The-Slight-Edge

Turning Your Dreams into Reality 159
What if one of your dreams is “radiant health.” How would you make that
specific? One way would be to describe exactly how you feel, what kinds of
activities you engage in and what they feel like. Imagine reading your dream to
someone you care about, and that person saying, “I’m not sure I quite grasp what
you mean. Can you tell me exactly what you’re shooting for?”
Now, the second descriptor: when? It’s often been said, “Goals are
dreams with deadlines.” Let’s reshape your dreams into goals by giving
them deadlines. Go back through each dream and answer the question, “By when?”
You’ve probably heard of the Pareto Principle, known more popularly as “the
80/20 rule,” which says that, for instance, twenty percent of the people in a sales
force produce eighty percent of the results. (Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist
who promulgated his theories around the turn of the twentieth century, actually
arrived at his formula, which is a bit more complex than a simple 80/20 rule, to
describe the tendency of wealth, innovation and initiative to concentrate in a selfselected
elite, no matter what the external social or economic system. In other
words, Pareto was really describing the success curve and failure curve—the two
sides of the Slight Edge!)
Here is another application of Pareto’s Law: eighty percent of everything
you do tends to get done in the last twenty percent of the time available! If you
don’t create a concrete deadline, that last twenty percent never seems to arrive
... and you’re always living in the eighty-percent time that says, “some day ... ”
Write your dreams down; make them vivid and specific; give them a concrete
timeline for realization; and you’ve taken a giant step toward making them real!
STEP TWO: Start with a Plan
This is the point where people are often thrown off track. It’s easy to assume
that you need to put together the plan that will get you there—in other words,
the right plan. The plan that will work. No. The point is not to come up with the
brilliant blueprint that will take you all the way to the finish line. The point is
simply to come up with a plan that will get you out of the starting gate.
You have to start with a plan, but the plan you start with will not be the plan
that gets you there. Just for emphasis, I’m going to say that once more:
You have to start with a plan, but the plan you
start with will not be the plan that gets you there.
What? That makes no sense at all! If this plan isn’t going to get me to my
goal, why bother designing it? What’s the point? Aren’t I just fooling myself with a
pointless plan?