Making Your Life Work As Planned This Year

By Grace Agada

One of the biggest financial dilemmas for many people living in the world today is that there is a big gap between what they plan to do each year, and the results they achieve at the end of the year. The reason for this gap is that there are certain factors that determine how your life goes each year, and depending on where you are and how you structure your life, this gap can be big or small.

There are about five factors that affect how your life goes each year.

They include: Your Strategy; Your Savings; Your Focus; The number of Completed Actions and; Your Role model.

 

Your Strategy

 

Your strategy is one of the greatest factors that affect your life each year. Imagine for a second that I just found about two oil wells in my backyard, and wanted to pay someone N1 million to dig and explore the well. Assuming that two people showed up for the job, one of them decided to use manual labor and do the job alone, and completed the job within one year. And the other decided to use a high tech machine and completed the job within one day.

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Even if I decided to ignore time waste and hire the first person and pay the same amount of money as agreed, the second would have used a smarter strategy that saved him time and energy, and freed up time space to earn extra income. But the other would have tied down his time the entire year.

The moral of the story is this – Most people are earning in one year what they could be earning in one day due to wrong strategy. When your strategy is not smart, you waste time, overwork yourself, and deprive yourself of extra income-earning opportunities.

 

  

Your Savings

 

The second factor that affects your life each year is your cash savings. Saving money is a critical component of financial success. It is critical because it gives you the ability to act on your goals.  Without savings, you cannot seize additional income-earning opportunities or protect yourself in the event of an income loss.

To save successfully you must increase your savings to the point that it overwhelms your bills. Broadly, there are two ways to increase savings. The first way is to reduce expenses and the second way is to add another source of income to your main income. When you save more than you spend your life will work as planned each year.

 

Your Focus.

 

Focus is critical for financial success and focus will affect how your life works each year. The truth is every year you will have goals that are competing for the attention of your limited resources. The only way to achieve these goals is to break them down. And prioritize the 20% goals that will make the most difference in your life. You must then focus on these goals to the exclusion of all other goals. This is how successful people achieve success.

 

Completed Action

 

The Fourth factor that can affect your life this year is the number of goals you begin and actually complete this year. At the end of the year, your results will be a reflection of what gets done, not what you are planning to do, thinking about doing, starting to do, or even doing. It is what gets done that is the real game-changer. And this is what will differentiate you from the many other people who will not make progress this year.

Successful people are massive action takers. They are constantly closing the gap between what they are thinking about, planning to do, and what gets done. Average people learn. Keep learning, keep planning, keep thinking, and never get anything done. This is why they never achieve real success. If you want to achieve your goals this year you must take massive action and get a lot of things done.

 

 

Your Role Model

 

Who you model is also very critical success factor. The person you model will determine where you end up. You cannot model a failure and achieve success and you will most likely succeed if you successfully model a successful person. The problem most times is that people are modeling average people and expecting to achieve successful results. They model their parents, uncle, friends, or colleagues who seem to be but are not exactly successful, just because they are at higher level than them. In some other instances they are either timid or resentful of those well known real success. The good news is you cannot become the person that you resent. Also, if you model average people you will end up being average or even less. And here is why. There is a big gap between successful people and average people in terms of the attitude, mindset and actions which are ingredients in building successful life. Average people take average actions, have average mindsets, and produce average results. So if you want to be successful you must model the person that reflects the kind of success that you desire.

 

Conclusion

 

Making your life work as planned each year requires deliberate action. You must not just plan to do but actually do all the things that will support the achievement of your goals.

 

Grace Agada is The Senior Financial Happiness Director @ Create Solid Wealth. She is an author and Columnist in several news publications and she is on a mission to help working-class professionals and CEOs become more financially successful. To learn more about Grace and how she can help you send an email to [email protected]

 

 

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