Do you know that success comes down to two things, effort and strategy? Most people fail because they don’t put in the necessary effort to get the results that they want. And effort is something that you will have to do on your own. Just like what Jim Rohn said, “You can’t hire someone else to do your push-ups for you.”

As for strategy, here is the 3-step strategy you can create more success this year:

1. Learn From The Past

How was your last year? Did you achieve all your goals or most of your goals last year? Did you do great or poorly? Do you consider last year a great year or a lousy one? Most people get it wrong by focusing too much on the future and they neglect the most important year, which was the previous year.

You learn the most from history. If you want to predict the future, you will have to study the history. Unfortunately, most people put in too much of their attention into the future and focus on getting what they want. They have missed important lessons that they can learn from their past.

If you were not doing well last year, there is no point to continue to do the same thing again this year. You will only get back the same result just like last year. What you need to do is learn from the past.

When you study how successful people made it in life, you will find out that they made plenty of mistakes, and then they learned and improved from their past results. In other words, successful people create extraordinary results learn from their past. They learn from their mistakes and do something different or improve their strategy to achieve a better result in the future.

So do a post-mortem and study your past. Write down what you have done last year and what are the results you got from it.

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” – Buddha

2. Ask The Right Question

The second step is to ask the right question. You see, at the beginning of each year, a lot of people will ask a similar question, “What do I want to accomplish this year?” When they ask this question, they force their mind into thinking about the future.

And if the previous year they failed to achieve their goal, there is a high chance that will remain the goal and do the same thing again. Instead, you should ask the right question, “What could I do differently to…”

It is absolutely fine to set the same goal, but the problem is that most people set the same goal and they plan to use the same strategy to reach their goal. They did not do anything different and thus, expect to fail again this year.

Therefore, if you want to change and get a different result, you must do something different. And you can start by asking – what can you do differently to achieve your goal. If you don’t change your strategy, you will never get different results. So what can you do differently this year so that you will produce better results?

Here’s a hint, do what works. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just find out who has accomplished the result you want and model their strategy.

3. Develop The Schedule

The final step is to develop the schedule. Scheduling works better than goal setting. Your goals are just targets to remind you of what you want to achieve in your life, while a schedule reminds and puts you into action mode.

For example, it is more powerful to say that you are going to work out in the gym from 7am to 8am every Monday and Wednesday rather than just saying you are going to work out in the gym.

When the schedule is clear and specific, you will more likely to take action and make it happen. As what Anthony Robbins says, “Clarity is power”. Furthermore, a schedule is something that you can work on and not something intangible. If your goal is to lose 10 pounds, your schedule could be to work out in the gym for an hour at 7am every day.

As you can see, schedules are something that you can act on and thus, you can control the result. When you set better and more effective schedules, you will get faster and better results. Hence, develop your schedule right now. Ask yourself what do you need to do to achieve your goals? And then turn your answers into schedules and put them into your calendar.

Follow your schedule and transform your actions into habits. This is how all the successful people did it.

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” – Stephen Covey

Remember, you have to learn from your past if you want to do better in the future. And instead of focusing on the future, ask yourself, “What could I do differently”, to change your strategy and improve your result. If you keep doing the same thing, you will get the same old result.

What are you going to do differently this year than last year? Leave your thoughts below!

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