How to be a Lean Mean Operational Machine

You can be anything you set yourself to be. You are in control and you have the ability to choose exactly what you do and how you use your time.

If you are stuck in something you don’t like or enjoy very much, I recommend you start building your transfer.

Learn new skills, get new education and move on. Make sure you don’t move until you have secured your future in the new place.

Be careful: To know what you really like, you need to analyze and think about it for long periods of time until you are 100% sure of what you like and enjoy (it takes time to internalize what you like and enjoy).

Once you figure out what you like and enjoy, you will be able to achieve massive amounts of goals, projects, and output.

The key idea is to produce and to be able to produce high quantity and quality of output, and to do that you need to be a lean mean operational machine.

Three things you need to become a Lean Mean Operational Machine:

1.      You need to know the road you will be going on

Vision, definite chief aim, purpose, a million dollars, etc. That’s what you need to know.

You need to create some kind of a goal that pushes you forward.

I have had times when I had to review and change my goals every day because I didn’t feel it was “right” yet.

Now I review them on quarterly or yearly basis or when I feel there is something that needs to be improved.

You should create your own vision statement and link it to some measurable goals. There are many goals helping programs which you can use to advance on this topic.

You can try Brian Tracy’s ultimate goals package which can give you everything you need to create the goals that will drive you to become more successful every day.

2.      You will need to have the capacity to go on that road

Once you have goals, you will need to learn and read every book you can get your hands on to help you reach those goals.

To drive on a new road to get you from point A to B, you need to have a car, a map, motivation, maybe some good company, food and ability to drive.

Same with achieving any other goal, you need to have the education (theory), experience (if you don’t have experience, you can start and learn along the way), and people to support you such as mentors and supportive friends (mentors can be replaced with books to start with).

3.      You will need to remove the brakes

The most difficult barrier which you need to remove is your emotional fears of success and failure alike.

Your fears are what will keep you from moving on. If you know where you want to go and you have the car and maps ready, the only thing that will stop you are the butterflies in your stomach.

If you have them now when reading this article, you are not alone. I still feel them whenever I start a new endeavor, but I follow several techniques to get going and reap the rewards afterwards.

1. Visualize success – imagine 5 years from now and everything is perfect.. how does it feel?
2. Ask yourself, is there anything else you would rather be doing? You need to fill your time with something! If this is the thing, then it is. If not, explore other options.

I had started a hosting company sometime ago because most of my education was in IT.

Then I had many doubts and second thoughts about the selection of that profession and I stopped developing it. After exploring everything else, I had returned to my initial business and I was confident it was the best option for me.

1. Simplify the next step: ask yourself, how can I spend one-hour to kick start this endeavor. Then ask yourself what is preventing me from doing that right now..

List everything that comes to your mind and study it. You will be amazed at the things that may come up as a barrier to starting.

Once you know your fears, it is easy to confront them. Again, you need to get your fears out in the open and understand them.

You need to transfer the butterflies in you stomache (un-understandable vague things) to something you can understand, measure, and find solutions.

The way to do this is whenever you have this feeling, you write down the answer to this question:

1. I don’t want to do this because..

                                                                                                  i.      Example: I don’t feel like it

1. Then keep asking the question “why”.

                                                                                                  i.      Example: Because I fear it may take all my money.

1. Then ask the question “how”.

                                                                                                  i.      Example: Because I need to invest a large amount of money into this endeavor and I don’t know if I will ever get it back.

Then work on each one separately to eliminate those fears.

For example, for the first question, it is true you might lose all your money on an endeavor – so to fix that, can you start smaller? Can you invest less money upfront?

For the second question, can you improve your returns? Can you improve the likelihood of getting any returns?  Can you see what others have done to get their money back in a similar investment?

The idea is to remove fears by analyzing them and finding solutions for them. Your fears are good things they are telling you something might go wrong and you get fears from all your previous experiences combined together to tell you something.

You should listen to them, analyze them and find solutions, if fears won’t go away for a certain goal, maybe you need to change that goal. Maybe you have been burned or have known others who have been burned many times who went into the same thing – trust yourself. If that’s all the experience you have of this goal, most likely that’s all you know.

Conclusion

Get into something you know is good. If you are not sure it is good, can you improve the likelihood that it becomes good or even great? Eliminate your fears by addressing them instead of ignoring them and turn on your Lean Mean Operational Machine and start making some serious money.