Tweet

Final Exam

Guest post by: Jim Stovall

Article Overview: I believe among the most valuable traits of any human being is the ability to honestly, objectively, and realistically assess themselves. It is easy to look at friends, neighbors, and colleagues and judge their success in their personal or professional lives. This ease in judging others comes from our tendency to look at everyone else's actions and results while only viewing our own intentions. We all start out with great intentions that can often become an excuse when we fail to perform.

Final Exam

I believe among the most valuable traits of any human being is the ability to honestly, objectively, and realistically assess themselves. It is easy to look at friends, neighbors, and colleagues and judge their success in their personal or professional lives. This ease in judging others comes from our tendency to look at everyone else's actions and results while only viewing our own intentions. We all start out with great intentions that can often become an excuse when we fail to perform.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. For years in my corporate and arena speaking engagements, I have challenged my audiences by telling them that most people spend more time planning their three-day weekend than they spend planning what they are going to do for the rest of their lives. This accurate self-evaluation is extremely difficult.

We've all heard of anorexia which is a debilitating disease that can result in death. Anorexic patients literally starve themselves to death. They can look in a mirror and see themselves as overweight, even though they are literally only skin and bones. For anorexic patients to be cured, it requires a sort of reprogramming in their perceptions and outlooks.

For you and I to assess our lives, we've got to undergo similar reprogramming. We can only judge our success and progress based on where we should be in our lives. Comparing ourselves to others, or even comparing ourselves to where we used to be, will always lead us to a false conclusion.

The following questions may be helpful as you begin the process.

1. What do I stand for?
2. What are the things I most want to accomplish in my life?
3. Who are the people that are most significant to me?
4. Am I making a difference in the lives of those I most care about?
5. Am I on-track to reach my personal and professional goals?
6. Am I making a lasting difference in the world?
7. Am I enjoying the ride?

The answers to these questions can begin the exercise of looking into our own life mirror and judging what we see. No one else can do this but us, and no one else's opinion really matters.

As you go through your day today, resolve to not judge anyone else nor allow them to judge you, but put your life on trial and control the verdict.

Today's the day!

Related Articles
  Java Certification Training Kits for self preparation
  Oracle Certified Associate, Java SE 5/SE 6 Preparation Article
  Oracle Certified Expert, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6 Enterprise JavaBeans Developer Preparation Article
  The Hardest Exam Ever: Has There Ever Been a Period That Was Not an Information Age?
  Course Detains Of Cheapest Online Traffic Schools
  Guaranteed Issue Life Insurance An Expensive scam?
  Cheap Online Traffic Schools For Your Benefits
  It\'s Time for Zero Based Thinking
  Vision Insurance Do You Need It?
  How to Become a Private Tutor in the UK
  Lesson #1: Beginning as a Beginner is Okay
  Doing Whatever It Takes For Success
  Improve Workflow at Your Practice with Electronic Medical Records
  The Desperation Solution
  Teflon v CrazyGlue
  Online Educational Services
  Self-Publishing Success: How You Can Earn $30,000 a Month with POD Publishing
  A Guide To Screenings For Every Decade Of Your Life
  Kick start your career with a PMP certification
  And Just What Does That Mean?

Article Tags: judging others professional jim stovall assess



Related Forum Posts
Usable Service? - Hi, I have been sitting on an idea for quite some time, but I'm not sure how much demand this business will have. I've found that over the years, every organization that I have worked with, I have simplified work processes drastically, saving time and resources. (money). I have talked to a good friend of mine who is a computer engineer who can setup unique company network systems to enhance sharing and security of information within an organization so that sensitive information is kept off of the world wide internet but can still be shared within. I've put together a very large list of my own ideas that I found worked wherever I went and feel that I can improve a businesses productivity by far and cut expenses with various changes to processes and have adopted a bunch of ideas from an IT Service Management Framework course that I have taken to create an office work flow that promotes efficiency. My business would first run a survey to understand that nature of your business and then we would set an in person meeting/consultation based on the results of the survey if there seems to be a need for change. This would be done outside of normal business hours to avoid disruption to daily activities. Once the consultation is complete, we will then begin training a small group and run a test environment to ensure there are no breaks in the processes before going live with them. Finally we will start periodic training sessions to transition all staff over to the new process. This would roughly run about 1 week (or more) in length from the time of the survey completion to full transition and could be provided to departments or entire organizations. My estimate to charge for such a service is: Initial Need Survey: Free In Person Consultation: $249/day estimating 1 day after regular working hours) First group training: $249/day (estimating 1 day - during work hours) Allow 2 days for test environment to work and look for glitches in process(No charge) Fix processes if needed (No charge) Final training: $249/day (onsite during work hours) Total estimated days: 5 ($249 per day) After the in person consultation, I will provide cost saving estimates based on the old work process compared to what I can change. The way I see it is, if I can save an organization over $1000 per month, the service pays for itself in it's first month or two. Off the top of my head, I can save an organization roughly 1 hour per week per person in productive time. If an office of 15 employees are paid an average of $16/hour, I can save the company about $240 in productive time per week plus whatever supply expenses that I can cut back on. My service can cost around $1,245 once but save a company over $12,000 after one year of adopting my practices. Sorry for the long rambling on description. If you read it, feed back is much appreciated.
Focus Brings Long Term Results - Over the past 2 years of venturing out and running my own business and not working full-time in a job I have tried numerous business opportunities. I have tried businesses in providing student accommodation, share trading and options, renting and selling paddles to dragon boat clubs and selling toilet odour eliminator products online. This was opportunistic thinking and diminished my efforts as I got started by adding more work rather than focusing on one business. It was all very tempting to try and run them at the same time to see which one would take off. Unfortunately there was no focus and when times got tough I jumped across to work on the business that interested me more. Opportunistic Thinking Is Bad If you are like me and see that everything is possible and always keeping an open mind about business ideas, then you will find it irresistible to try new ideas. Trust me I’ve learnt the hard way. So how have I changed this? I’m a huge fan of Yaro Starak’s blog - entrepreneurs-journey.com and one day he wrote a post about his coach Rich Schefren who was launching a new coaching program. As usual most internet marketers have a system to launch their new products and give away a lot of free quality information that can be applied straight away. They do this so they can build rapport with you and show that their information is useful before they start their sales pitch on you. As I knew the information was free and they just wanted my email address, I downloaded Rich’s eBook, the “Internet Manifesto“. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend you get a copy of it immediately. The Change in Mindset After reading the “Internet Manifesto”, I had a profound moment that I would change the way I operate my business. My mindset went from “thinking opportunistic” to “thinking strategically” meaning if I wanted to build a long term business I would have to set up the right systems and hire staff to leverage my time. I realised that I couldn’t do everything myself. Rich’s famous flowchart accurately shows how most Solo Enterpreneurs run their Internet Businesseses today. (I’m one of them and have taken action to outsource a lot of my work since then) Rich Schefren's Internet Manifesto Since then I have taken action to sell my businesses that are not part of my goals and made a mental decision to not start new business opportunities. Focus Is Key Since I was compelled to find out more, I downloaded the rest of Rich’s series of books which are listed below: 1. Internet Manifesto 2. The Missing Chapter 3. The Final Chapter 4. Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 5. Maven Matrix Manifesto 6. The Entrepreneurial Emergency Through this series I learned that I needed to focus on one task at a time, not five at a time (today’s generation calls it multi-tasking). Making that shift helped me improve time efficiency and also get tasks completed that generated more money. Additionally, you need to use your strengths to focus on a task and learn to outsource the rest that you are not good at. This is the key to long-term success in any business. Tyrone Shum Focus Strategist


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Convening a focus group for a niche product

The Substance Abusing Employee

Are You An Accidental Consultant?

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.