When most of us think of success, it is in terms of a desirable but nebulous something to be achieved in the indefinite future. "Someday, when I have the time and the money," runs such thinking, "I'm going to have-" and on continues the dream, each to each man's taste.
The distant goal, the long-range objective, is essential to successful career planning, but the lapse of time alone is not going to get you there. Decision and action are the allies of progress; procrastination is the enemy of progress. So time can become an ally- of procrastination; for the more time you give yourself to reach a goal, the more time you have to invent excuses for not getting there-and there is nothing procrastination serves more obediently than a good excuse.
How often you have told yourself of the many little things you could accomplish if you could get around to it. Those little things could be "seed" accomplishments. They can be left to die on the vine with no apparent loss suffered, or they can be made to flourish to the enormous enrichment of your entire life.
Only a very little seed is needed to grow a big tree. While this takes a good many years, it is different with people: one little success can start you on the way to very much larger ones in days, weeks, or even hours.
Such seeds could be a difficult apology to the boss or a fellow-worker, with a resulting restoration of good-feeling on the job. Start a long-postponed reading program to enlarge one's job perspective. The clearing of the top of one's desk to see what the wood looks like. The deposit of the first dollar to pay for next winter's excursion to the Virgin Islands dreamed of but never remotely approached in 20 years. Every day a new accomplishment, or something to be achieved within a future so immediate, that its day-to-day progress is encouragingly visible.
This is a good place to put in a word for selfishness. I am very much in favor of what I call "intelligent selfishness." This is a Golden Rule type of selfishness. It recognizes that the world around me is not very good unless I get along in it; also, that it's just about the same to other people in regard to their feeling good about the world. By this measure, I am intelligently selfish when I help others to get ahead at the same time as I help myself to get ahead. (Another chapter shows how you can use intelligent selfishness to help you get a salary increase or promotion.) Intelligent self-love is necessary if you are to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Actually, the only place where you really have freedom to start is within yourself. So, to put it selfishly, you must start with you.
With yourself in mind, then, be sure to plant among your seed successes a few that cater to your intelligently directed but wholly selfish ambitions.
Knowledge of your best self, of how you use your best capabilities to achieve your ambitions, gives you control of self-motivating forces having great power. You can apply this motivating power to help you overcome weakness, and enable you to outwit that enemy of progress, procrastination. I know an over-weight man who simply could not force himself to stay on the meager diet ordered by his doctor until he made a self-motivating success project out of it. He dearly loved his home machine shop. He promised himself a $15 machine tool if he stayed on his diet a week. Then, self-motivated or powered, he proceeded to save almost two dollars a day on his break-fasts, luncheons and dinners. In six months he found himself with a vastly improved workshop and waistline, and he had made a habit of proving he could do what he wanted done-with barely a dent in the budget.
What would you like to get done within the next 24 hours? Don't think of some unpleasant chore, like cleaning the basement, when you can just as effectively start out on something pleasant. Think of something that can use the best of your abilities, or improve your mind, like reading the book that you meant to read months ago. Write it down, and then in more detail describe four steps needed for its accomplishment. You now have a method to use in reaching a pre-arranged objective. Take that Step One, and because yours is a short-term, 24-hour project, you give Time no opportunity to stop you with procrastination. The remaining three steps will follow through on the momentum of Step One.
Let me warn you about that first step. It may look easy, and even pleasant, but the inertia of years of "getting along" is hard to budge in the direction of "getting ahead." Time used those years to get its forces of procrastination deeply entrenched. Before you can move you must overcome both inertia and procrastination, but once you are rolling, the rest is easy.
The result can be a revelation. In one 24-hour period you have proved to yourself that what you have done in a small way you can do on a larger scale with practice. Destroyed forever is the theory that success is a matter of "getting the breaks," or that it comes to some people because they are luckier than others. You have made many mistakes, accidentally. This 24-hour experience proves you can manufacture "a success," purposefully.
Now that you are rolling, continue setting day-to-day seed projects, not forgetting to reward yourself from time to time. Remember my definition of an achievement-something you did well, enjoyed doing, and are proud of? That "enjoyed doing" is as important to overall success as it is to the achievements that make success possible. Don't let yourself become a slave to success.
It will help you to do this too: At the end of each day, make a note for yourself in answer to the following question, "What's the best thing that happened to me today?" Even on the worst days, some things are just a little better than others. Make a habit of looking for something that is "best" in each of your days.
