Have you ever been to the source of a great river, like the mighty Mississippi?

What did you see? Something so tiny and insignificant?

Did you find it hard to believe this was the origin of one of the greatest rivers in the world?

Water runs into ditches.
Ditches dump into creeks.
Creeks combine to form rivers.
These rivers flow into the Great River.

Only then – miles downstream – does its magnitude become apparent.

BIGG success is life on your own terms. Like the Great River, BIGG success starts small too!

A single, seemingly insignificant activity today combined with another one tomorrow and the day after that leads to the life on your dreams.

Insignificant

The “seemingly insignificant” part needs a little further explanation. Let’s start with “insignificant.”

The action you take probably is insignificant. Your world isn’t going to change.

You won’t immediately be thinner or better looking.
You won’t suddenly be rich and famous. And that’s good.

In fact, nothing will change. Or so it seems…

Seemingly

That’s where the “seemingly” part comes in. One thing will change instantly – you!

You will have taken action.
You will have done something to enact change.
You will have taken a step toward BIGG success.
So you can instantly feel better about yourself – you’re a winner!

And you will win if…

You follow up with a second action, and a third…

Don’t worry about the results in the early stage. Focus on the activities. That’s what you can control.

You’ll see the results soon enough. You’ll see that these activities aren’t insignificant.

In the meantime, it’s all about desire, devotion, and discipline. They lead to BIGG success!

What seemingly insignificant action will you take today?

Image in this post from stock.xchng

Sometimes when we think about life on our own terms, it’s hard to see how to achieve something that bigg. Want to know how we respond to that?

We say, “Don’t try!”

Before you click away, give us just a second to explain. What we mean is …

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Don’t try for the bigg goal all at once. Break it up into little actions. Give yourself a due date for completing each action. Suddenly that bigg goal isn’t so bigg at all. You advance toward it action by action. Those little actions are milestones. You can think of the period of time between due dates for your milestones as terms.

Vision to Victory

We introduced this subject last time when we talked about how to ramp up your savings, but we left out something really important. You must have a clear vision of bigg success in your mind. What exactly does life on your own terms look like?

Then, as you map out the actions required to get there, it’s crucial that each action build upon the previous action. “Success breeds success,” as the saying goes.

So when you succeed with one action, you’re more likely to succeed with the next. It’s all about momentum.

Momentum is a precious thing

Once you get momentum, you want to do everything you can to keep it because it works both ways. We think of an interview with an excited football player whose team had just won a bigg game. He described their victory by saying:

“We had the momodum, but then we lost the momodum. Fortunately, we were able to get the momodum back!”

He may have been too excited to get the word “momentum” right, but he certainly understood what it was all about. It’s something we see all the time in sports.

It doesn’t just happen on the playing field. We think it’s particularly important to understand this right now. Things haven’t been going the way a lot of people would like lately. We just have to work all the harder to get the momentum (or should we say “momodum”) back.

Life may throw you something unexpected. That’s part of the price of bigg success. That’s okay. You know you can do it. You know you will win. In those moments when things don’t go your way, don’t get discouraged. Overcome your fear. And charge back.

Get momentum working for you again because success does breed success. Build a cumulative advantage to turn success into bigg success.

Build success into bigg success

You do that by staying hungry. We’ve said before that bigg goal-getters are usually happy, but never content. That’s one of the secrets to building on your success.

Another secret is to understand the fine line between confidence and cockiness. Stay humble, but be proud of what you’ve accomplished.

Perhaps most important, stay focused to gain a cumulative advantage. Make sure your milestones work together so you get where you want to be as fast as you can get there. Then focus exclusively on reaching your next milestone.

If you’ve done everything you can today to get to that next milestone, then you are living your life on your own terms right now. You may not have reached your destination, but you’re well on your way to bigg success!

How do you stay focused on what you need to accomplish today?

Share that with us by leaving a comment below, calling us at 888.455.BIGG or sending us an e-mail at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com.

Thanks so much for spending your time with us today!

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Next time, we’ll talk about when your definition of success changes. Please join us!

Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00372-041409.mp3

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(Image in today's post by cobrasoft)

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There is real value in seeing ourselves as entrepreneurs and in looking at change as an opportunity rather than something to be resisted. We should welcome change!

That’s a bigg step for a lot of people. But if we don’t change, it means we’re standing still. There’s an old saying that a rut is nothing more than a grave with both ends knocked out. We have to get out of our ruts; we have to change – either as a response to the change we see coming or by creating the change that we see needs to be made.

We’ve been talking about change in our last couple of shows. We started by talking about the lost art of making change. Last time, we talked about how saving our change can lead to bigg changes in our lives.  It occurred to us that we can think about change in our lives by thinking about change – pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.

A penny for your thoughts

The change process begins with a penny for your thoughts. It’s important to generate ideas about where you want to go. Then check the validity of your idea to see if it plays to your strengths. If it passes that test, look at the customers (or employer) you plan to serve as well as the competition already serving them to see if this is a good opportunity.

If I had a nickel for every time …

But the idea itself isn’t worth much. It’s the actions that follow the idea that make it valuable. So think about the saying, “If I had a nickel for every time I (fill in the blank).” We’re usually making a joke or lamenting something we’ve done too many times to count when we say this.

But there’s some bigg wisdom in this little saying. It’s the key to moving the idea from inside your head to something tangible. It’s about inputs. You can’t control the outcome, but you can control your actions.

So if you think about the actions necessary to bring your idea to fruition and then mentally think that you’re getting a nickel every time you act, you begin to see that your inputs create the output you want. The more you perform, the more you eventually get back.

A dime a dozen

As you come up with your ideas and begin to implement them, stand out. You don’t want to be a dime a dozen. You need to be unique. If you don’t find a way to differentiate yourself from the crowd, you can’t expect to be seen as outstanding. Find your niche. Entrepreneurs do it. So must we.

Two bits

One bit isn’t good enough. Have a back-up plan. If your tactics don’t work, what will you do next? This is the advantage of action. You learn. Notice that we didn’t say you fail. But you may not succeed bigg at first. You must adapt. Think about how you will need to adapt before you have to.

So there it is … the change process. Making change work leads to bigg success. 

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Thanks for taking time out of your day to read our post today. Please join us next time when we talk about the seven P’s of business success. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00343-030409.mp3

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(Image in today's post by ajajulian)

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One of the challenges we face is getting started. You’ve talked about inertia – we tend to remain inanimate unless we really push ourselves. One of your quotes that I love is that we need “leadership over laissez-faire.”

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There’s the old phrase that the only person who likes change is a wet baby. I see that every single day. It is so important. Newton had it right – objects at rest tend to remain at rest; objects in motion tend to remain in motion. I find that if I can get someone in motion, making the smallest step, the next step becomes all the easier. There is something about momentum and forward movement that builds on itself. Unfortunately, inertia builds on itself too. We can become really sedentary in our lives in a variety of ways – both physically and mentally. That’s part of the reason I write the column. Sometimes when I write, I picture myself giving that stone just a little bit of a push downhill. If I can get it to roll a quarter of a rotation, maybe it will start to roll a little bit further. That’s something we need to do in our own life and also cultivate in others.

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Leaders are admired for their ability to keep pushing, taking all the steps necessary to keep progressing toward goals. Does your knowledge in this area stem from a time when you didn’t push yourself enough?

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I have to admit that I face this problem every day. I think we all do. There are days when we just want to sit down and do nothing. We just want the world to go spinning around us and not have to worry about whether we have groceries in the house or if that check has come in from that client. It just gets a little overwhelming to us. I grew up in a very small town – a rural town – in Ohio of about 2,000 people. Frankly, in a town that small, there’s a lot of inertia. There’s not a lot of push to go on. I found out very early, though, that I get bored very easily. If I don’t have a constant set of stimulus coming in, I can very easily settle down and just let the world go by me. So as part of learning about myself, I realized I have to have a new book to read, something new to watch, a new place to go to, a new area to go for a walk. I have to constantly have that new input so that I can continue to create the output that I do create such as my column, my podcast, and the other stuff that I do.

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That’s a great way of looking at it. Look at the inputs – the actions that you take – and then the results will come at some point.

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That comes from an artist coach that I had become friends with many years ago. I worked at Walt Disney Imagineering for five years as an IT professional in the computer department. One of the biggest perks I got at that job was that I had access to all of the art coaches that all the creative people did. One of the things we discussed was that you cannot output art or other great things in life unless you have enough input coming in. Those are the raw materials that you use for your creation. I really took that to heart and have lived that particular philosophy for a long time now.

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And if you can’t afford a coach, find that friend who may be a little bit ahead of you in life or in their career. I have a friend who I meet for coffee. We would always say we needed to get together more often, but it never happened because we didn’t make it happen. So we finally said that we would meet at a particular time every month. That’s what made the difference – getting it pre-planned.

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I started a whole new event here in Los Angeles specifically for that reason. It’s LA Friday Coffee. It is coffee and casual conversation between work and dinner. We meet at various coffee places all around the city. But at its essence, that is my attempt to get myself out on a Friday night to meet and talk to people that I don’t see often enough.

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And boy you just can’t beat coffee!

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Unless it’s a martini!

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Anyone who follows my Twitter stream knows that I’m into coffee!

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We have to be, doing what we do. Right?

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It’s weird. I’m a geek in all things. When I find a new interest, I geek out on it as much as I geek out on technology or anything else I’m interested in. So I’ve read up on roasting coffee, how to make coffee, and the perfect espresso shot. My wife’s family is Sicilian and we’ve been to Sicily so I’ve tasted real coffee. That whole geekness kind of filters into my whole life as well.

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I’ll bet you make a mean cup of coffee though. When will it be ready? We’re on our way!

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Thanks Douglas for sharing your thoughts with us. He has started a free online resource called Career Camp where members of his community can share their expertise. We highly recommend it to you!

And thank you for taking time to read our post today. Until next time, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00333-021809.mp3

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One of the things we wanted to talk with you about today is that you have declared 2009 “The Year of Leadership.”

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This year was a definite conscious decision to choose a theme. It started about three years ago when I decided that, working alone in my home office, I had really become disengaged from my community – both the tech community that I work in and the community in general. So for my own personal decision, I decided to make that year the Year of Reconnecting and Getting Out. In 2008, I stumbled across the idea of the Year of Visibility, which I also think is very important. It’s about people making visible what they do and how they do it. So when 2009 rolled around, I realized that this was getting to be a great idea for each year. I was already working on a column and a podcast on leadership. If there’s ever been a year in my lifetime when I really needed to exercise leadership and get that out of other people as well, this is the year. We’ve simply been lacking leadership in a lot of ways across the entire world.

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I love that you said you need to do this. When you announced this on your show, you were really clear that it was about personal leadership leading to engaging a community and getting other followers.

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Everything starts at home. Sometimes I think we forget that. I could see in myself areas where I needed to lead more – whether that’s in my business, in my podcast, in my column or whatever. I think a lot of people have gotten the idea that leadership only exists “out there” somewhere. It’s something that takes place in the executive suite, in the boardroom, or in higher levels of government. The fact is that leadership is a fundamental aspect of our lives that we exercise – or should exercise – every single day.

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In your Year of Leadership, what are some of the steps that you’ve been taking? What challenges have you faced?

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I remember when I worked in a corporate office and lunch time would roll around and the question came up about where we were going to go for lunch. And no one would decide! It’s kind of a joke, but kind of not. One of the simplest things you can do is start making decisions. Too many of us abdicate our decision making. We don’t decide and face problems with that down the road. So most fundamentally, it’s just stepping up and making decisions. Now I realize why we don’t make decisions. We’re scared – scared of failing, scared of making the wrong decisions. The fact is there is no wrong decision because each decision you make brings you closer to what you need. If something doesn’t work, you say, “You know what, that didn’t work. We’re going to try this now.” The point is to keep moving forward and to keep making those decisions so you don’t suffer what I’ve heard described as “analysis paralysis.” You spend all your time looking at all the different options out there and never end up doing anything.

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I think one of the scariest things when you’re trying to step up your leadership role is that you might have to challenge the existing leadership. How do you tip toe around that?

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One of the ways is what we’ve already discussed. You start making decisions for yourself. It’s a relatively non-threatening way of pushing those decisions up the silo. One of the best things we can do as a human being is set a good example by our actions. As people see you making decisions, it helps them to take the reins as well and move forward.

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Thanks so much for checking in on us today. Join us next when we continue our conversation with Douglas. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00332-021709.mp3

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