You’re driven. You achieve a lot of your goals. Like a tyrant, that little voice in your head demands your absolute commitment to achievement. Heck, you even wrote out plans for achievement. You may think these thoughts and actions are pushing you to achieve but are they the habits of high achievers?
You could also be just the opposite having to constantly tell yourself to stop using Facebook, be more productive, focus more. While these are definitely not the habits of high achievers, you really have the desire to become one.
The real question is, when it comes to life do you just want to just “take it as it comes” or reach for something great? Hopefully you’re serious enough to choose the latter and ready to start your journey to truly become a high achiever.
How To Be A High Achiever
You must begin with discovering something that matters to you in a big way. It must mean enough to light a fire inside of you. Whatever it is, you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get there. You may already know what that is. The key point is having that passionate drive to really push yourself hard to accomplish your goals consistently.
Next, set yourself a BANG – a Big Awesome Nervy Goal with your passion directly in the cross-hair. There is no brain surgery needed here. The goal just needs to be achievable but challenging enough to make you push the envelope so to speak, to get it done. Realize that every time you stretch your boundaries and push your limits, you grow as a person.
Learn To Become A Finisher Through The Completion-Centric Planning Approach
High achievers are obsessed with finishing. Once a project is given to them, they will work obsessively and compulsively to finish it. Some may go about it in an organized way, others may not. But one thing is certain – they will do whatever it takes to get it done.
Cultivating a finisher mentality is not hard to do if you go about it the right way. Let’s start with one truth: real achievement requires you to push very hard. When you work on achieving something one task at a time, it’s easy to bypass these hard pushes by doing lots of easy tasks. Instead, adopt a completion-centric planning approach. With completion-centric planning, you are focused on the completion of projects instead of individual tasks as your daily constitution.
Here’s how it works. Sit down at your computer, open your favorite word processor and do the following:
- Make an Active Projects List– List 5-10 of the projects that are most important to you from 3 related categories: professional (related to your job or school), personal (family, home), other (big projects like writing a book, starting a business).
- Mark each project with criteria for completion– For each project write a brief description of the actions that must be taken to complete the project.
- Make another list on the same page and name it a Holding Pen– Use this list to add new projects while working on the active projects. You can save them here until you’ve completed the current batch.
Working The System
Each day, review your project list and figure out which project that you can make the most progress on that day and do it. Do whatever it takes. If it requires a hard push, go for it. Your biggest goal is to work on completing projects despite other responsibilities outside of these project. Harness an obsession to kill the list.
Work as hard as you possibly can to finish your projects. Once you’ve completed a project take a rest for at least a week. Spend this time doing small amounts of work. Use this time to recharge your energy.
Some Final Thoughts
Following a system that creates a workflow rhythm that’s necessary for completion-centric planning is what high achievers do to accomplish their work. Sure, it doesn’t have the appeal of leisurely working on tasks at your own easy pace but achievement is not pretty. You need to learn to go after your goals with a fierce determination and gusto. This system will teach you to do that. Now, try it for yourself. You might be surprised at what you can achieve.
