Mastery

This week I finished a book entitled Mastery.  This book along with the videos and articles on habits went a long way to impress the fact that to gain true success in business you have to be willing to stretch yourself and grow outside a comfort zone.  To be successful you have to develop habits that may not seem easy or comfortable.  You need to look at your success in the form of a lifelong process not a dollar value goal.  In terms of business while the bottom line is a measurement of success, it is not the end result.  The bottom line is just a measuring stick to guide you through your path of improvement. That is not the common way of thinking in the world today.  It was a lot to think about and find a way ti incorporate it into my own life.

Entrepreneurial and Family

Somehow, this week's lessons and my life coincided. While a great deal of our material spoke about making time for your family and remembering what is most important, I had a very sick child at home with me this week and chose to spend a lot of my time with him.  He is a teenage but it felt more important to sit and watch TV with him or read his homework to him so he could stay current than worrying about my business responsibilities.  I still did my work while he slept and did my homework late at night but I am glad I spent the majority of my work hours with him.  Being in business for myself, in the service industry as I am, I have a bit more freedom to arrange where and when I do some of my tasks.  This is in contrast to someone opening a boutique of some kind.  The type of business that you decide to open can impact how you can arrange your family time so make sure you take a long hard look ant the company you are starting before you begin down that road.

Mastery

It has been quite a week in class.  We had a great deal of information given to us and all of it was really good.  I was most impressed with the opening chapters of the book entitled "Mastery".  This book discussed becoming a master of a skill or talent, but it was the description of a master that caught my attention.  To become a master you must enjoy the times of no progress.  You must not look to the nest break though but revel in the time when little or no progress is noticeable so as to master that stage of the learning process.  I had never thought of it that way.  The thought of using the plateau in your progress as a time to master the skills learned so far makes a great deal of sense.  Honing your skills as you advance means you do not have to work harder as you learn new things.  I like that.  In a video we watch it talked about making your decision not about you while they are about you.  This sounds like an oxymoron but they way I figured it, if we make decision about aspects of your lives that effect us, we need to consider others first and how our decision will affect them.  In this way we address the big picture in our lives and now just focus on "me."  This is always a good view to have.

What are my goals

I have had an eventful week which has lead me to be behind in everything I had to do.  Which makes this week's lessons all the more applicable and in my eyes, humorous.  This week we looked at our plans, both short term and long term, and who we want to be in the end.  As we considered these questions we were tasked with creating our own personal constitution and goals, both long and short term.  I am on the downhill side of my working life and am swinging into grandparent mode so many of the goals I had early on in my life have been fulfilled, so I looked to my retirement years and the eternities.  Since I am in the more endure to the end stage of this life I now look to gaining those attributes and talents that will aid me in the hereafter.  Since I have no concrete idea of all I will need, I am going to work on an overall goal of being better tomorrow than I am today.  I know this all sounds vague but inch by inch it makes sense to me.