Be Observant

SuccessAvenue


Careful attention to one thing often proves superior to genius and art.
- Cicero
Even as a young lad, Alexander the Great had a keen intelligence and perception. His father, King Philip of Macedonian had bought a prize horse. It was so wild that the best horse trainer in the kingdom was unable to handle it. Each time anyone jumped onto its back, it threw him away.

One day, Alexander had just finished his lessons with his famous tutor, Aristotle, and walked out of the courtyard to meet his father and his horse trainer struggling with the wild horse. King Philip had finally given up on the prize animal. Alexander loved the wild nature of the horse and ran to his father.
"Your Majesty," he panted. "I can handle it!"
The king laughed. "An animal the best horse trainer in the land cannot handle is what you think you can handle?" he said. "O.K., I'll give it to you if you can tame its wild nature."

When the King saw Alexander and the horse racing into the palace later in the day with an incredible display of companionship, he couldn't believe his eyes. He called Alexander and said, "You can have it if you tell me what you did to tame it."
"You told me to observe things carefully," he began. "I observed it carefully. The horse became afraid each time it was backing the sun and saw its shadow on the ground. I turned it to face the sun and started petting it. When I saw it soften, I mounted it and sped off."

Be observant. Observe and study your environment. You’ll become more successful in your career or business if you could develop the mental acuity to spot trends around you and put them to good use. Your environment is physical, social, economic, political, financial and technological. Changes are going on minutely in each of these areas.

In your physical environment, notice the changes in the weather and seasons, development of new infrastructures and the effect it has on people and their activities. In the social environment, be aware of the shifting values and priorities, evolution of new fads, population trends and possibility of social instability.

In the economic sphere, observe the trends in the federal budget, the macroeconomic policies and its effect, trends in the money and capital market, inflation and exchange rate fluctuations and consumption patterns.

In the political sphere, monitor government policies, track the shifting boundaries between the private and public sector, appreciate the dynamics of the political parties, and check the gauge for insecurity and political instability.

Now, let’s turn our attention back to the microcosm. Your health and physical well being could radically improve if you can see the connection between your life style and your state of health and vitality.
Your communication with people will be exponentially improved today if you’ll stop rearranging your thoughts or be composing what you want to say next but begin to listen when others are talking.

Listen not only to what they are saying and also try to perceive what they are not saying, or are saying with their body language. Listen attentively with love as if the other person is the most important person in the world.

The quality of your relationships will start going up the day you’ll become more observant and start separating the ones that are uplifting and supportive from others that are disruptive and a drain on your energy.

If you want to solve any problem, sit back, listen and observe. Gather information. Search for clues. If you have more information you can solve the problem at hand. The key to observation is to have a goal. Then pay attention. Pay attention to whom? Pay attention to yourself, others, and the environment. Keep an eye on the prize.

That's what Alexander did.

Plan Well

Make no little plans. There’s nothing in little plans to stir men’s blood. Once a big idea is recorded, it can never die. - DANIEL BURNHAM

Planning is part of preparations for success. It is the first test of commitment to your dreams. A plan is a mental outline, on paper (or in some other permanent storage medium, including the computer), of the task to be accomplished, the result desired, the inputs required, and making allowances for deviations over a given time frame.

Some people feel that planning is a waste of time and rush headlong into the job to be done. This approach is faulty. Planning assists you to discover mistakes on paper (in the prototype). These mistakes could be expensive in the playing field. The planning process offers you an opportunity to think through the whole scheme or programme from beginning to end. The plan acts as a guide when you’re implementing the scheme. (You reserve the right to alter any part of it.)

It is true that in emergencies you could plan as you go, but this should be the exception rather than the rule.Everything needs planning. A military commander will plan for his campaigns. This involves troops, materials and supplies, timing, movements, contingencies, strategies for different scenarios, including retreat.

A homemaker will plan for what she requires to run her home in a week or month. She has to determine how and when they are to be used, and match it with the funds available to her. If she uses the resources meant for one week in a day, she’ll put her family’s welfare at risk.

An architect designs a building and gets inputs from a quantity surveyor on the materials to be employed. No engineer will start building a machine or building without proper plans.

A businessman or corporate executive about to embark on a business trip out of his station has to park his luggage. He will include the papers or files he will need, tooth brush, shaving stick, aftershave, clothes, etc. He will book a hotel, purchase air ticket, and arrange how to move to and from the airport.

An individual desirous of getting other people to support his business scheme has to do a business plan.

A young woman that is eager to get married should first sit down and identify the qualities she desires in her ideal mate. Then she has to note down her own good points and define changes she has to make in her behaviour and attitude in order to attract the worthy prince. She has to sit down and figure out how she’d know if a man loves her and define an evidence procedure she’d use to validate her choice.

There are six areas that pertain to our life: spiritual, physical and health; career; financial; family; relationships and social; and personal. Our planning should cover all these aspects of our life.

Each day make a “To Enjoy List” comprising of all the activities you’ll love to do that day. Break it into the critically important and the usual. Concentrate your attention on doing those activities in the critically important side of the paper. Whenever you’re in between activities or that you’re tired or bored, execute one of the items on the “usual” side of the paper.

The elements of a plan are: results desired; people and resources required; how the resources will be employed; time frame; contingencies; scenario building; and environmental factors.

The plan might not be followed rigidly but it's a useful guide. It prepares you for what to expect. Plan your day. Plan your week. Plan your month. Plan your year. Plan your life. Plan to succeed. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.

If you can’t spare the time to plan for your success, what’s the guarantee that you can find the time to be devoted to it?

Prepare Yourself

Prepare yourself to accept the responsibilities of manifesting your dream. If your dream is going to become real, it' s up to you. If you don’t nurture your dream, no one will.

An African farmer who is waiting for the onset of the rainy season clears the field, prepares his seedlings, and makes arrangement for additional labour hands that would be required. An expectant mother usually prepares for the arrival of the new baby by buying baby clothes, nappies, soaps, towels, baby bed and keeping some money aside in a savings account.

The period of preparation will enable you to incubate your vision, clarify your purpose, plan well, increase your energy level, develop new habits required for the actualisation of your purpose, and drop limiting habits.

Spend quality time nurturing your vision. The more attention you invest in contemplating the picture of what you want to achieve, the clearer and more definite it will become. Clarity of purpose eliminates doubt and increases your desire for the goal.

Prepare yourself for success. Pretend that you're already successful. The mind doesn't know the difference between a real picture and an imagined picture. So "fool" your subconscious mind to accept that you're already living the wish fulfilled.

Preparation includes gathering information, researching, studying, training, apprenticeship, and planning. Find models and mentors. Get other people to buy into your vision - if they are required for its actualisation. Negotiate resources that you don’t control, including other people’s time and mental resources.

Prepare for changes. A change in your habits is required for you to bring your dream into reality. Drop habits that are holding you down. Take on new empowering practices. Take control of your time and attention. Cultivate new positive friends that are successful. Drop complainers, gossips and negative thinkers.

If you set any worthwhile goal and feel you can achieve it by remaining the same person you are now, you’ll be disappointed a million times.

Success requires discipline. How many are willing to imbibe these new attitudes? Success requires throwing away old habits and acquiring better ones. Success demands the supplanting of dis-empowering beliefs and attitudes with empowering ones.

Success asks you to guard your time jealously. It insists that you sleep later and wake up earlier. Action and not talk bring about success. (Unless you're in Oprah Winfrey's line of business!) Talk is cheap. Only activity produces results. Results lead to progress.

Your daily disciplines have to change. New habits have to supplant old habits. You need to expand your belief system.

You get angry easily? Then you need to learn tolerance, patience, and forgiveness. Do you wallow in the three evil Cs: complaints, criticism and condemnation? It’s time to learn how to let others be and be more grateful.

Improve your health. One of your greatest assets in manifesting your goals is good health, a high energy level and vitality. We all desire to get healthier and be physically fitter.

The first step is to gather information on what it means to be healthier and fitter. Seek professional advice if it is available. Having observed the relationship between what you eat and your health, improve your diet.

Try food supplements if your food doesn’t offer you all the nutrients your body requires; or if your food is overcooked, over-frozen, over-processed, or you make special demands on your body. Work out an exercise program for yourself, taking into consideration your health and age. If you’re up to 40 years of age, seek a doctor’s opinion before embarking on any exercise program. Let the exercise be something you enjoy.

If you love your dream, if you passionately want it to become manifest, obey the Law of Silence: Tell it to ONLY those people who will give it the same love and devotion as yourself.

Prepare to appear. Prepare to be seen. Improve yourself presentation. Need we say more?

Amechi Chukwujama

Dream It!

Dream as far as you can see, and when you get there, you can see further - ZIG ZIGLAR

Dream what? Dream what you want to be, know, realise, or do. Imagine the life you wish to live. That's the beginning point of manifestation. Create the life you want to live in your mental vision and give it feelings. Constantly relive this picture in your quiet moment until you become suffused with it.

The famous inventor Thomas Edison dreamed of an electricity-powered lamp. Thousands of failed experiments were not enough to deter him from producing the incandescent lamp we all use today. The Wright Brothers saw, in their mental vision, a heavier-than-air machine flying through space. The airplane is the physical manifestation of that dream. The Italian, Marconi, dreamed of a way of sending messages through the air without wires. If you have a radio or TV set, you're witness also that that dream had come true.

A dream (or vision) is a mental picture of a desired future state that is considered better that the present.

It is important that you clearly specify, in black and white, what end the fulfillment of this dream will confer on you, all the others concerned, and the society. This is known as the mission or purpose. Your mission gives clarity and direction to your vision.

If you’re a corporate body, your mission or purpose is the reason your organisation exists – what it is set up to achieve or do for others. A mission defines the role of the organisation and gives it self-identity. Usually the mission incorporates the strategy for reaching the vision.

An example of a corporate vision and mission are those of Fate Foundation, a Nigerian NGO;

Vision: “Our vision is to promote the growth and establishment of over 1,000 businesses by 2005 and 5,000 businesses by 2015. This will result in the creation of employment for at least 50,000 Nigerians by 2015.”

Mission: “Our mission is to foster wealth creation by promoting business and entrepreneurial development amongst Nigerian youth.”

The objectives of your organization are the outcomes it wants to achieve for its publics in specific areas in line with the approaches it want employ to realise its mission.


People with different missions can see the same vision. Alternatively stated, two individuals who have the same vision might translate it differently for themselves. Your value system determines your mission or purpose. A vision can be for the totality of your life or for one department of it, say career, financial, family/relationships or spiritual.

The things you set out to accomplish in a given day, being part of your overall vision, constitute your dream for that day. Two people might engage in the same activities in a day (vision) but might have different values motivating them (mission).

For example, one of them might purpose to make it easier for the next person in all the things he has to do for that day. The other might postulate that he was going to manipulate anyone who comes in contact with him into doing his bidding. The two missions are different.

This brings us to the core of this subject. Behind every vision is a dominating value or motivation. Let your purpose be as high as possible. One way of doing this is to stipulate that it will be for the good of all.

This world came into existence as a result of God's dream. You can create your world through creative dreaming. Whether you like it or not, we’re all dreaming our lives. Mostly we do it unconsciously. Whatever you’re experiencing is the result of your dominating thoughts and feelings. The point now is to do it deliberately and constantly.

If you want to do anything intensely enough, retire to a quiet place, and see in your mind's eye the fulfillment of that intention. Put feelings into the picture. Dream it. All life is a dream.

Keep your dream alive!