Practical Wisdom from the Entrepreneurs Creative Edge by William Reed

A business saying has it that there are three types of people in the world; those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened?! Clearly, we want to be more like the former, and distance ourselves if possible from the latter.

You might say that making things happen is contagious. Experience shows that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. A certain amount of it is momentum, the habit of doing things now and not putting them off until later. But energy benefits from focus, and it is more important to do the right thing effectively than the wrong thing efficiently. The ability to tell the difference is what wisdom is made of.

Thomas A. Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, was one of the most productive geniuses in history, having invented the phonograph, telegraph devices, the electric lightbulb, film projectors, and motion pictures, with 1,093 patents to his name! He is famous also for saying that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

Yet for so many people, bad things seem to happen to good ideas on the way to implementation, and they never get done. This leads to a process I call Goal Drift.

Goal Drift is when people set a goal with best intentions, somehow drift off course, and the goal is then forgotten or abandoned. It often starts with a Power Surge, a burst of energy and enthusiasm, which falls off rapidly in the face of resistance. It happens again at regular intervals, often month’s apart, followed by another burst of temporary enthusiasm, eventually trailing off with nothing much achieved. The solution to this is steady action, as recommended by Scott Belsky in his book Making Ideas Happen.

Another reason for Goal Drift is Category Confusion, as defined by David Allen in Getting Things Done, where people list everything in one To Do List, and fail to separate items into categories. Allen suggests categorizing first by location, home, office, computer, using what he refers to as a Dashboard to keep track of all items at a glance.

Matsumura Yasuo, developer of the Mandala Chart, points out that an inflexible approach prevents most people from achieving their goals. Some people engage in distracted pursuit, chasing after whichever goal most urgently demands their attention. Another common approach is single-minded focus, in which the goal is pursued with blinders on and may be achieved, but usually at the cost of health, relationships, or balance. Another immature but common approach is to attempt to achieve things in a series of logical steps, completing one thing first, and then tackling the next, but only one thing at a time. Unfortunately for them, life is not so logical and everything tends to happen at the same time, without any respect for inflexible plans.

Kelly McGonical, PhD Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, and author of The Willpower Instinct, has researched ways in which people sabotage their own best intentions through distractibility and lack of mindfulness, and has devised many intelligent interventions that can get people back on track with greater self-control and self-discipline.

A powerful way to overcome many of these problems at once is to engage in accelerated action, using a goal setting solution called Goalscape, developed and tested by Olympic athletes and coaches in the challenging 49er yacht racing class. Described as two men trying to control a wind surfer, this highly unstable craft is enough to make even seasoned champions cry or get on toward the Goal.

Interesting in helping people learn how to achieve their goals and make their best ideas happen, we have started a company called EMC Quest, which among other things is the official representative of Goalscape in Japan. http://emcquest.com

We just spent the better part of a week with Richard Parslow, a World Champion Yacht racer and a Coach of World Champions in the Olympic 49er class, who is also the co-founder of the company behind the innovative Visual Goal Setting software Goalscape. We invited him to Tokyo and conducted a series of events for the business community, exploring how this software is used in both sports and business for applications ranging from project management, to recruitment and hiring, team building, and presentations.

To explore the many dimensions of goal setting and achievement, I have also started a new column called Time for a Change, and each week I update the content in the form of a GOALSCAPE file in the cloud version. The links to the articles are found in the Notes view of the outer sections of the chart. If you click on the paperclip in the notes view, you can download PDF attachments that I have created for each section. You can view this Goalscape at http://budurl.com/zp9g

Goalscape provides a single clear picture of the entire goal structure, indicating content, priority, and progress toward completion. Goalscape is an easy and fun to use goal setting toolproviding you with more time and energy to work on critical tasks to achieve your goals more effectively than conventional, list-based calendar and other tracking systems.

William Reed WEBSITE: http://www.williamreed.jp WEB TV: http://williamreed.tv NANBA: http://www.nanbanote.com iPAD CREATORS CLUB: http://ipadcreatorsclub.com BLOG: http://www.EntrepreneursCreativeEdge.com