the book and enjoy the experience, please leave a review so that other people will know that's right other people will know.

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Alright, let's talk about letting the topic today. Let success sneak up on you, and I understand that that may seem a little bit, strange or unusual or confusing because you said “But Paul, you did at the very beginning, you talked about goals and setting goals short-term, goals mid-term goals long-term goals too, so forth. How can I let success sneak up on me if I've already plotted it out if I already have my goals.”

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I'm going to tell you. You can't always focus on the goal. Sometimes you have to focus on the process. Now when I talked about the goals that I had set I mentioned that one of the I've set goals over the years, but once. Pacific situation when I was back in the Marine Corps a friend of mine told me that I needed to write down my goals I needed to do it and I listened to him because he went to college. He's a smart guy, right and I don't know if he listens to this or not. But if he's not listening, Dick, you're wrong so fix yourself, but he said write down your goals and I did and I wrote down several goals and like I said in the podcast.

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I wrote those down in a spiral notebook read them, and then I put the notebook away and I guess I probably referred back to him, you know a few times or what have you but then I change duty stations and that spiral notebook got packed up got put away and I didn't see it again for years, wasn't till I got out of the active duty Marine Corps and I was back home, living my life, that I found that notebook and I opened it up and I read the goals that I had written down years before, and I realized that I had achieved except for one goal.

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I had achieved all of them, and it wasn't because I focused every single day on those particular goals. But what I did was I focused on how to achieve them and recently a good friend of mine was doing he was doing a Facebook live and he said that people spend too much time focusing on their goals and not enough time focusing on the process, and to the the the modern person a person who's attended all these professional seminars and read books and so forth is like this guy's crazy.

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He's wrong, it's you know in the book I read, goals, and how to set them and how to keep them. You know, he's telling me to forget about that and worry about the process. Well in the book in the morning, mine said the book I talked about. How the goal when I was on bait in basic training and we were at the rifle range my goal was to become an expert marksman to qualify high enough in order to wear the expert Marksmanship badge which in you know, basic marine corps is the highest rifle qualification badge.

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You can earn, it's called expert right? So my that was my goal. But having that goal wasn't enough it wasn't enough for me to say to myself. Okay, I want to be an expert Rifleman. I want to earn the badge and wear it that wasn't enough. What I had to do was I had to apply myself, and I had to focus and practice and I had to put my physical and mental energy into developing enough skill, so that on that day that would happen but I didn't just practice practice practice, you know, physically Focus mentally and then go to the range and sit down and think alright.

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I'm going to be an expert today and I'm going to shoot a high enough score to be an expert. On that day, my coach told me he said I don't want you focusing on anything, but that individual shot. Now you have to shoot many rounds on the rifle range. You have to shoot a lot of rounds they add up your score and at the end of the day they tell you how you did but you don't focus on the outcome on the end score in order to get there.

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What I needed to do was focus on one individual shot at a time. You know the next for now, it doesn't matter that you have 29 more shots to make after this one right now that you're going to make has to be perfect, and then once you've done that one, then the next one will be perfect. Then the next and the next and the next until the end of the day before, you know it, you're finished.

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They add up the score guess what you are going to be an echo Marksman or an expert Marksman now. Maybe you say but Paul I'm not a marine doesn't apply to me. Okay, you have a small business you do you have customers. Yes. I have customers. Okay. Now you could be thinking you say well, I have a small business and my goal is to make.

A million dollars in sales this year, and you say well, you know the business that I'm in I'm not going to make a million dollars of sales. Nobody does. Okay. Let's say your goal is $500,000 in sales this year. Alright. How do you get that $500,000 in sales? Do you get up every day and think how am I going to make?

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A half a million dollars every day. When you go to work every week. Do you focus on you get your team together, and you say we need to make a half million dollars. Give me some ideas. How are we going to do it, and you say, "Paul, this crazy because that's not how business works. You can't just sit around and think I need a half a million dollar idea."

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How do you do it? He said well where we have customers. Alright you focus on that customer experience, and you make that particular one the best it can be that sale that customer experience whatever then you do the next one and the next one and the next one just like firing one shot at a time, and at the end of the day at the end of the month at the end of the week at the end of the year if you have success after success after success. It adds up. Look what you did you just achieve your goal. But if you spend every day thinking I haven't achieved my goal yet. How am I going to do it? How am I going to do it?

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How am I going to do it? I have to have to sell a million dollars half a million, whatever. I have to sell that you're not you're going to spend all your time focusing on how to do that and not how to get there. Not on the way. and that's why I believe what my friend was talking about or one of. Part of what my friend was talking. They said people say goal goal goal goal goal and they forget about the process. How do I reach that goal, and what do I do to reach that goal?

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Let success sneak up on you. If you focus on doing it, right even when it's small even when it's and that's the truth is that's why short-term goals are very valuable. Yeah, your larger goal. Maybe I want to have a successful business that has a million dollars a year in sales. That's my long-term large goal, but you have to figure out how am I going to get there? You have to have stuff in between. You can't be so focused on the success that you forget how to achieve it.

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Let success sneak up on you. Set your goals, write them down, you know, have a mission statement or what have you and then move on to accomplishing it. Move on to the process, whatever that process may be, and when you do that, you may just be surprised at how success has snuck up on you, and there it is looking you right in the face.

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You're like "Man, I was so focused on doing things right and doing things the right way, I woke up and there is my goal. It's achieved." That's largely what happened to me, you know in the goals that I wrote down years and years ago. I wrote them down. I started focusing I moved on and then years later.

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I opened up that notebook. I looked in it nothing man. Look at that it snuck up on me, and here it is. Alright, so it's important to have goals it is an end, and that's the part of the problem of have done this or not a problem. But if you'll say "Oh you said to have goals and now you're saying let success sneak up on you."

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Yeah, it's actually a combination of the two and I hope that I've explained it fully explained in detail in the book and you can read that at your leisure later on. That's it for today folks. I'm your host Paul Markel. Talk to you again real soon.

[OUTRO]

♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Thank you for spending time with us today. To get show notes, submit a topic request, for more from your host Paul G. Markel, visit MorningMindsetPodcast.com. That’s MorningMindsetPodcast.com. Please leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player, we appreciate your time & effort, and we look forward to reading your honest feedback.