How can you eat, sleep, and have sex to reach success (legally)?

As entrepreneurs, when we think and speak of success, we often define that success by what we accomplish in business. When really, the business is just the vehicle by which we get to where we ultimately want to go, which is self-fulfillment—reaching our full potential.

Self-fulfillment is the vision or final destination. It’s the state of being we dream of in order to keep going when things get so difficult that we consider giving up. 

To reach the level of self-fulfillment we seek, maybe it helps to understand what naturally motivates us at the most basic levels. Understanding basic human behavior may help us on our journey.

Enter, Abraham Maslow. 

Way back in 1943, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow theorized that human needs are ordered in a hierarchy of importance. As you progress through the levels of the hierarchy, you get closer to the highest level, which is self-actualization or what we...

Let’s talk about goals.

If you’ve paid any attention to what I’ve been telling you over the last few weeks, you know that one of the things I consistently encourage is goal setting. If you want to change something in your life, you need to set a goal to do it first.

Why?

Well, if you don’t know where you are going, how will you know how to get there? Setting a goal is like creating a road map to the destination in which you want to go.

Believe it or not, there’s a science to setting goals effectively and putting yourself in the best possible position to actually achieve those goals. (Hopefully, you’re not setting goals just for the sake of setting goals.)

I bet you can guess what’s going to happen next.

Yep, I’m going to tell you how to effectively set goals, then crush them.

First, a little history. In 1981, a guy named George Doran wrote a paper that appeared in Management Review called, There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write...

If you failed at accomplishing your dreams 100 times, would you keep trying? What about 1,000 times? If you failed 5,126 times, would you ever try again?

James Dyson, founder and CEO of Dyson—you know, the company with the cool vacuum cleaners—did just that. He failed 5,126 times to create a prototype for his G-Force vacuum cleaner. It was on the 5,127th time that he succeeded. Even after he successfully created his prototype, he was rejected by every manufacturer and distributor in the UK, because they didn’t want his bagless design. He ended up launching his vacuum cleaner in Japan.

It took him 15 years and almost his entire savings to develop his innovative vacuum cleaner, which is the best selling vacuum cleaner in the US (and he’s a billionaire).

He’s quoted as saying that each of the 5,126 failures taught him something new that led to his success.

After reading that story, would you try one more time now? If you’re allowing past failures to...