Clarity is a precursor to success. How will you know when you’re successful when you’re not sure what success means to you?
Not only is clarity vitally important to achieving personal success, but it’s equally important in achieving team-oriented success. In this post, I’m going to discuss the significant of having personal clarity, and I’ll follow up with a second post on achieving clarity for teams in the next week or two.
Clarity plays a crucial role in personal success because it helps you make the right decisions and take the right actions.
With clarity, you’ll be able to be proactive in creating the life and/or business that you’re striving for.
With clarity, you’ll be able to focus your time and effort on your most high-impact tasks. (Think 80/20 rule.)
With clarity, you’ll be able to focus on the things that are essential to you and your goals.
With clarity, you’ll have inspiration.
With clarity, you’ll know what to do with your time — as well as what not to do.
Achieving clarity is not necessarily an easy thing to do. You really need to do some soul-searching to figure out where it is that you want to go in your life and career — but the payoff for achieving clarity will do wonders for your life and career.
How do you go about achieving clarity?
Three action items that I recommend are:
1. Create a long-term vision for yourself. This long-term vision should be at least three years out from now, and it should clearly describe what your life is like at that point in time. Make sure that this vision is what you want your life to be like — not what someone else wants your life to be like — because this vision should energize and inspire you on a day-to-day basis.
2. Craft clear short-term goals for yourself that will help you reach your long-term vision. By creating and executing on these short-term goals, you will get a little bit closer to realizing your long-term vision. These short-term goals should serve as a “path” for you to reach your long-term vision.
Once you have these short-term goals laid out, try to spend the majority of your time focusing on achieving these goals — and ignoring all of the rest of the low-impact items that may pop up throughout your days.
3. Revisit your long-term vision and short-term goals on a consistent basis. Once you have created a clear vision and short-term goals that will help you achieve your vision, you should revisit them on a consistent basis. It’s important to go over them frequently because they will keep you in check when you steer off the path — which you most likely will at some point or another.
These “check-ins” will remind you of what’s important to you and get you back on track.
Your Thoughts?
How do you go about achieving clarity in your life and career?
(Photo Credit: Iragerich on Flickr)
Justin Hong is the Managing Partner of 