Wildly Important

Have you wondered how tough it is to deal with daily tasks and challenges? Have you woken up on days when you rue the “mess” you have to go through? From starting your family out, to hitting the chaotic traffic, a pile load of office work you’ll have to deal with, tight schedules, meetings, deadlines, invoices, vouchers and payments, presentations, project and works… and the list goes on and on.

I have always wondered what special things are common to successful entrepreneurs, managers, technocrats, artisans, businessmen, family men and mentors.   I guess I have found one of them….

We were preparing for our corporate strategy workshop last year. My boss commissioned a research assignment on one of the strategies we were looking into. Nutshell is that the research work led me to a principle I guess I discovered by happenstance. This principle has become a mantra, an ethos and an orientation for me.

Trust me. My productivity has doubled or tripled. I have been able to handle voluminous tasks with some higher level of efficiency and met most deadlines. I have turned out quality outputs.  My wife and I have applied it to our lives, in beautifying our new house, in managing our finances and much more in our aggressive saving culture.

One of the principles of success is to focus on the Wildly Important Goal (WIG). It means; that goal without which any other goal is meaningless. It’s as simple as that. I learnt this from Franklin Covey’s 4 Disciplines of Execution. 

Your WIG could be anything, starting a new business, weight loss, earning a degree, saving a defined amount, building a house, achieving a deliverable, learning a skill or passing an exam. It is important you sieve that WIG out of all the myriad of goals, task, and wishes you have. It is more important than many of your good goals. It is your great goal. Jim Collins said “the enemy of the great is the good”. It is a great goal that without it, all your good goals are meaningless.

I wake up on many days and quickly determine my WIG for the day. My WIG this morning was to facilitate a meeting of engineers to finalize our short, mid-term and long term production targets. I got to work and that was what I prepared for. That was all that matters and every other thing was secondary………

My wife and I had purposed that our income in the last two months of the year will be geared towards beautifying the house. We had come up with a list. As soon as money started coming in, straight it went into the “list”.

I know you are trying to achieve your dream. Your WIG draws you closer to it.