In 2014 Get Excited About Your Life!

Over the last two and a half years I have consulted for and worked with a myriad of amazing (can I repeat AMAZING) business entrepreneurs. Along the way I have come across some common traits through their often varied business practices that I found profound and very telling. The following are the ones I think may benefit you the most as you prepare for your New Year’s Resolutions:

1) Own your life.
The first thing I noticed is that these business entrepreneurs, above all, own their business. They take full responsibility for the risks/challenges and, rightfully, garner the rewards resulting from their business. The buck starts and stops with them. They are the alfa and the omega of their business and blaming other people, especially those who have no stake in their business, is never an option for a real business owner. What we often forget is that our primary business as human beings is life. In order to get the most out of it we have to behave like owners and assume full responsibility for all the risks/challenges that life presents. If, out of the ten things that you say about your life, more than three are excuses or blame then chances are high that you have yet to assume full ownership of your life.

2) Get excited about your life.
What is also very evident is that even when everyone else in the room has lost hope or interest, true owners of businesses find every reason and season to get excited about their business and the prospects ahead. In most cases without the excitement of the business owner, there would be no excitement for the business. If you truly own your life then naturally you will be the most excited about making it the best life you could ever live. The irony about life is that we can easily get excited about other people’s lives or even assignments that we get at the office (often someone else’s business), yet fail completely to draw on this energy to get excited about our own lives? Many of us get confused about life when we give room to other people to take share in the ownership of our lives by giving credence to their opinion on what our life should and should not be. True excitement about life is directly proportionate to your ownership stake; the more you own of your life, the more excited you are likely to be about it!

3) Just do it.
The business people I engaged also consistently employ a ‘just do it’ mindset and give the rest of us spectators a reason to keep looking and talking (and consequently doing nothing ourselves). The single most important determinant of their success is just simply taking action while everyone else is taking notes. There is no work around to this - no action, no hope for success. In life, as is the case in business, there are only two real options when it comes to action: you either live doing something (about it) or die doing nothing! There is no middle ground and if you think about it, no real option to taking action as a result - just do it!

New Year’s Resolutions are, on a whole, not optional. They represent the need for us to rejuvenate our sense of purpose and excitement for life and chart out a way forward towards making it the best life that we can ever live. For this very reason, New Year’s resolutions do not have to be composed at the advent of the year but they have to be composed regularly enough to serve this very purpose - rejuvenation.

New Year’s Resolutions are often goals or desired achievements that require some level of planning. Planning is just as critical a life tool as is purpose. If you think knowing your purpose is enough to get you through life, try realizing it without planning. Remember: the absence of detail in planning is the presence of blame in execution.

Yet the quality of the plan and its execution has more to do with the person behind it than the plan itself. Most of our plans do not materialize because, we lose drive, we lack discipline or we just don’t know which direction we ultimately want to take our lives in, so whatever we end up doing or achieving doesn’t seem to be enough.

So before you embark on your New Year’s Resolutions ask yourself the following questions: why do I not have drive (energy to push until you achieve); why do I not have discipline (ability to focus so that you achieve) and what direction, overall, do I want to take my life (so that whatever you achieve adds to your ultimate goal) and make sure the answers to these questions form part of your plan.