There is a big difference between defining your priorities and taking the necessary steps to actually accomplish your goals. The more congruent your priorities actually are, the more likely you are to accomplish your goals. Amazing people clearly define their priorities and have actions that are congruent with their goals. There are people who say, “one day I am going to open a company” or “on Monday I’m going on a diet.”

The first step is actually sitting down and defining what you want to accomplish professionally, personally, spiritually, financially, and beyond. This is not a wish list or a “someday I will get to my goals” list. This is a list to start today.

After you define what you want in the four buckets of priorities- professional, personal, growth, and miscellaneous- what are the critical tasks that need to be done on a consistent basis? For the professional goals, write down the tasks that need to be accomplished. Under the...

Focusing on your priorities is a mindset issue. The people who are amazing have an intense focus on amazing. The opposite of priorities are distractions. Distractions may be social media, phone alerts, and anything that diverts attention from your priorities. Priorities and distractions are not straight forward. For example, when you are home, you can be distracted by a work call. During the day, you can be distracted with a personal call.

Every goal requires its own dedicated time, energy, and money. Focusing on amazing requires not being distracted from the goal. It’s also executing on every single step. When I am working, my priorities are communicating with my team and writing. One of the activities is writing. When I write, it’s me, my office manager, Jamila, and some music.

In a perfect world, distractions pop up and need to be attended to. If you are working on a project for work and you or a family member get sick, then your priority should change to deal with...

An often overlooked priority is growing ourselves as human beings. This can be in terms of professional development, personal development, challenging our narrative, spiritual development, or getting over a mental block. Examples of this could be attending a conference, physical exercise, and other activities. It can even be improving our habits or setting new goals. At some point or another, we fall into a routine that is comfortable. If you are not conscious, then personal growth can be overlooked or even ignored. If you want an amazing life, then personal growth needs to be a priority.

One issue is that when you become busy and overwhelmed with other priorities, personal growth can be the easiest to put off. It’s easy to say, “I can’t go the gym because my kids need me,” or “I have no time to read because I am on a deadline.” Other examples of growth can be meditation, attending religious services, basically anything that indirectly helps you...

There are activities that don’t really fit into the other buckets. However, if you don’t execute on these activities then your life will not run smoothly. Examples can include putting gas in your car, paying bills, calling customer service, going to the doctor, etc. Although these are necessary activities, we often ignore them and don’t treat them like priorities. When we don’t treat them like priorities they linger and get in the way of more important tasks.

In each bucket, there are tasks that we don’t feel excited to do. A chef turned restauranteur has to make sure that the restaurant is clean and be attentive to hundreds of pedestrian tasks that need to be executed. Conventional wisdom says that you should love what you do all the time. Let’s face it, there are priorities that a person is not going to always be excited about. A loving couple with young children must spend time coordinating schedules and other tasks that are necessary for the...

We all have obligations on the home front. These priorities can be tending to our family, spending time with our friends, family, and loved ones. It can even be spending time on our hobbies or taking a vacation. These priorities are meant to enhance our lives and our professional life serves as a way to support our personal goals.

In order to meet our personal goals, we have to be clear on who we want to spend time with and how we want to support them. My immediate family includes my wife, Leslie, and my two beautiful boys, Andrew and Tyler. When I am with them, they are my priority. My time with them includes helping them become who they need to be in order to succeed. I also have long dinners with friends and often go out of town on trips with my friends. One of my core values having personal amazing experiences. I’m constantly making that clear to myself.

Our personal lives include taking on priorities and activities that are just for us. Priorities may include what we do...

To achieve amazing success, you have to be focused on your priorities and not be distracted by things that don’t help you achieve your goals. Clarity is a major component of this mindset.

There are four buckets of activities that are important to focus on in order to live out a balanced and amazing life. These buckets are professional, personal, growth, and miscellaneous. One of the goals in each is to set priorities and not get distracted on the way to amazing success. The better that you produce the results in each bucket the more grounded you will be. Be on the look out for upcoming blogs covering each of the buckets as well as how to have the right mindset in order to prioritize. In this blog, let’s focus on the “Professional” bucket.

We all have professional activities that we need to consistently execute. The better you do your job, the more likely you are to excel professionally. Every profession has its own set of activities that need to be...

Every year around the holidays, I look back on the past year and look ahead to what I want to accomplish in the coming year. It has been challenging because we wanted to grow our presence online and expand the business. The challenges included finding the right team members and creating the right processes and routines. This exercise had many ups and downs. A huge part of success is the interpretation of the past. Although one should not ignore the challenges, one should not dwell on everything that went wrong. I understand that if I want my big dream to come true, I have to accept that challenges are just a part of life. The bigger my goals are, the more complicated the challenges will be. I also have a deeper understanding about gratitude and changed my view on the subject. Before, I used to think of gratitude as a feel good concept. Although that’s valid, it’s also a success principle. Before accomplishing anything, one must recognize the resources at their disposal,...

Goal setting is important when it comes to making our big dreams come true. However, what happens after we set our goals is important. Goal setting is about giving our desires, our hopes, our dreams a voice. After you set goals, the real work comes in. Oftentimes, people set goals and work on them for a couple of weeks. Then, after a while, when they get bored or something comes up, they abandon the goal. After people set goals, they immediately go into action mode. If they want to lose weight, they buy tennis shoes or sign up for the gym. If they want to save money, they decide to eat out less. And, often, only a few weeks later, they have something happen to them that makes them abandon the goal.

These are some tools to help you stay on track:

1. Have a purpose around your goals. What would achieving your goals mean to you? What can you do if you accomplish your goals? What would it mean to the people who you love? What would you be able to do if you accomplish your goals that...

Every year, I go back to my alma mater, USC, to lecture freshmen business students. One of the most transformational moments of my life was when I decided to attend USC. Now, I can happily call them a client.

The class that I’m invited to is part of the Global Leadership Program. Every week, a guest lecturer, who is both an USC alum and runs a company, is invited to talk about life and business.

My brand is about motivation, inspiration, and goal achievement. Even though I discuss business principles, I don’t abandon my mission and try to impress the students with my business acumen, or impress them with words like “acumen”.

The head of the program is my beloved professor and friend who is now the dean. When I was there, Jim Ellis and I forged a friendship. My feeling is that Jim invited me to talk about dealing with challenges and inspire them with my story.

One of the challenges that I face, and one that many others face, is not embracing raw talent and...

One factor that gets in the way of an amazing life is not focusing on your goals, but, rather, focusing on your challenges. Whenever I focus on my challenges and my limitations, I don’t get very far, but when I focus on my dreams and my amazing life, my challenges become secondary.

Before I decided that I could go to USC, I was obsessed with how my disability prevented from living an amazing life. When I decided to make my dreams and my goals the focal point of my life, then and only then was I able to go and live out my dreams.

So often people make their challenges the focal point of their life instead of their dreams becoming the focal point. When I decided to speak and write, I did not obsess over the fact that it’s probably a good idea for a speaker to, you know, speak, or for a writer to, you know, actually write.

When I asked Chris to be on my team, the last factor that I considered was whether or not he could understand me. I knew through experience that we would...