The Best Checklist for Success Now with Notes on Execution

A checklist does not only tell you what to do to create a specific result, but it can also put things in the right sequence. Here is a handy checklist you might use to help you pursue success with some practical notes to guide your journey.

Know What You Want: The first reason people don’t often create the results they want in their life is that they never do the work to decide what they want. They don’t spend time deciding what they want or what they want to do with the short time they have here. The starting point for success is deciding what success means to you and getting clear on what you want. You may find this to be one of the more difficult prerequisites to success.

Establish Goals: Once you know what you want, you start by establishing goals. Goals not only provide you with a target, but they also come with a timeline, compelling you to act on what you profess to want—what you call success. Goals also provide structure to what you do with your time, allowing you to prioritize and ignoring what isn’t essential to the result you want.

Identify Resources: When people talk about success, goal-setting, and problem-solving, they often fail to identify the resources they have and the resources they need, something that will be helpful later in this process. The resources you have available to you can improve the likelihood you succeed and your speed to result. You might also be missing resources that you might need to acquire. You will find a list of what you have and what might help improves your plan.

Identify Obstacles: Obstacles don’t yield on their own. You have to do something to address and overcome them. The lack of resources might be an obstacle, but it always yields to resourcefulness and persistence. Most people will deal with internal obstacles, like imposter syndrome, procrastination, fear of failure, poor self-talk, and the allure of comfort over effort. Success is more will than skill, although both are better than one alone.

Develop Plans: Had you decided to go with Goals, Plans, Execute, you would have missed several things you will find helpful for producing success. Having made lists of all of the above, you have a plan that is better than what you might have made otherwise. Your plan can now include your resources, as well as your obstacles, providing you with better odds of creating the result you call success. Plans are critical because they contain the individual actions you need to complete to produce the result.

Execute Your Plan: This is a very serious point of failure for many. If you ask people what they want, they will give you an answer. Because they don’t have what they say they want, you have ample evidence that they don’t really want it. The exception to this rule is the person who is executing a plan to have what they want, proving with their actions that they want it. Execution is the variable, and only those are willing to do what their plan demands of them find success.

Fail: Yes. Fail. Maybe more than once. It is a mistake to believe that success and failure are separate. Both are part of the same path, call it the learning curve, call it a feedback loop, or call it better information. You may want to skip this part, but many who try to avoid failure tend to give up on what they want because they refuse to learn from their failures and adjust their plans.

Execute Adjusted Plan: Executing your adjusted plan for some result is critical. First and foremost, it means you are still pursuing what you want. Second, it means that you are willing to acknowledge when something isn’t working, that you are learning from your experience, and that you are dialing in your plan. You may find yourself running a loop between failing and executing your adjusted plan. Accept that as progress and keep moving.

Persist: There is nothing worth wanting that isn’t worth working for. Persistence is a powerful force, and it the key to forcing obstacles to yield to your will. Those who find success find it because they don’t give up until they achieve whatever they call success. They refuse to give up what they decided they wanted in step one of the success journey.

Experience Success: Eventually, you will have what you want, what you call success. It will feel amazing, and you will hear the accolades from the people who watched your journey. Soak it up, appreciate your accomplishment, and celebrate it.

Repeat: A few minutes later, you will notice that your success has led you to a place where you can now see something much more significant than you accomplished. Okay, maybe it won’t be a few minutes later, but it won’t take long before you see how much more there is in front of you, and you start this process over.

Do the work here, and then share this with someone who might benefit from following a strategy that will improve their results.