Easy Ways to Constantly Improve Your Success

To constantly improve your success, you need to review regularly. “Review” means re-view – take another look. Refresh, revise, renew and re-invent. Done right, this is a constant process with substantial rewards. Because you can always do better.

You may want to improve something simply because you are not satisfied with the way things are going or you have a gut feeling a change is needed. Maybe your circumstances have changed, and you need to set a new goal, modify or delete an old one.

Because you as a real person are a living system, you also may want to make revisions based on the feedback you receive from your actions that tells you how you are doing, are you on target and on track, or is some improvement needed.

We humans (and all animals) are hard-wired for feedback. As you reach for a glass of water, your eyes and nerves give feedback as to where your hand is. Once you pick it up, your fingers and muscles give feedback as to its weight and stability. A blind person uses a cane to get tactile (touch) feedback about the surface he or she is walking on.

Feedback is also essential for big machines like jetliners. Did you know that a commercial jetliner is off course about 90 percent of the time? That’s because weather and turbulence are constantly knocking it off its course. But the plane has a variety of instruments to give the pilots constant feedback as to the actual course and speed. This enables either the human pilots or autopilot devices to constantly make course corrections so the plane reaches its destination.

In the same manner, all the distractions, problems, obstacles and other people that impact you in real life can cause you to get off course fairly often. The problem is, in most cases you do not have adequate feedback from other people or systems telling you if you are on track or not. This is one reason success can be hard to achieve.

Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Michael Jordan and other famous people considered failure as the key to success! That is probably not what you were expecting, right? But failure is feedback! Failure says, Don’t go down this road – take another route. This is why leaders who advocate innovation encourage their people to fail fast and fail often. Failure is feedback!

But hey, it does not feel good to fail, even if you keep telling yourself this is how to succeed. Personally I really, really hate to fail. So I minimize failure as much as I can by careful research and planning.

But still, even careful planning cannot avoid problems of human life, real life for real people. So you want as much timely feedback as possible to maximize your success and minimize your failures. Here are some ways you can do that:

(1) Use some form of measurement to track your progress. This is why SMART goals are so valuable. The M stands for Measured. For example, if you want to achieve 32 hours or 80 percent billable time per week, you need to bill about 3 hours and 15 minutes every half-day. You can track your time and check your running totals at lunch time and before you leave at the end of the day. If you have a goal of lifting 100 pounds 10 times each day you go to the gym, you can keep count of your daily workouts with something as simple as a sheet of paper or an app. There’s a good book called How to Measure Anything by Douglas W. Hubbard that can help you determine what form of measurement and feedback is best for whatever you are trying to accomplish.

(2) Ask someone else to give you feedback. If you have a job, ask your supervisor to give you feedback, such as, “I’d like to know how I am doing. Could you give me some feedback?” Depending on your goal, a friend, spouse or mentor could give you feedback on your progress. If you are a student, your grades are feedback from your teacher – and if you are not happy with those grades, ask the teacher for feedback on how you can do better.

When I was trying to choose the best title for my book How To Be Successful in Life (the source of this post), I did an online survey using Google Forms, listing 10 possible titles, and paid 100 people to pick the title they found most appealing. I used a very inexpensive service provided by Amazon Web Services called Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) that cost me only 10 cents per person plus a 40% ($4.00) handling fee by Amazon. I also asked a number of friends plus people on my success email list (now on Substack) to participate in the survey, offering a free PDF copy of my success book as a reward. All this research helped me choose the title of my award-winning book. Feedback works and it can be cheap or free.

Life brings constant change. What seemed like a worthwhile goal or realistic task may be turned upside down by what happens at any point in time. Remember this key to surviving and thriving in the natural world: Constantly adapt to the changing environment.

So at least once a day, maybe more often if you live a fast-changing life, be sure to do this:

Review and update your goals, tasks and plans every day. And ask yourself, “How can I do better to maximize my success? You’ll be glad you did.

To your ultimate life success,

Buck Lawrimore