Success is spelled with 4 S’s

Most people think there are three S’s in the word “success”, but that’s not true, there are really four S’s in the word “success.”

These four S’s are:

• Set it
• Share it
• Start it
• Stick to it

Okay, I should admit something, these are really the four S’s in goals, but when you achieve your goals you move towards success. Let’s look at these 4 S’s in a little more detail.

Set it

All success starts with a goal. You have to know what you want, and have a plan to get there in order to be successful. This might be something as simple as “make 10 cold calls today” or as difficult as “double my salary in 12 months.”

Both have one thing in common, until you SET the goal, you won’t begin to make any real progress towards achieving your goal.

Last year I had a goal to increase my income by 35% in 2006 - I knew what I wanted my end result to be and I knew that I would have to make some changed to accomplish this. Once I set my goal, I began to work on it and by the end of 2005 I had already increased my income in 2006 by 19% - a pretty good way towards my full goal before 2006 had even started!

Share it

When you’re working towards a goal, you need to let other people know about it - you need to share your goal. But take care to share it with people who will build you up and help you be successful; you don’t want any negative people dragging down your spirits as you work towards your goals.

I have a friend with whom I share a lot of my goals. He is an excellent resource for keeping me accountable to myself. If I share a goal (or even a “want”) with him - even in passing - he’ll keep asking me about it and my progress on achieving my goal. I’m not even sure he realizes he’s so great at goal-accountability, but he is. I’ve accomplished goals before simply because he kept me on track by regularly asking me about my progress.

Find someone who you can share your goal with and who will be excited, positive and share in your success with you!

Start it

You’ve got to take action before you’ll ever achieve results. This step is simply taking the first action towards achieving your goals. This is also the step where many people falter. A lot of people feel like they can’t take action until they’re 100% ready or until they’ve got 100% of the information needed - these become stumbling blocks to getting started.

I’ve always said (and many more famous authors have said it before) that massive action towards your goal will often win over intricate detail. But any action is better than planning yourself to death. Follow the formula of; Ready, Fire, Aim!

About a year ago I decided I wanted to do more with my photography. Instead of hemming and hawing about whether or not I could do it, I jumped in and found some friends who wanted work done - with the understanding that I was (yet) a “pro.” If you’re a pro photographer reading this, you’re skin is probably crawling, but after a few assignments from friends I landed some assignments from people I knew who weren’t friends. That has led to some work by people I didn’t know at all.

If I hadn’t started doing it, I would probably still be sitting around dreaming about making money from my hobby instead of actually making a little money from my hobby!

Stick to it

When you make your actions towards reaching your goals habitual, you are almost guaranteed of reaching your goals. This is hard because sticking to a goal requires a personal commitment and will power - until it’s an ingrained habit you have to constantly condition yourself to stick with it.

This can be easy if you have a huge amount of passion and motivation or it can be more difficult if you’ve not worked yourself up for tackling the goal. If you make sticking to your goals a habit, eventually the behaviors you stick to in order to reach your goals will become habits.

This web site is a good example of this; I had to stick to a commitment of writing articles before I knew if anyone would actually visit the site and read them. I couldn’t write one or two articles and then sit back and way for readers to show up and demand more to read. I had to act like I had a base of readers right from the outset and stick with regularly writing articles. I can tell you that the first weeks were very nerve wracking, I would look at my logs from the week and there would be entire days where I might have one or two visitors (or worse, a day with no visitors). I would worry that my articles weren’t resonating with readers, and I would wonder if the site would be a total flop!

In the end, persistence and sticking with it paid off; today I have an ever growing base of readers and every week my logs show an increase in visits and page views. The site still has a long way to go before my own personal goals for traffic levels will be met, but sticking with it will be key to getting there.

When you combine all of these steps, and follow them as outlined you create a set of behaviors and habits, and an environment for yourself where success is much more likely to be the result. All to often people set goals and don’t have a plan in place to assure they reach their desired outcome. These 4 S’s of “success” are the framework you need.

The next time you spell “success”, make sure it has 4 S’s!

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Here are some related articles you might also enjoy!

• How do you measure your successes?
• Success requires support.
• How high do you bounce?
• Is your “success resume” up to date?
• Do you skim the surface or dive deep?

February 18th, 2006

Entry Filed under: Goals, Development, Success