The quote is from George Harrison’s song “Any Road” and was no doubt influenced by the dialogue between Alice and the Cat in Lewis Carroll’s brilliant book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. The statement is very profound. With the current fixation on immediacy we are frequently confusing being busy, pushing texts and emails around the stratosphere, with forward momentum. Never have we been so active, yet so stationary.
I attended a key note address delivered by Dr David Keane, who was a fellow speaker at a conference. His talk was about “The Art of Deliberate Success”. He asked a question ‘What do you consider success means to you?’. This is a question we should be asking ourselves . Keane pointed out the importance of having clarity, priority and execution working together. Where you have clarity and prioritization working, but execution missing, you become stuck and are not making progress toward success. The sweet spot is where the three collide. Jim Collins called it “Your hedgehog”;:meaning you were untouchable.
Jim Collins in his “Good to Great book” had three circles when looking at success from an organisation’s viewpoint. The three circles are as relevant to us as individuals. The Collin’s circles remind us to look and focus in an area where we can be a world expert. This is not as hard as it sounds providing you look for a very specific area relevant to your experiences to date and one where you have already made some progress. Find an area which is free from competing experts and get your 10,000 hours into that space as soon as possible.
The second circle is passion. Where passion and being a world expert collide is an agreeable place to be. Work and play merge together. The last circle is economic demand. It is not only practical to focus on something that others are happy to pay for it is commonsense.
I attended a life skills course several decades ago. It was called turning point. It lived up to its name. It was the first time I was exposed to the power of the subconscious and its ability to pursue a target. If we have a vision of what success looks like, a treasure map in other words, then we will travel towards it.
For a treasure map you need an A3 page, where you set out how you envisage success will be like with your life partner, your family, your friends, your health, your hobbies, your career and your retirement savings. State the goals and glue pictures to help you visualize the outcomes you seek. The more pictures the better, pictures from magazines and journals are an excellent source, (e.g., If you want to be fitter, then a picture of a person similar to you with the body shape you aspire to., If you want to practice yoga daily then a picture of a person, like you, doing yoga, etc.). My first treasure map had a picture of a particular motorbike, a BMW 100RS, which is reasonably rare. Two years later I owned the exact replica of the bike in the photo, even the same paint combination. Read any self- help book and ask any achiever, and they will tell you that visualization is the key.
I discovered the book “The Winner’s Bible” while browsing in an airport bookshop. It resonated with the concept of treasury mapping, albeit in a different way. The concept being you have a folder with inspirational sayings and the goals you have set for yourself. Each day you pick-up your Winner’ Bible and read the pages that resonate that day.
