Do you have a big dream inside of you that just knaws away at you, day and night?  I know I do.  So what are we meant to do with the things we hope for?   This dream that is incubating away in you is actually a template for the future.  So how will you get there?  You do it by making the right choices and taking strategic steps one right after the other, day in and day out.   One of the biggest hindrances to reaching our goals is the problem of ‘big score’ mentality.  This way of seeing things puts the goal or the desire of your heart right in front of you.  What’s wrong with that?  Not very much but the reality is you build a big dream into reality with good thinking and by setting shorter targets to boost your achievement.  What do I mean?  Well, consider the great wall of China.  It was built over a period of time and courtesy of overview effect we see the finished product and marvel.  However, that ‘dream’ was built over a period of time.  It was built with human hands over a sustained period of time.   If you have a big score mentality you will also be looking for the next hit rather than realising the ‘big thing’ can be achieved with a progressive steady plan of growth.  Even if you require a big miracle… it’s still made up of smaller ones!  So here are some ideas for avoiding ‘big score’ mentality.

Make your goal specific

When you are thinking about your future and the goal you have think about precisely what it is you want.   What is the core desire or aim of what you plan to achieve.  For example, I want a PhD.  It’s a desire of my heart.  The first thing I did was finish a bachelor’s degree then enrol in a research masters degree, then I enrolled in a PhD once I had finished the masters.   I made my goal very specific.  If you can’t do this… don’t worry.  Live for a while.  Soon enough you will find something that you really want to do.

What are the steps required to reach the goal

Each step was towards my ultimate goal.  I am almost there … and yes it’s taken ten years to reach this point.  Is ten years a very long time to reach a goal?  During those long hours slaving over a PC yes it does seem like a long time.  But, it doesn’t matter once you have completed what you set out to do.  So long as you focus yourself on writing each day, even if it’s one page a day.  You will have 365 pages of quality material by the end. Each step is another step towards the goal.  Over this time I didn’t allow the goal be overshadowed by how much the actual work and my job drained my energy.   You simply can’t afford to allow your energy to be sapped away by the routine nature of making money.  Remember, one step closer is better than one step backwards.

See the big score as coming in stages

I think this is where most people become disheartened.  They lose confidence in themselves because of the bigness of the goal.  If you aren’t able to conceptualise the stages or phases required to build your goal then you will you find yourself becoming discouraged.  Set your self progress targets towards the goal on a month by month basis.  How much closer are you to realising it?  Measure it against the end result and see you will be pleasantly surprised.   To continue my previous point, see the steps as ‘phases in reaching the big score’.  A man I know has a dream of being a millionaire.  But for every dollar he makes he spends at least 50% on lottery, gambling or other means of big score dreams.  I am not joking when I say if he had of put at least half of his money away for an extended period of time he would be just about there by now.  The promise of an immediate payoff for no real effort in his mind is greater than the possibility he will make sustained money over a period of time.  This is what we call the gambler’s fallacy.   While my friend has deep seeded mental reasons for his gambling addiction and this in part explains his behaviour.  Most of us do not recognise just how successful we could be if we consistently saw our big goals as a set of steps or goals to be reached.  Instead, I think we see the desire and think well that’s what I will have at the expense of setting short term goals and reaching those targets over a period of time.

Don’t listen to morons

In short keep your goal a secret if you are worried about your progress.   Once, I had a dream to be in movies and I decided to tell everyone in the video store that that’s what I want to do.  After awhile of no achievement I became constantly discouraged by people around me saying, ‘Hey you where’s that movie?’ If you have a big dream keep it quiet or else the morons will get you down.

Don’t be afraid to try alternative paths

As you break down the dream into the steps required (or if you like the tactics you need to employ) think about how can do this.   Is your current plan giving you the realistic growth that you expected.  If it isn’t don’t be afraid to try different ideas along the way.  Whatever you do… don’t give up! I know many people that come and go with a desire to do this or that and once the reality of the stepped phases sets in they simply find it too difficult and walk away.  Most people I have met that have a dream are like this.  If you are stuck go talk to a friend, collegue or someone about it.  Another persons viewpoint may be just the thing you need to get there.

Remember that it is okay to dream your goals and plan to have.  It’s okay to visualise the possibility of you having it and seeing yourself with it.  But, there comes a time when you must work off a plan and begin to take small steps towards your desire.  There are times where you can’t see what to do.  In those times don’t give up… walk away for a while and come back.  After a period of time, some research or perhaps some discussions with people you know, the answer will become clear.  In short to avoid big score mentality we need to focus ourselves on understanding how we think and how we act.  If you desire the big hit that’s good BUT remember there will be little actions that go along side it.

Technorati Tags: dream, reality, goal

I often read stories about bloggers making money and I think to myself wow, I wish I could do that. But wishing does not make it so. What makes things so is faith and faith by the bucket loads. That said, you don’t get to the end by overnight. You build great things by taking one step at a time. It takes time, which is a given, but more importantly I want to highlight that it takes one step at a time. I have just completed a PhD that took me a long time to finish. I started in late 2003 and I have just submitted it to be examined. Each day presented new challenges and new problems. I think at the best of times I have felt like I couldn’t do it but I got there. When it came to the writing parts, I wrote something each day. Whether it was seven pages or two words… each day I made progress.  Let me tell you though it wasn’t easy.

Why am I saying this? There is this underlying assumption that all we need is the right elements and everything will work. What a load of crap. Things take time. All of the great entrepreneurs of this era all built there businesses one at a time. The question becomes… how long is long? As long as it takes. Here are some examples of progressive growth that I have found from life, work and the web:

1. Problogger

Okay so I am partial to this guy because he lives in Australia and yes he is good as what he does. Sucking up aside, let’s look at the reality of problogger’s growth. Check out this graph:

Note the growth pattern down the bottom (you can read more on the story here). As far as I can tell it was almost a whole year before problogger became even close to a “money maker”. For those of us who write for a living, that’s a lot of hours. Let’s also be honest… there’s the knowledge involved in that as well. Knowledge, comes as a price. Everything I know about business has come from study (over ten years) and two failed attempts at startups. You better believe that has cost me. Think about all the hours of work with little noticeable difference. Could you do it or are you in it for the insta-hit?

2. Richard Branson

I recently read his book so it’s an at hand example. Sorry about that. I am not sure if this man is a hero or a villain I just can’t work it out. However, in following his life I found that he has developed a long term view of things perhaps mixed with short term megalomania! Reading his story though you get the impression that building the Virgin empire that has taken his entire life. That’s a long time, though each business and each failure provided growth for him as for his fortune. He began in the late sixties with his magazine, then he moved into music (1970’s) then everything else (1980’s-now). That’s a brief summary but think about the time, the daily decisions, the commitment. I know what it takes to fail… but this kind of success comes with a tremendous sacrifice.

3. Peter Spann

I have to say at the outset that I think this man is one of the most interesting people I am yet to meet. You can learn more about him here. His story of how he made millions from being dead broke is inspirational if not more than a little strange. He took time and stuck to his plan day in and day out. His story is very inspirational, even if some of the financial advice is hard to follow. Still, that systematic decision making, step after step, led him to becoming a fairly wealthy bloke.

4. Joyce Meyer

As a leading Christian author Joyce Meyer now enjoys a wide audience spanning several million people. I had the pleasure of seeing her in Brisbane, last time she was here and she was talking with the a pretty severe flu.  What I admired the most was that despite this and having to been helped on to the stage and off again she got through her message.  Now that’s dedication.  When I am sick I can tell you that I am the first to pull the sympathy card.  Not this lady.  I was listening to her story on a CD and she was talking about the years she spent not being able to get access to speaking engagements because of her obscurity and being a woman and so on.  It was interesting to me how she kept doing what she could day after day and despite the setbacks took one step after the other to get where she is today.

There are so many more people I could call up as examples (Ricardo Semler).  All of them made it by taking one carefully thought out step after the other.  So how do we get there?  I don’t know and maybe you don’t either.   I know this: I take one step and then I can take the next one after that.  Until I take that first step, I can’t take the other.  So in short: do something lest you do nothing but make sure you are doing it slowly, confidently and with full assurance of faith.   Slow but steady growth is the order of the day.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, failure, decision making, Brisbane

Much is made of modern management training in academic circles to which I respond with ha! A lot of the stuff you come across is life cycles this, supply chain that blah blah blah. What troubles me to my guts is that there is not a real lot of quality teaching around thinking strategically. Now, when we hear that term almost always makes you think… oh no not another chess metaphor. Chess is the worst possible metaphor for strategic thinking that I can think of. You know why… because it sucks. Chess is a game with predictable outcomes where if you know all the moves possible you can win. This takes me back to Herbert Simon’s stupid idea that all we need is more information. What? Now, he’s dead we have all the information we could possibly get our hands on and the world is no better off! In fact, the more information we get the worse things become.

So how can we move to strategic thinking? Here are five ways to think strategically:

1. Look at something from more than one point of view

When you confronted with a problem you can’t solve find another point of view and use it. Go and ask someone who thinks the exact opposite way to the way you do and ask them what they think. This opposite point of view will tease out what’s wrong with your ideas and will help you to think strategically. Alternatively, deliberately think the opposite way to the way you do right now and notice what happens. When I do this it breaks bad thinking habits and usually good answers come.

2. Look for generative mechanisms.

According to Roy Bhaskar’s view on reality there are things in our social world that generate the events we see. What is generating what you see? Now before you start think about this: what generates the social world is people and their thoughts. Thinking and acting on those thoughts creates the world around us. What thinking generates your thinking? What underlies things? To help you get along here I would suggest thinking about it like this: what are the conditions that created this?

3. How are things related.

Remember a rule of systems thinking is to understand the whole in favour of the parts. So look at the situation and ask your self how are the different smaller level wholes related to make the bigger level whole. This means not breaking things down to the level of cause and effect… instead it means looking for the big picture and how the various parts of the picture relate to form it. Consider this picture:

Looks like a bunch of columns eh? Have a closer look… do you see people hiding in the shadows. The whole was obscured by the parts. So it is when you try to think systemically. Don’t study the parts … study the wholes. Look at this picture above and ask yourself what connects together to make it look like that.

4. How are things not related

One of the misnomers of strategic thinking is that the world is linear. The problem is that you can never predict the way in which the world we respond to things. Consider the outpouring of aid for the Tsunami or the levels of anxiety after September 11. Warranted though they were the depth to which people reacted was overwhelming. Looking for wholes sometimes can make you create relationships where none really exist. Always seek to explore how things are also unrelated. Lateral thinking is a good example of this. Looking towards something that is unrelated or lateral shifting in systems terms means looking for a new sideways ideas to how things are related.

5 .Think over dimensions

If you consider each part of something as dimensional or as containing the element of another element which contains that element then you may understand what I am talking about here. Interdisciplinary in academic terms is a fantastic example of this. In this case I am working with people from various points of view who are experts in something that I know little or nothing about. Each domain of knowledge is a new dimension that helps me to view a situation through a much bigger multidimensional view. This is the plural version of number one (listed above) and a major requirement for strategic thinking. Knowing the dimensions of what you are dealing with is impossible from just one view because systemically things are related differently on different strategic levels. You can’t know how a car works by driving it … yet if we assembled a team. A driver, the engineer, the factory people, the marketing team, the distributors and so on we could see the dimensions we were dealing with. Learning over dimensions is much more of a challenge because it creates knowledge that’s more complex, more general and heaps more useful than boring old analytical knowledge.

This is only five ways to think strategically there are lots more things you can do. I think it’s best summed up this way. What are the conditions (dimensions) that cause this to exist? It’s real so it exists…putatively! Take a strategic view of your job as an example. What is your job? What does your boss think about your job? Is your job related to other people? What is your job not related to? How many dimensions of your organisation does your job effect? Now you are thinking strategically!

Technorati Tags: management, academic, thinking strategically, strategic thinking, problem, Roy Bhaskar, systems thinking, Lateral thinking