If you are going to achieve anything worthwhile you have to live intentionally. This is because every purpose will demand a specific lifestyle.
Maps are no mere tracks and routes. They are validations of the wisdom that not all routes and bends lead to desired destinations. Also, it is why human resource and career management executives have grown in relevance for business and career planning. Tracking one’s career trajectory helps to identify areas of stagnation, redundancy, acceleration, and where change is necessary to meet targets.
Like the individual, business too needs to set styles and standards that fit the desired market position.
Why? Winning in business or career is no accident. Just as pilots have trajectories for location, success and excellence demand specific skill-sets, culture, experience and network of relationship – these are regarded as the ‘Way’ or ‘Road’.
Every purpose is unique. Hence each has its own ‘way’ for attainment. However, each ‘way’ is dotted by actions. Purpose and goals are the stimulants for actions. More, by providing tenacity they also shape those actions. Meanwhile since every action generates reactions, each reaction either pushes you or your business a step forward or backward. In the long run, these have dire consequences on timing of attainment.
Therefore, in keeping tab of purpose or business goals, it is the action being taken daily that must be carefully analysed for relevance and fit.
Entrepreneurs need to check if their daily activities are contributing towards set objectives. The operating environment can generate pressure at times. If a business doesn’t keep it sails, it may be made to respond to circumstances at the detriment of well-planned strategies.
The truth is, at some point in time, businesses or individuals aiming for better things must start living intentionally. This means all actions must be focused.
As earlier mentioned, skills, experience and relationship are the ‘tried and tested’ determinants of the outcome of any life. Of course, you know a business is as strong as the characters of its personnel, the quality of its partnership and acquisitions over a particular time. These ultimately determine that business’ sustainability and realization of vision.
Success leaves a trail. Sometimes, it may be a pattern that link up variables. Every Indra Nooyi, Sir Martin Sorrell, Zuckerberg, Dangote, Trump, Dre, and Steve Jobs is content. Like bottled fizzy drinks aimed at creating specific experience and nourichment, so is every founder, corporate top executive, president, artiste and top career people.
These people’s rich blends of experience, exposure, training, discipline, tenure and relationship can be studied. Leanrning through their trials, failure and successes is reassuring. Obviously, their lifestyles (experience and relationship) can be rehearsed by anyone aiming for their kinds of success albeit with little adaptation, here and there, as a result of changes and differences in clime, circumstances and time.
Take for instance, Russian-born Andrey Andreev who founded Badoo, one of America’s most popular relationship Apps. Andrey didn’t catch the vision for his famous app out of thin air. He grew under a father who was involved in technology, and he once dropped out of school to travel wide. These two events stimulated tech interest.
Traveling wide offered him an understanding of people of varied backgrounds, which worked well to bolster many features across all the apps he has built – Chappy, Bumble, Huggle etc.
Besides, he once had a successful relationship with Whitney Wolfe, a former marketing executive at Tinder. Andrey Andreev’s life has always been built around connection and interaction. These life experiences are built into his innovative products.
Like Andrey Andreev, Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, grew up studying a successful uncle who was a merchant. The influence of being a firsthand learner of trading tactics at a very young age pushed him into localizing industries and courting powerful national decision-makers to protect his trade interest.
There are more instances, like the influence of the organised choir on most popular artistes; or the balance of grassroots competitions on the career of many successful sports men and women.
Broadly, most successful CEOs are people who have had stints across 3 to 4 industries. Some began their careers in banking; moved further afield to work for a management consulting firm, and later took up a job in sales in another industry. The exposure handed them a grasp of financing, management and the money-making aspects of the business they lead.
Anyone can draw up this kind of plan for their career. The driver is to get into an industry, commit energy to understanding the business/ industry so well that one becomes a go-to to some certain extent. Having built a rich blend of knowledge and relationship in that industry, you can pick a new industry, work and rise to a sufficient level.
The grit and relationship acquired across these fields are what most likely make many people tick and successful business people and leaders later in life.
The summary, for business and individuals is:
- Know Your Purpose: Since everything (sun, moon, even the soil) that precedes you into this world has a Purpose, you can’t negotiate a successful life without discovering your own Purpose
- Conduct Research to Gain Insight About People, Processes and Business: There is no self-sufficient person anywhere, everyone and every success is content of various interactions, relationship and experience over a long period of time; so research those who have achieved what you aim at, and make plans as well as adapt appropriately by following well established lifestyles and experiences of some role models
- Live intentionally: Actions generate consequences; for each action you take whether in selecting friendship, taking a job; partnering or acquiring a business, make sure you weigh it against your original purpose, If there is no fit or relevance to what you want to become, you had better abandon such action, relationship, job, acquisition or partnership. Like a wrong route on a map, if you don’t, it may cost you time, energy or even your original purpose
