Transcript
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Welcome to Darren Daly on Demand, your most trusted resource to help you become better every day. Here's your success mentor, Darren Hardy.
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Have you ever heard the adage I will accomplish this even if it kills me? Well, in my early years of goal setting and achieving, I almost died and I missed a lot of other opportunities along the way. I I became so dogmatic, so focused on the goals that I had set and the specific plans that I made to achieve them, that my blinders kept me from 1 seeing the easier and faster routes to my destination, 2 that some of the goals that I deemed important at the start of the year or the decade were less important than I originally believed and three in that blinded focus, I didn't even see the even better, more significant, more consequential, and even easier to to achieve opportunities that presented themselves along the way. One of the greatest challenges to success is learning how to stay focused on your goals while remaining flexible enough to adapt to any needed change. Even though we have designed a very specific strategic plan to achieve them, it is equally important to remain open and flexible all along the way. If you look back at most of your defining moments or those pivotal events that transformed your life, I bet most of those were unplanned and happened unexpectedly. Life is a mystery. You never know what might show up, and so that means that you can't be so myopic that you miss the opportunities and solutions that you couldn't have even imagined or fathomed before. Murphy's Law lives to teach us this. If something can go wrong, it will. Don't be too attached to the route that you first charted, as you will undoubtedly be reevaluating and readjusting all along the way. I often equate the path towards your goal in life, like standing atop a double black diamond ski run. Your goal is to get into that, say, comfy chair next to the warm fire at the bottom of the hill inside the cabin. But if you just ski straight at that destination, you probably won't end up with all your limbs intact nor all your equipment still attached. You're going to run into a mogul and it is going to force you off track and you're going to have to zig and zag and bob and weave your way all the way down. You might not even look too graceful and you'll likely fall repeatedly and you will most likely be terrified all the way down. Look, I've been there. But if you keep picking new paths and coming up with new approaches to get to to your desired destination, you can get to the exact destination of your desires. That comfy chair next to that fire in the worm cabin. Limbs still intact. But the key here is remain fixed on the destination. Have a vision and an outcome in mind. Have a mission, a big goal, and who it is that you are growing to become. But remain wide eyed and flexible to the various paths that you might need to take all along the way until you get there. My friend Ken Blanchard would say life is what happens to you when you are planning to do something else. That's true. Just as a business never goes according to its initial business plan, neither does the plan for your life. Don't get too entrenched in having it have to be or go a particular or certain way. Just in case you are thinking to yourself, well then why bother planning at all if nothing goes according to plan? As the great 19th century military strategist famously said, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. And in your case that means real life. I'll let one of the greatest planners in history, the one who architected the incredibly complex Operation Overlord, better known as the D Day landings During World War II, the supreme commander himself, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and answer that for you. Eisenhower said, in preparing for battle, I always found that the plans are useless, but the planning is indispensable. So yes, make a plan and then remain flexible. Stress and success constraints are caused when people are too fixed and rigid in their beliefs about how things should be. You want to learn to bob and weave, particularly when things the bullets start flying. Realize that it is okay to say I changed my mind.