Keeping busy and getting things done aren’t the same. Within any given time period we have a choice of what tasks to complete, with the inevitable result that not everything gets done (those about to argue should first make sure they exercised today, have their personal financial plan in order, and have scrubbed behind the toilet). It is entirely possible to put forth a good honest work day, feel busy as hell, and at the end of the day have done absolutely nothing to bring you closer to any of your goals. In situations like this, which I’ve experienced many times, all you’ve managed to do is successfully stay in the same place as this morning.

Steve Pavlina already explains the difference between urgent but immaterial tasks and highly important ones that can be put off indefinitely. There’s no sense repeating what Steve has already done so I will leave it to you to read his article for perspective and tips on avoiding falling into the trap that I describe above. I’d like to focus on the class A and B types of tasks that Steve describes, in other words the tasks that will provide a meaningful future result. Steve describes them as tasks that yield benefits over 5+ and 2 year timespans respectively. I find myself thinking of the class A tasks as Great Pursuits, and the class B tasks as mostly ones that feed back into accomplishing the Great Pursuits (why would your shorter term accomplishments not be harmonious with your longer term ones?).

I recently learned some valuable lessons and made some tough decisions to re-allocate my time so as to be able to pull myself further ahead. I have a natural tendency of taking on too many tasks, something that I need to consciously watch about myself to avoid overload. In August I chose to challenge myself by simultaneously running Tilted Pixel, teaching two labs for first year business at Laurier, taking on a full time course load (I am pursuing business and computer science degrees), and continuing to write this blog. For the most part this actually worked, but starting mid November things got too hectic to reasonably handle. Everything had to suffer some level of stress fracture with this kind of load, but with the lack of firm deadlines it was inevitably the blog that simply had to be put on hold. Side note: In six particularly horrendous days in December I wrote a final exam, spent the next two days up all night fixing a web server emergency, slept for for a day, then studied for and wrote 3 exams in three days.

This experience got me thinking on the importance of not only allocating enough Class A task time to get somewhere, but of the importance of carefully choosing the Great Pursuits to be taken on. Achieving anything great inevitably requires a substantial regular effort, and certain life-long goals like being physically fit don’t provide much opportunity for rescheduling into the future (yet due to their far off nature are easy to dismiss). Being an entrepreneur and loving variety and ambition I constantly have more opportunities than I can possibly take on. I have found very quickly that not all great sounding opportunities are great for me. Much more painfully I have at times had to re-allocate time away from unfinished Great Pursuits, sacrificing one ambition for the good of the success of the whole.

Clearly there’s a limit to how many goals can be effectively chased at a time. With too many great opportunities at once it becomes impossible to accomplish any. How do you choose these Great Pursuits? I don’t have the full answer, but the approach I am taking now places heavy emphasis on favoring those that are:

1. Strongly in-line with my beliefs and eventual goals.
2. Within my existing or desired circle of competence.
3. Holds a high likelihood of success given the appropriate attention.

In coming up with these I adopted the spirit of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, a rather amazing research project and must-read.

These sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to get distracted chasing opportunities based on immediately attractive criteria like fast cash, easy results, or a particularly glamorous end-result. These criteria happily ignore the feasibility or real results of the chosen pursuit. One such mistake I made was in spending several months on a terrific business idea that I was perfectly suited to develop from a technical standpoint, but had not the resources nor knowledge to have any hope of growing the business idea beyond a business petri-dish. My mind happily skipped over this core competence gap, instead choosing to focus on what I could accomplish immediately and the money making potential of the venture. The business is now closed, the lessons have been learned, and I am unlikely to attempt it again.

More recently I decided to experiment with affiliate marketing and Google Adwords due to my interest in the success stories and popularity of this particular money generating fad. This time around I was much more realistic with my expectations, setting aside money I was prepared to lose and ensuring that the knowledge and experience I gleaned would be proportional to the time and cash I was putting into this (in this case my ulterior motive was learning more about using Adwords to advertise effectively). My approach allowed this failed experiment to still yield worthwhile benefits, but looking back I don’t feel that I would have attempted this if I had been using the criteria that I outline above (there are simply closer matching ways I could have used the time and capital).

In contrast to the misadventures above, a venture like Tilted Pixel meets the criteria that I’ve outlined. It’s not easy or low risk by any stretch of the imagination, but it falls within my core competence (strong website development background, entrepreneurial capability), lines up with my long-term goals, and gives me strong reason to believe that determination will equal success. It’s a Great Pursuit that I can carry out, and be confident that my efforts are working towards a purposeful goal.

What are your Great Pursuits? What kind of tasks should you venture forth with the fullest ambition and make your priority? What seemingly good projects aren’t going to realistically mix with your competencies and goals, even if they are good opportunities?

I had a very interesting conversation the other night which I’d like to share some ideas from. In a nutshell I was speaking with someone who has been making a lot of positive changes in her life lately. She was shocked at how much she had done in one year, but she also felt really behind for not having done things such as setup a savings account (even though she’s really just out of school). There was so much life “setup work” she had never done, or ever been aware of and now she feels like she’s just been jolted by all this stuff coming out of nowhere. What’s really happened is that over the past year she’s “woken” up a little bit and consequently came to realize things about life that had completely flown over her head.

I had a very similiar similiar experience several years ago which completely derailed me from my current path, which at that point was simply going in the direction life took me in. Sure I was making “choices”, such as planning on going ahead with a degree that I deep down knew wouldn’t be right for me, and planning to somehow be happy working in a cubicle the rest of my life (despite having had a chance to briefly try it and strongly hating the idea of being in front of a computer all day doing someone else’s work). After all programming was my talent, so why on earth would I want to be anything other than a programmer graduating with a computer science degree? I had goals too, or so I thought. Surely a Ferrari was a goal? I mean it wasn’t humanly affordable on the salary of a corporate computer drone, and I had no plan to attain it otherwise, but yes that was my “goal”. I completely didn’t understand that where I was letting myself drift in life had nothing to do with what I actually wanted. To make things worst this direction was highly encouraged through high grades in “smart people” courses and congratulations from others on making such a great and rewarding choice.

Luckily the entrepreneurial bone in me activated and gave me some business experience before I ever filled out the university application form that would have doomed me to writing boring code for stuffy monolithic corporations and unwittingly providing material for Office Space 2. I was exposed there to a strange freedom that was offered nowhere else. I read some extremely positive literature from people that seemed… happy. This was a world that my programming books had never exposed me to. Never before had I seriously read about ideas like goals, personal development, financial planning, and the idea that becoming truly successfully was something other than luck or born talent. It was enough to make me consciously realize what my subconscious had known all along - I wasn’t ready to spend another 4 years in school to prepare myself to be someone’s slave doing something that I already knew I would dislike. It’s not that I disliked programming - I’m having an absolute blast putting my skills to use with my website development company - it’s that I enjoyed working on projects of my own devising and not some insigificant clog in an obese software application. I took a year and a half off instead of going straight into university during which I awakened consciously further and further.

In the end I chose to enter a business program and because I had the opportunity I chose to go the double degree route and end up with a computer science one as well. My end choice in degrees is not important however, what is important is that for the first time in my life I had honestly been able to step off the beaten path, consciously examine my surroundings, figure out where I actually wanted to go, and then go in the direction that would actually take me there.

It’s possible and relatively easy to get to where you want to be in life if you stop long enough to start moving in the right direction.

I mentioned that I had simultaneously thought that I would own a Ferrari and planned to be a cubicle drone all my life writing software because I loved to write software. Clearly this was a logical flaw as I had no way of actually aquiring the funds for a Ferrari on the salary I would have been paid working for someone else. Yet having spent the last 17 years being a complete drone and not doing any true thinking for myself with regards to my own life, my brain was very happy to simply accept this gigantic fallacy. I was getting high marks and planning to enter a respectable profession, surely success would just come to me.

If this is how you plan to approach life, and most of us at least start off with this ridiculous mindset, then truthfully you will find success to indeed be hard. Feeling powerless and reliant on good fortune to succeed is highly depressing, which consequently pushes people into an even lower level of consciousness. It’s not surprising that very few people actually ever wake-up and realize it’s in their hands to mold shape their lives! If you’re waking up everyday wondering why life is so miserable and why bills suck so much then you need a really loud gong to jolt you out of it. My gong was realizing how much freedom and possibility actually existed for those were in charge of their lives, and how I was on the exact opposite track to that.

My dreams have changed somewhat from simply wanting a nice car. Truthfully they’ve become a lot more ambitious than that, but thankfully also not nearly as materially obsessed. Many of them are now real actual goals that I plan to achieve. I can place this label on them because I have taken the time to look at where they are, and then alter my course in life so at reach them. By altering course I mean that I have identified and am now systematically taking the actions that I need to acheive the goal. It’s as easy as baking a cake, but it’s far more long term. It requires staying focused on baking that cake for 5, 10, 20 years. It’s a pleasure to do now though, since I am seeing results and I am now confident that it is in fact me that controls where I go with my life. With that a lot of fear and uncertainty about my future has disappeared.

Waking up and taking charge has a lot do with building awareness of the world around you. Let’s take personal finance as an example. At this point you may already be cringing as visions of old people balancing cheque books come into your mind along with lectures about not taking on all that debt that is currently already sitting on your Visa (or another vendor of plastic 18% interest loans). It’s natural to not want to learn something when it doesn’t fall in your field of interest and when it seems like some complicated and tremendously boring thing meant to be understood by people that wear a lot of plaid.

However all that’s really at the heart of personal finance is goals and planning (again I can already see shivers as complicated financial planning forms and balanced cheque books come to mind). What people miss is that the complexity of the plan isn’t what’s important, it’s actually having a plan and following it towards some defined end goal. Believe it or not, once you supply your brain these things it’s actually very good at automatically taking care of the pesky complicated details. What if I told you that the difference between becoming a millionaire or a deadbeat with a terrible credit rating isn’t your level of income? What if the secret to achieving wealth is so dead simple that the only way you could have possibly missed it is that you’ve been asleep all your life and lazily following a crowd of equally sleeping debt-ridden lemmings? What if I simply tell you this secret and not ask for your credit card number or even your e-mail address in return? Very well.

The secret to accumulating wealth is to pay yourself first at a rate of no less than 10% of your income. With the money that you pay yourself you should invest it and aim for a return of 10% or so yearly. Immediately reinvest these returns and reinvest the returns of the returns and so on. Compound interest will do the rest for you.

This is the first and most important principle that financial planning books teach. I learned it first from The Wealthy Barber and recently again in The Richest Man in Babylon. Both of these books teach you the things you absolutely must understand about money and do so in a very easy to read way. The difference in following their advice and not following it however is profound. I wish I had woken up to these simple rules earlier and decided to start saving when I first started making money in high school. I would have had an extra $5000 or so saved up right now, and I would definitely not have noticed that 10% lower income.

So that’s how you get your finances in order, and hence start off on a path of success in that area of your life. But taking charge of your life isn’t just about learning how to manage your money. I said before it’s about becoming aware of the world around you, learning how it works, how to work within it, and what you wish to accomplish. Of utmost importance is waking up and consciously choosing to take actions towards the life that you actually want to live. To have a purpose and be actively fullfilling it. There are many areas in life to wake up to once you have done this. There’s your health to consider, your spiritual views, your social network, specific skills that you would like to aquire, and so on. It all starts to come together as you work towards understanding what you wish to achieve in life and actually going out there to achieve it.

Consciously following a path towards your goals instead of blindly drifting through life really is the secret to success, not being born into the right family or with the right genes.

I spend long hours figuring out the next moves in my business along with all the other aspects of my life that somehow have to be mashed around it. Some of it’s on paper and much more is in my head, but rest assured it’s all very real planning. Yet in all that wonderful planning there is a very strong “follow your gut” current. At the end of the day it seems that this current is what really drives things forward and makes it all happen even as well-laid plans fall apart.

I heard Angela Mondou speak yesterday at the Chapter 4 Entrepreneur Week event and she said one thing that stuck out above all else. She was talking about being strapped into the backseat of an F18 fighter on an air combat training mission, wondering what she had gotten herself into as she fought just to stay conscious in the thing. She proceeded to draw a parallel point that went something like “As an entrepreneur you will always have situations when things seem overwhelming and you stop and ask yourself ‘what the heck am I doing here?’”.

That certainly has rung true for me many times (often this is accompanied by overwhelming deadlines or a web server deciding to develop some bizarre quirk), and it’s in this kind of mental wake-up that I look back and wonder how I even got to where I am now. It all moves much faster than the conscious part of my brain can ever hope to adjust to, and that’s where intuition has to be secretly steering it all from the backseat.

What I’m doing with Tilted Pixel feels right and in just a year it’s gone from a name that I was able to snag a .com domain for to something infused with meaning. There’s a certain energy radiating off the name that didn’t exist and I’ve noticed that energy reflect itself in me and in the people that I meet with. Every day this entity becomes more defined and more real. It has hit some amazing goals such as reaching key revenue targets and becoming a federal corporation last August.

I cannot possibly say that the above is the result of a well-laid plan. If anything it’s intuition that determines what the goals should be, and the plan is merely the slave tasked with reaching those goals and making the necessary changes whenever the goals shift.