The kind
of success most people expect and experience in their endeavours is oftentimes
nothing more than incidental success.
It is the kind of success obtained by chance, casually and not necessarily
requiring strategic actions to make happen.
The
problem with incidental success is that it has very low probability of
accomplishment - it may or may not be achieved. Not only that, the quality of
results obtained is often average, less than satisfactory and unsustainable.
When you
formulate aspirations with no action plans, entertain hope with no strategy or
keep dreaming without doing, you are invariably setting up yourself for
incidental success. By relying on winning a lottery or acquiring an inheritance
as a strategy for becoming rich; by hoping for luck, waiting for things to
improve or hoping for manna to drop from the sky, you are programming yourself
for incidental success.
On the
other hand, when you set definite goals, back them up with credible action
plans and are committed to their pursuit, you will set up yourself to succeed
by design.
Succeeding
by design is a lot like the United States landing the first man on the moon in
1969 - it didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the country made it a
goal to be accomplished. Eight years before, the then US President, John F.
Kennedy had made a mission statement to the American Congress saying, “I
believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before
this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to
the Earth.”
