Let’s get right into it!

Before we begin this adventure, let’s start by creating our target. Without a target what are we aiming at? If you don’t have a destination, what are you going to type into Google Maps?

Keying in the right destination

We have all read about, probably what may be the worst failure of our life, the feeling of deep regret we face near or at the end of life. It is the worst failure because there is normally very little or no time at all to cure the regrets at this sunset moment or maybe more appropriately, the twilight moment of our life. After struggling all my life to define success, I believe I finally have it. Success is having the least amount of regrets at the end of your life.

What are these regrets we speak of? Most common are:

1. Wished we had spent more time with loved ones. (maybe there will always be some degree of regret here)

2. Wished we had worked less in order to be better at the no. 1 regret.

3. Wished we had lived more, do more things as in the things we had thought of doing but never got around to it.

4. Wished we had the courage to pursue a life true to our dreams or desires not what was expected of us. (surprisingly top of many people’s lists)

5. Wished we had worried less.

6. Wished we had made more money to take better care of our loved ones.

7. Wished we had stayed in touch with friends.

If we start here with this knowledge, we should be able to create the right target and thus start correctly to follow the right directions.

In golf, it is not about playing consistently perfect but about making the best mistakes, i.e. the least costly mistakes. In other words, you may never have a golf game with all the aspects perfected but you can certainly develop a consistency that allows tolerable mistakes instead of disastrous ones that wreck your golf score and even your day. Golf fans know what I am referring to. The point is, don’t try to formulate the perfect target so that you have no regrets. It is not possible, because as you can see above, some of the regrets are caused by too much focus on one or the other regret. You have to find a balance that will allow you to have a life with regrets that will be tolerable. Once you prioritize the regrets in importance to you then you can go about living the life that produces the outcome that you can accept as a successful life, i.e. a life of a level of tolerable regrets.

Finding the right balance

How do we know what is the right balance? This is subjective. Life for almost every person has 3 focus areas that provide a feeling of balance when they are fulfilled in the right proportion for each of us. It is important to note here that this balance changes throughout life. The below balance would be likely appropriate for someone in their 20s to 30s.

FOCUS CHART

We need money to live a good life in a civilized society, one where money is used to provide food, lodging and security. However it may be more important to be at home as a mother for your children in their infant years and sacrifice a second income which may lead to regret #6. In this case, her Focus chart will look different. She may focus 60% on Relationships, with her infant, instead of Money. Or, it may be more important to her to take advantage of a career opportunity and pay a day care facility to take care of her child while she is at work. Her husband may decide that he could work part time to spend more time with the child in order for the mother to take advantage of her career opportunity. She would be doing this knowing that by moving forward with #6, she would eventually have the ability to focus on #1 as a priority again. As you can see, the BALANCE changes depending on what stage of life you are in. Once you set the balance necessary for the era of life that you are in and in alignment with the values you hold dear, the next step is achieving the goals of this balance. NOTE: THERE IS NO PERFECT BALANCE. There is a perfect plan based upon your analysis to move forward with. Own it, start your journey now. You will be fine with the right mindset. Greatness normally does not begin with perfection.

Achieving Goals

A goals is a dream with a deadline. A goal should always have a deadline AND multiple “checkpoints”. To achieve a goal on your deadline or before, you need to be able to monitor and measure your progress along the way. This will increase your chances of success as it allows you to adjust the pace of your efforts to stay on track for your deadline.

We have set our goals and now we need to be productive, get tasks done and completed. We are talking about being an ACHIEVER. An achiever is the one who gets done what they say they are going to do. The good news? It doesn’t take a genius or special skills.

In this journey that we call life, the bottom line is results. It’s not just about dreaming if it is not followed by effective action, planning without purpose, waiting for a euphoric brainwave or someone or something to rescue you and miraculously find the drive and vigor to achieve. In this world, there are dreamers who sleep away their lives and there are dreamers who are excited to put their will into action. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to perform at a high level and be a high achiever. However, I can guarantee you that if you live a life where you do things, anything, instead of waiting or wasting your time on time killers such as binging, being hooked on social media hits, because they are hits, like drugs that we become addicted to, and like robots adopt to a lifestyle that silently devour our productive time.

Just think about boomers, how much they achieved without the fawning credit opportunities of today to purchase things they “needed”, without instant access to information, information that answered every question or lessons or videos to explain any task. They did it the hard way by trying and failing. Failure was not a deterrent, it was a rite of passage. But more importantly consider how they used their time productively instead of getting on tik tok and being entertained by a dog on a surfboard, a heron riding on the back of a gator, an endless flow of entertaining snippets that do little for improving us. Okay, sometimes it is a great stress reducer, but after 10 mins, you are now wasting time. One thing is clear, in this age of empowering information we waste it, we allow it to control us instead of us taking advantage of it and getting to another level, you know, leveling up. By the way, level up is a term Steve Harvey, host of Family Feud, uses when he drops great offers for courses online at discounted prices. He offers great courses and bundles through the site Stack Skills. Stack Skills is actually a site of great lessons at great prices to edit photos, videos, learn a programming language, build a website and much more. How many of us are leveling up?

Do you think that you are not as good as the people who succeed? Did you know that many successful people are not the smartest or the most intelligent, not even in the top 10% of their class? You know, Bill Gates was not the smartest guy in the room. However, he was the guy with vision. So was Steve Jobs. They however, did surround themselves with the smartest people to transform their vision into meaningful practical solutions to problems they foresaw as needs of society that did not even materialize yet. Suddenly we wonder how we lived without a desktop computer with icons to click on instead of remember the correct syntax for giving the computer a command in the form of a phrase, the age of Dos commands. How about Steve making us not able to exist without major separation anxiety if we don’t have our phones in ready reach or clutched in our hands?

Stop thinking about what you don’t have and move forward, forward to a state of commitment to something that excites, drive you or compel you. Just stop with the incessant binging, or looking at Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok, Snapchat and find that part of you that exists, that part that wants to do something instead of seeking validation from others also seeking validation, a sad circle of existence that basically keeps you stuck, stuck in mediocrity. You don’t have to be great. Let’s not put that pressure on ourselves. That’s the pressure of failing that keeps you from even attempting.

Well I have news for you! There is a way forward, that is not complicated, not scary with the promise of another unfinished task, and you don’t need to be a genius or amazing. You just need to live now. NOW! Instead of thinking of failing again, the only consistent thing probably in this life of coping, something you have become a warrior at, do this! Do not allow another year to go by that you will regret not doing what you wanted to do. Just simply let’s live a life of little regrets. Next year, don’t be that person who regretted that they didn’t do something they had wanted to do. That’s it. Live of a life of doing, of attempting, of failing but of doing. Stop thinking and start doing. This is what I call it, “Mat Socho Bas Karo”, Don’t think just do! By the way, I was saying this years before the movie, Top Gun, Maverick, made it popular. You don’t need to be skilled or talented or gifted. You just need to be somebody that does something about wanting to do something by doing something!

Let not another year go by with you saying at the end, “oh man, I regret that I didn’t do that”. So pick something, anything that you thought of doing and let’s get started. That’s it friend, just do something that you can look back on later that you did, whether you failed or not. One requirement. You must give it your all. Fail mightily if you fail. Now because this is a crazy society where people go to the extreme with taking things literally, please allow me to clarify. If you wanted to learn to jump off a cliff and hang glide, by all means do it AFTER you are trained and you take all the necessary safety precautions. I am encouraging you to be fearless not stupidly reckless. For example I had a fear of kayaking in the water where there were gators. I loved the idea of kayaking but gators worried. So I researched all the habits of gators, their behaviors, when they are dangerous, how to deal with an encounter. I learned that you have a better chance of being bitten by a dog than a gator. Of course, I am not going to go swimming amongst gators. Adversely a kayak is extremely safe among gators in the water. They will almost always avoid a kayak. Also a gator will not likely go after what is not an easy prey. I also got a knife and learned where gators are vulnerable. Then I practiced wary and respectful paddling in freshwaters. Above all, I knew to never panic, which is how most people end up in the water with a gator while padding a kayak, not the gator launching a powerful offensive capsizing maneuver. Then with a very timid but highly aware attitude I made my first very short excursion in a lake with gators. I went back several times after and soon lost my concern for gators but still stayed wary and observant.

Ok now that we got that out of the way, let’s start by simply doing. Now I am not saying no more Netflix, God knows you wouldn’t survive that. I am just saying not to keep making this your way of life. You only have so many hours in this life, use it well and you will have less regrets. Maybe that is the definition of success, to live a life with the least regrets. Whether that propels you to a state of financial might, health or whatever, it will propel you to being someone you can admire. This is the most empowering tool in life, to be a person you admire.

Maybe before we go any further, it is a good time to define or at least clarify what we mean by success as our goal. By success, we mean to live a life of abundance. A life where you are able to do excellent at health, finances, family life and personal fulfillment. However, for our purpose at this point, that would simply mean a life where you are consistently achieving your goals, back to doing.

If we can be one thing in this life is to be someone who does what they say they will do.

Next I will being profiling some of these warriors of accomplishments and we will also learn something else called “consistency”.

Then the question becomes, what do you want to do with your time if you could spend it any way you wished? We may not even know what that is! Now we are addressing purpose. Or maybe not even that profound. You just want to start doing AND completing the things you want to do. Tasks as simple as walk around the block for exercise or wash your car or make your bed. So we are not going to dive deep into purpose yet. First you have to be functional.

You first have to become this athlete whose mental fortitude is strong and effective resulting in you doing whatever you say you are going to do. Is there a secret way to become this? How do you start doing things and completing them? What if I told you the answer is so ridiculously simple? You see, each person is capable of completing challenging tasks even though at this very moment, they may feel like a procrastinator, a loser, immobile or stuck in a rut. Well I have been there. While I searched for that special motivating and inspirational thought that would propel forward, it turned out to be quite simple. See there is very little difference between say an achiever and a procrastinator. I spoke to some of these high achievers, the ones that seem to have inexhaustable drive every day. I tried to unearth their secret mentality, that innovative approach, their principles that guided them, the secret sauce! Their answers were disappointedly but excitingly simple!

“Stay connected to your vision while doing the mundane tasks necessary”

— Super Achiever

Much of what you read of advice from achievers comprise of many ingredients for a recipe that becomes too complicated to follow because of the absence of basic foundations, for example, how do you get started doing something when you don’t even know what you want to do? “Follow your passion”? Not just yet. Well this is why I have decided to share with you the art of achieving. Delightful phrases such as “follow your passion” leaves you euphorically launching into space only to crash and burn under the disappointment of how mundane or prolonged the process turned out to be. How do you find your passion? Your purpose? Once again there is no secret recipe or approach as much as they will try to convince you of a standard path to that end.

To start on the path to being an achiever requires you to start. Yes, simply start. You don’t need the perfect plan nor the perfect moment. You need now and to start. Now here’s the simplicity. Don’t think, just do. You will hear this echoed throughout this blog because success is based upon this. The simple habit of doing what you intend to do. In vedic terms, it is, “mat socho bas karo”. I recently learned that in Top Gun: Maverick, the recent sequel to the original Top Gun, this became a theme in the movie. To think I was saying this years before the movie.

I am going to be honest. I still need to achieve goals that are part of my life of abundance plan so I need to employ the lessons that I have learned from the achievers. The first step is making a very easy list of tasks that you are guaranteed to complete. I have been doing this. The goal is to become a super achiever. A super achiever is one who not only completes the tasks on his lists but goes beyond that. Read on to join me on the path to becoming a high achiever. Whether you want to become a super achiever is going to be your decision but first things first. Let’s learn how to complete the tasks on your to do list.

Introduction to Mat Socho Bas Karo.

1. Make a list for the week of tasks that are achievable fairly easily.

2. Make a list for the first day with some of the tasks from your weekly tasks.

3. Now make it a matter of life and death that you complete the tasks for that day.

4. IF for some reason, God forbid, you were not able to complete a task by the end of the day, place an asterisk next to it and include it in the next day’s list.

5. Keep doing your daily list and executing the items. When you have a task with 3 asterisks, YOU MUST GET IT DONE. NO EXCEPTIONS. This is why you don’t want to allow a task to develop 3 asterisks by getting them done on the day they were assigned.

Getting the tasks done: Once you have decided how to do it just do it WITHOUT ANY MORE THINKING. Shut off the brain as soon as it tries to stop you or talk you out of it with those glorious rationalization speeches. Don’t think just do. Mat socho bas karo!

Your Best Version

There is so much free accessible advice on the internet by influencers, gurus, coaches that we should all be such high achievers. Alas we are not. Why? Because much of the advice is not practical and sustainable. Sometimes they don’t address the most basic issues, how to get things done consistently, the most basic ingredient for being an achiever. The words ring constantly, “Wake up earlier, it is compatible with your circadian rhythms, that natural instinctive behavior as we respond to light”, “follow your passion, you will never work another day in your life” and so on. While these are effective for some, they are not applicable to all in the quest to be their best. We are all different so what works for some will not necessarily work for all. So we must follow fundamental guidelines and build upon them.

To provide the actionable and sustainable advice, we decided to simply follow the example from those who have actually done it, not the Youtubers or Instagrammers or others that typically belt out advice in volumes to drum up the most likes and followers.

We are not referring to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Remember, that level of success requires more than just being a high achiever. There is a certain level of narcissism and sick obsession required in those cases. There is nothing wrong with that but we prefer to focus on a life of abundance, a balance that is most likely to produce happiness and inner peace, including the financial independence that is also part of this framework. Therefore we will focus on the more “ordinary” achievers that reach high levels of achievement and success without sacrificing relationships along the way, a life of abundance. In terms of dollars, we are referring to those who achieved financial independence to the point where they were able to spend their time as they deemed fitting without damaging their current and future financial independence, i.e a sustainable financial independence.

---

But first we have to learn how to achieve consistently. By that I mean people who do what they say they are going to do, day in and day out. Let’s be realistic though. They have days of poor performance, life will throw curve balls at you, but the perseverance is the key trait of this group. No one, NO ONE (yes I had to shout this for effect, sorry) is absolved of having to deal with curve balls in this life. I believe success is determined by how we deal with these curve balls. Ok I will stop referring to them as curve balls for our non sports fans.

All our advice on this blog will be grounded in practicality without the unrealistic generalizations that end up being ineffective because they neglected the unpleasant details that were endured along all journeys. For example, “follow your passion”, is bad incomplete advice that is impractical for a person with responsibilities and financial obligations that cannot shelved temporarily. This is life but with all its pitfalls we can achieve a life of abundance. So whatever advice we share, it will be distilled through the realities of actual experiences, not given by someone who has little clue of the comprehensive canvas of life’s realities.

The good news is that it is not complicated. To be successful, all you need to do is do what you say you will do…consistently. Did you know that it was as simple as that? The tough part is to do it consistently which is why it is so elusive and seemingly complicated. It is the very fundamental difference between those that are able to achieve their visions and those that futilely get no closer or move at an agonizing pace towards their goals.

Firstly, your habits determine your destiny. Observe your habits, they will explain where your present is leading you towards. By repeated actions, you will become that which you commit, whether unknowingly or deliberately. Okay, but how do we practice the right habits? We have plans and we know what it takes to succeed but somehow we don’t get it done. Now here is what I have observed. We all know what we want to do already but we are either scared or we lack confidence. “We lack confidence” means that we lack faith in ourselves to commit completely to a goal or a string of actions needed to accomplish that goal. Why?? Because we have gradually created a standard that we have accepted about ourselves. Over time we have accepted we are not A students, we are not going to be rich, it is too hard for us, we don’t get things done or it is not within our capability. The problem is that once you start accepting it once that you are any of the above, it leads to weakening in faith in yourself, which leads to further acceptance or resignation to lower standards. Some are sure that they will get rich one day, but daily they sabotage themselves by their habits.

Why is it we don’t do what we intend to do? Because that is the standard we have decided to live by. All you have to do is decide, decide not to accept mediocre performance. Really? But how do I get things done? This is the problem you say, I know so much about planning for success but I just don’t get things done that I am supposed to.

What if I said it is simple to change that? Well it is, the “Mat socho bas karo” way. This is Sanskrit for “stop thinking and just do”. Incidentally I have been saying this for years on my instagram page and then recently it was said in the movie, Top Gun Maverick. My daughter called me and said in an incredulous voice, “Daddy, they are saying your saying in the movie!” Well Nike started it with, “Just do”, but that was only half of it. The other half is to stop thinking. The difference between winners and losers typically is that winners do what they intend to do and losers just say it and then settle for an outcome. To simply get things done regularly you MUST shut off the brain. For example, if you planned to go running at 6am, when the alarm goes off, get up, don’t think and MOVE. Trust me this works like magic, once you make it outside the door, it gets easier and easier. If you allow yourself time to think, it will start. “Why not tomorrow", “it is hot, the news said to be wary of heat waves”, “it’s not like the world will end if I don’t go tomorrow instead”, “sleep is important to your health” and so on. Your brain is excellent at rationalizing procrastination, self preservation and being your sweet tolerant friend in the heat of the moment.

So we know that we need

1. Practice the right habits.

2. Once we choose the habits for success

3. We need to figure out HOW to practice those habits.

4. HOW to do what we say we will do

So let’s start becoming achievers and then superachievers by practicing “mat socho bas karo”.

MAT SOCHO BAS KARO…success made simple (to be continued)

“Success is being able to do what you want with your time without an adverse effect on financial independence or relationships”