Sensible Guide to Personal Success Planning

Four Questions for Highly Successful People
A SENSIBLE GUIDE TO PERSONAL SUCCESS PLANNING

Agenda
o Brief Biography
o Introduction
o Four Key Questions for Highly Successful People
1. What is your definition of success?
2. What are you willing to do and not to do to achieve success?
3. Is success a journey or destination or a bit of both?
4. How do you know when you achieved success?
o Conclusion
o Questions and Answers
PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL 2

Te’s Biography

Introduction
o You are the master of your own career.
◦ No one else is accountable
◦ You inevitably live with the results – success or failure, happy or not
o Personal goal planning entails understanding of your capital
which includes your strengths, weaknesses, skills,
experience, drive and potential.
o To be successful, you have to
◦ Think strategically,
◦ Plan tactically,
◦ Implement wisely,
◦ Hone in on special areas
surgically, and
◦ Balance between thinking
and doing

Four Key Questions for Highly Successful People
1. What is your definition of
success?
2. What are you willing to do
and not to do to achieve
success?
3. Is success a journey or
destination or a bit of both?
4. How do you know when
you achieved success?

What is your definition
of success?Q1

What is Success?
o Webster defines success as “an accomplishment of an aim or
purpose.”
o Success is also an attitude; an attitude is a settled way of
thinking or feeling about someone or something.
o Success is different for different people. Examples include:
◦ Be wealthy
◦ Win games and gold medal
◦ Gain power and influence
◦ Make meaningful social changes
◦ Balance between a comfortable
home, two kids and a dog, a
well-paid job, and time to relax
7PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL

What Success Means for YOU?
o What do you really want to
accomplish professionally,
personally, academically, socially,
financially, etc.?
o There is no right or wrong answer.
But it must be your answer.
o Some factors to consider:
◦ Time – How long do you plan to work?
◦ Circumstances – What is your current
situation?
◦ Desires and interests – What are your
deep desires?
◦ Available resources – How much time,
money, and energy do you have?
◦ Achievability – How likely are you to
satisfactorily accomplish the goals?

Recommendation 1
o Plan backward – what do you want your obituary to say
about you?
◦ Looking back from the finality of life, there is simply clarity of
determining what are the most important.
◦ Also, obituaries tends be brief. This
would help you hone in on the
specifics.
o Create a short list of 5 (plus or
minus 2) goals that defines
your life.
◦ In absence of achieving these goals,
your life would be less meaningful.
◦ Stop worrying about the rest. If you perform these goals well, the rest
can be filled in.
o Remember, this is your life and your goals.

What am I willing to do and
not to do to achieve success?Q2

Defining “not” is just as important
o The first question is created for boundless speculation; this
question is designed to establish limits.
◦ Limits are crucial as we are all bounded by limited resources, including time,
money, energy, and
mindshare.
o “Not to do” can be as
important as “to do”
◦ For example, business are
usually profit driven. If there
is a demand, should your
company sell hotdogs?
◦ For you as an individual,
are you willing to work 80
hours per week in order to
get promoted? How about
90 or 100 hours per week?
◦ The point is not the number of working hours, but the notion of limits.
Knowing your limits is essential.

Recommendation 2
oAnalyze – Think through what
you want, what you are willing
to do, and what you are NOT
willing to do.
oConceive – Develop an action plan
that is achievable, ambitious, and
actionable
oTry – Give it a twirl and be ready to
fail. Most people often learn best
when they make mistakes. There is
no guarantee to success, but with
trying, there is the certainty of
failure.
al
You

Is success a journey or a
destination (or a bit of both)?Q3

“Life is a journey, not a destination.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
o Do you agree?
◦ If yes, then do results even matter?
◦ If no, does it mean “end always justifies the means”?
o This question can be viewed
in three relative sets of
dimensions:
◦ 1 (or a few) dimensions – Only
results matter; the journey is
not important (or as important).
◦ Infinite dimensions – Journey is
paramount; results is secondary.
◦ Many dimensions – Both results and journey matters; there are many
considerations.

1-Dimension – For Result Minded Individuals
o A one dimensional road is
straight with no or few
curves, rises or dips (Brown,
2009).
o You are likely to spend
considerable time planning
and determining the most
likely path toward success.
Once determined, changes
are rarer.
o You may enjoy the journey,
but your happiness is derived
far more from accomplishing
the goals.

∞-Dimensions – Life’s Traveler
o A traveler derives success from
the journey and only secondarily
from the destination.
o Travelers welcomes detours,
curves, rises, and dips.
o You are far more likely willing to
try new unbeaten paths and find
new ways of doing things.
o In the extreme, travelers can
lose sight of the destination and
become wanderers.

N-Dimensions – The Middle Road
o For those who place equal emphasis on the journey and
destination and is willing to constantly juggle both, then you
are taking the middle road.
o This roadmap is defined by
the present circumstances,
the destinations, and the
key stops along the way.
o Like 1-dimension and ∞-
dimensions, actions are
conducted within the
parameters of your core
values, beliefs and attitudes.
o Many roads will lead you to your final destination; the choices
you make determine the road you take.

Recommendation 3
o The choice is yours, but be flexible be ready with change. The
road of life is rarely smooth or linear and is more likely to
look like the picture here. So be prepared for the adventure.
Progress
10
8
6
4
2
0
High
Low
Time
Valley of despair
Early success
Source: The Decision Book, Fifty Models for Strategic
Thinking, Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler, 2008

How do you know when you
achieve success?Q4

What does success looks like to you?
o Have you establish guidelines or metrics to measure
success?
o How do you measure
subjective attributes
such as happiness or
“feel good”?
o Two consideration
when determining
guidelines and metrics:
◦ Ethics
◦ Happiness

Ethics
o Does success have to be ethical? For example:
◦ People can get rich by robbing banks just as they pay less taxes by under
reporting on income tax.
◦ Students can pass exams by cheating.
o What if the ethical demarcation is
much less clear?
◦ Supervisors can take credit without
sharing them with their staff.
◦ For marketers, it may be perfectly
legal to exaggerate your product’s
functionality in the advertisement.
It may also be legal to conduct
negative campaigns trashing your
competitor’s products.
o When does a person cross the
threshold in which actions become
morally questionable to morally
wrong?
o Do you have a yard stick?

Happiness
o Have you had experience in which you achieved success and
yet felt miserable?
◦ Common experience suggests that success itself is insufficient for most
people; happiness is required
o The difficulty with the
happiness concept is
that it is very
individualistic.
o Mikael Krogerus and
Roman Tschappeler
(2008) developed an
excellent model for
achieving happiness.

What makes you happy?
Five things that make us
happy:
o Intensely focused on an
activity
o of our own choosing, that
is
o neither under-challenging
(boreout) nor over-
challenging (burnout),
that has
o a clear objective, and that
receives
o immediate feedback.
Source: The Decision Book, Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking, Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschappeler,
2008

Recommendation 4
Are you ready to define your success metrics? We believe that
success metrics must minimally obey the following three rules:
1. Goal(s) must be substantial.
2. The attainment of the goals (journal)
and the goals themselves (destination)
must be legal and sufficiently morale
that you can celebrate.
3. Success must be tied to happiness. We
submit that the very purpose of success
for most people is the attainment of
happiness. Thus, without the “feel
good”, success itself may be meaningless.

Summary
o The 4 questions presented in this article are of course a
simplification of a very complex process.
o But these four questions are pivotal as they likely lead to
more questions and explorations.
o By establishing a direction in Question 1,
◦ tap the boundary of what you can
and would do in Question 2,
◦ understand whether you would
cherish to journey, the results, or
a bit of both in Question 3, and
◦ finally define measures that let you
when to celebrate in Question 4,
◦ you are ready for this journey.
o Are you ready?

Questions and Answers

Contact Information
Please complete a quick survey at:
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Thank you!
Name: Te Wu
Company: PMO Advisory LLC
Email: wu@pmoadvisory.com
Phone: 201-688-0680
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tewu1/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/pmoadvisory
Blog: http://blog.pmoadvisory.com

Sensible Guide to Personal Success Planning

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