The One Thing You Must Do to Succeed in 2013

3 Steps to Get Your Life On Track

Do you want to be a success in 2013? With the New Year comes a sense of starting over and the chance to do better than you did in the prior year.

You’re probably wondering why I’m asking this question because: who doesn’t want to be a success?!

The reality is that despite wanting to succeed at business, many people put roadblocks in their way hindering them from achieving their goals.

What does this mean? For example, say you’re a great designer who has an amazing portfolio of client work. The problem is you’re not very good at selling your services. As a result you go from project to project without a well-primed pipeline of work. You work ridiculous hours to meet deadlines but you don’t have enough work to build and retain a support team to grow your business. Further, you feel compelled to chase after every potential lead and waste time responding to RFPs from people you don’t really want as clients.

Does this scenario sound familiar?

While you may not believe it, you can get yourself out of this self-imposed rut. Even better, you have even have options:

  • You can grow your design business by getting a sales person to bring in bigger clients while you focus on building your staff and portfolio of award winning work.
  • You can work for an established design firm with an array of strong peers looking for someone with your talents.
  • You can run an in-house shop for a client where you’re the one creative expert.

Here’s the one secret to your success in 2013.

You have to look inside yourself to determine what you want to do with your life. Specifically what is the one goal that you’ll stop at nothing to achieve. Because once you know this, you can put together a plan to accomplish it. You can make decisions more easily since you can ask: “Does this help get to my goal or not?” (Here’s more information on creating personal goals.)

For example, our designer must decide what’s he wants. Does he want to build his own shop or is it more important to be part of a great team? Each option has its own benefits and drawbacks. But the worst thing he can do is put off a decision and continue endlessly bouncing back and forth between options.

Once you decide what you want out of life, you can map out a path to your success because you can weigh each decision you make based on whether it helps achieve your goal. Here are three steps to help get you on track for success in 2013.

  1. Determine your primary goal. Decide what one thing you want to accomplish. The more concrete, specific and realistic you are the easier it will be to achieve. Further, write down your goal. Even better, post a copy of it where you can see it a few times a day so the message is reinforced. Issue: If you make a list of objectives, you’re setting yourself up for failure since you’ll spend your time bouncing from one thing to another without making any progress achieving any one of them.
  2. Develop a plan for achieving your objective. Don’t keep doing what you’ve always done and expect that you’ll achieve your goal. You need to have a step-by-step strategy to guide you through your journey. Issue: You must be flexible and adapt your plan to deal with any issue, good or bad, that arises. (BTW–Here’s how to get your marketing on track for 2013.)
  3. Set milestones to track your progress. Like any business strategy, it’s important to have a series of interim sub-goals and to measure your progress towards achieving them. Issue: Here’s a point where people often make a mistake. Instead of taking the time to measure their progress and celebrate achieving each accomplishment they plow ahead. As a result, they never build a sense of success.

The bottom line is that to succeed you must determine what your goals are, create a plan to achieve them, and track your progress. Remember it’s important to continually assess your progress and to celebrate your triumphs, no matter how small or personal.

What else would you add to this list and why?

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen


I’ll be speaking at:

Attend the largest online content marketing conference

Get Heidi Cohen’s Actionable Marketing Tips Delivered to Your Inbox:

  


Related articles:

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drb62/2603563990/

 

Tags , . Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to The One Thing You Must Do to Succeed in 2013