Achieving goals takes perseverance. While some people may think all they have to do is click their heels and say “I believe” to get what they want in life, they’re in for a rude awakening. It takes more than just airy fairy thinking. There’s a lot of hard mental work involved in achieving your goals. You will face challenges along the way – not only challenges from situations and other people, but challenges from yourself.

Yes, sometimes we are our own worst enemy. We buy into the quick fix notions that if we just visualize what we want in a positive way, and then put it out into the universe, that our work is done. Not so. This isn’t a one way street. The universe isn’t a big vending machine in the sky; we have a responsibility to do our part. We must concentrate on what we want and focus on achieving our goals several times a day.

Achieving goals takes a lot of perseverance, which can be difficult to sustain. Keep your eyes on the prize, as they say, and that means not letting up. Keep believing, keep dreaming, keep positively affirming that your goals and desires are manifesting themselves. Persevere through the biggest challenge: negative thinking. You’ve probably lived a lifetime with the pattern of worry and negative thinking. You need to change that; when the least little negative thought crops into your mind, immediately stop and change it to positive thinking. Soon, with much perseverance, you’ll be able to change your negativity and doubt into positive thinking and the manifestation your goals. Work through the challenges your mind throws at you, in order to realize your dreams. Achieving goals takes perseverance. You can do it!

Sambo was a good cook. One day there was a gathering in the neighborhood. The caterer was stuck due to bad weather. There was no food for the people. After some time, everyone started complaining. They wanted something to eat.

Sambo lived close by. He ran to his house and cooked a large pot of stew. Everyone fell in love with Sambo’s Stew. It started with the neighbors coming to Sambo’s house for a meal. When Sambo said, he had run out of supplies, the neighbors said they would be willing to pay for a bowl. Sambo started to deliver his delicious Stew. Money started to flow in.

The news of the Sambo’s Stew spread far and wide. People started coming from far away. Sambo had to set up a separate shed in his courtyard, for people to collect the Stew from. He spent days building the shed. People were complaining constantly. They wanted stew; they didn’t care about the shed.

Sometimes he would have to travel quite a distance to make a delivery. Sambo was not the greatest navigator and would often get lost. He could not leave the shed because carriages were always stopping by, to pick up his stew. He was having difficulty keeping track of the money owed to him. One day Sambo collapsed from the stress of trying to do it all.

Someone should have told Sambo to hire a waiter, a delivery boy, and an accountant. People who would be good at the jobs they were assigned. When it comes to work, Divided We Rule! Unfortunately it’s too late; no one will ever taste Sambo’s Stew. He has sworn never to make a pot again. He now does gardening. Don’t be like Sambo. Division of labor is the key to success.

Business Strategy, Business Planning, Marketing Guidelines, KPI’s; the list of plans is endless. Every business and businessman spends a significant amount of time planning for the different aspects of his business. Most people fall short on the step that comes after planning i.e. implementation.

So you have your plans, how are you going to go about executing them? Ironically you need a plan, for how you are going to implement your plans. Some people would consider this to be trivial. They would be wrong. It is very important that every entrepreneur know, how he/she is going to put their carefully devised plans into action.
There is a belief that a well devised plan would implement itself. This is like saying that a well made pie would eat itself. You need to cut it into slivers, decide what china you are going to use, who will be served the first piece and when exactly it would be served.

All plans may be good, but in my opinion what makes a plan great, is if it can be successfully implemented. After all, plans will only be plans until someone uses them. One way of successfully implementing a plan is breaking it into pieces. You can implement one piece at a time until it is in place. This would put less stress on the organization and would involve a lot less hassle. Another advantage is that if any piece is underperforming, necessary changes can be made to the future pieces.

The most important thing I’d like to say is, GET STARTED. You may have the best plan or strategy in the world but it is of no use if you don’t use it. Fine tune the plan as much as you can within reason. Once that is done, execute it. To quote Rihana, “Baby you’ve got the keys. Now Shut Up and Drive.”

There are times when an organization cannot handle its increasing work load. There are a number of ways to handle this situation. You can increase your work force, merge with a larger organization or you can share the workload. Increasing the work force can be a very tedious job. It would involve increasing office space and day to day resources as well. Every merger comes with strings and not everyone likes to be tied down. They say, ‘sharing is caring.’ So let’s look at two ways that enable organizations to share the workload. ‘Outsourcing’ and ‘off shoring’, though the concepts have been around since the 1980’s, it was only after the 2004 U.S Elections that ‘Outsourcing’ and ‘Off shoring’ became terms of everyday usage.

Technically the terms have very different meanings but they are used interchangeably. Outsourcing is subcontracting a process to a third-party company, whereas Off Shoring is subcontracting a process to a third-party company, outside the country. The advantage of doing this is that companies can save on costs. The main contribution to cost effectiveness is the gap in the wages of developed and developing countries. The world today has become a global economy. We are all so interconnected, that the growth in any one economy will have a positive effect on every other economy in the world. On the other hand, the fall of an economy can have disastrous global consequences. Case and point: the current recession.

Call it ‘outsourcing’, ‘off shoring’, ‘near shoring’ or anything else; the fact remains that sharing resources, responsibilities and liabilities, is in everyone’s best interest. The sheer volume of work load being outsourced, is an indicator of the effectiveness of ‘outsourcing’. Be it in business, or in personal relationships, we all function on one basic agreement. ‘You do your part and ill do mine.’