Focus on the process, not results

To complement what I wrote yesterday regarding believing in yourself and ACTING on your inspired idea, I wish to make a clarification.

I wrote that you should implement an exciting idea without regard to other people's opinions, however do keep in mind that this idea should feel EXCITING to you.

Other people, including friends, family, coworkers, will tend to be cautious, conservative and, well, pessimistic.

Nevertheless, this does not mean you shouldn't consider their analysis.

Just keep in mind -- and this is really important as I have found out myself -- that people will evaluate your ideas based on the PAST.

Most importantly, they will not consider your feeling excited (about your idea) as a relevant factor in their analysis of whether your idea will work.

Yet that is precisely my point: if you truly feel excited about your idea, you should implement it right away. Why even talk to other people about it?

This doesn't mean you can FULLY implement your idea. It simply means you can take decisive steps (these steps should be irreversible, if possible) toward implementing your idea.

The secret is this: In life, in order to succeed, you either DO or you DOUBT. You cannot do both.

Yoda put it differently: "Do or do not. There is no try."

In other words, he's saying that when you "try" to do something, you implicitly acknowledge to yourself and others that there is the possibility of failure. In short, you doubt that you will succeed.

This doubt itself WILL attract to you all kinds of obstacles and difficulties that, had you been totally confident and secure and calm, would not have appeared.

In short, your doubts CREATE your difficulties.

Doubting oneself, is like driving a car down the road while focusing on the tree instead of focusing on the road. You will eventually run into the tree!

This may sound obvious to you, but trust me, I coach entrepreneurs and have noticed many times that they doubt themselves.

So how do you get rid of your doubts?

Here's a trick to put yourself into a supremely confident state of mind WHILE fully enjoying the process or the project you are doing.

Think of a movie that you've enjoyed watching before. In my case, it would be Fight Club.

Now, you KNOW how it ends. It does end well.

So the second time you watch it, you no longer worry or wonder about the ending. You just fully enjoy the movie.

It's the same whenever you do a new project. Imagine that it ends well. Then, you only have to enjoy the process of "getting it done."

What makes it hard for us to enjoy the process, is society's obsession with "results."

As long as a person obsesses about results, he/she is not fully invested in the process (or the game being played). Ironically, the result therefore cannot be good.

On the other hand, when you focused on HAVING FUN right here and right now, the results will take care of themselves.

Think this is farfetched? Consider the advice that Tony Hsieh gave on Oprah. Hsieh is the founder and CEO of Zappos.com. He's only 26 years old.

He said, you should choose work that you are totally passionate about, even if you don't make money for 10 years.

In other words, he's saying that process (or the game being played) is more important than results.

In the next post, I go even further. I will explain why a focus on "return on investment" can actually be detrimental in business and investing.