5 Things You Can Do to Alter Your Life’s Outcomes Now!

By Nehi Igbinijesu

Sometimes in life, we get to a fork in the road. We work ourselves to exhaustion financially, emotionally and most often, spiritually. It looks almost certain that failure is our next stop in this journey called life. We almost wish we could be children again or just change our past, forgetting that all we have control of, is now. We forget that today’s outcomes are a product of yesterday’s choices, and that living everyday life is residual.  You may no longer have control of your yesterday but the fine news is that you have today. And with today, you can alter tomorrow’s outcomes of your life starting NOW!   1. DISCOVER YOUR PURPOSE OR OVERRIDING OBJECTIVE You, like all of God’s creation, were created for a purpose. Everything on the planet including the blackberry phones, ipads and just about anything, only become relevant because they have a use or purpose. Now, if men created stuff with intent in mind, how about God?  You were born for a reason and the fastest way to find out is from your manufacturer. A lot of times, we get clues from our attributes, gifting, passion, character or what we wanted to become when we were kids.  Most successful people have attributed their success to doing what they loved. What you love to do is a pointer to what you were originally created to do. Fish would die outside water and just maybe, what brought you here is a frustration that emanates from the work you do. You were born with an overriding objective from heaven. Find it and you will never have to struggle through life again. It would put springs in your steps even in the face of adversity. Release yourself to the idea that you were born to do something significant and use the cues you get. Maybe you were born to inspire others or even lead Nigeria. In the words of late billionaire and Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.” 2. SET GOALS – SHORT, MEDIUM AND LONG TERM GOALS In his book, Create Your Own Future, Brian Tracy affirms that “the primary reason for underachievement and failure is the fuzziness and confusion about goals”. The poor outcomes come from the inability to decipher exactly what we want in life. A person without goals is like a car with a steering wheel. There are no flukes in life. The lasting success you want to see must be hinged on the goals you set for yourself. After discovering your purpose or overriding objective in life, the next thing to do is to sieve out distractions by creating short, medium and long term goals around your purpose. Get to any “overnight” success story and you will find several hundreds of hours of planning. And mind you, a goal is not a goal until it is written, comprehensible and executable. 3. READ BOOKS AND ATTEND SEMINARS Your outcomes in life would be greatly affected by the books you read. Ghandi, Martin Luther, Ho Chi Minh and many other men who changed the world attribute a lot of their success to books. The life coach, John C. Maxwell wrote, “The best way to keep from becoming satisfied with your current achievements is to make yourself a continual learner.” Reading books arms you with the experience of the author and help better decision making. You have no business reading cookery books if you want to be a politician. Life coach and business man, Peter J. Daniels read about 2,000 biographies before venturing into business. He failed three times but eventually built a multi-billion dollar real estate empire. Author of the Rich Dad series, Robert T. Kiyosaki wrote, “The middle class get an MBA but the rich attend seminars”. Seminars unlike schools offer hand-on training in a specialised area of interest. You are almost sure to get more value for money from a seminar about exporting cash crops or foreign exchange trading than from studying the subjects at school because such seminars are led by experts who have hands-on experience rather than some university professor with all the theoretical jargon. 4. CHANGE YOUR FRIENDS, ASSOCIATES AND HANG-OUTS PLACES Charlie “Tremendous” Jones is credited with this popular quote, “You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read”. It is so true. Some of the reasons why you are unhappy with your life’s outcomes are the people in your life. Yes. As hard as it might seem, you might have to fire people that do not conform to your life’s overriding objective. There are people you hang around that you have got to let go if you ever want to be rich, married or successful. If you want to be a businessman, hang around businessmen. You want to be a politician then make friend of politicians. Birds of a feather flock together. You just can’t let people that don’t stretch you towards your dream in your life. The outcomes you want to change are yours, so fire those non-conforming friends, associates and hang-outs. Someone once said: “Change your friends and change your life.” 5. DARE THE GREATNESS IN YOU!!! More than anything be yourself. Follow your dreams and act on them. You’ll probably only be able to trace the success of acting on your life’s purpose in hindsight but it will be far better than living with regrets. In the book, Get Big Fast, Robert Spector quotes these words from Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, “I knew that when I was eighty there was no chance that I would regret having walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus in the middle of the year. I wouldn’t even have remembered that. But I did think there was a chance that I might regret significantly not participating in this thing called the Internet that I believed passionately in. So, once I thought about it that way, it became incredibly easy to make that decision.” And that was how a comfortable 28 year old bank vice-president left his job to found one of the largest online retail stores in history. Use these 5 steps right away. Tomorrow awaits your story of Success!