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It is my sincere belief that the best decision you can make about doing very well in business…is to have no choice but to succeed. A business associate of mine said to me last week ‘How do you manage to write an article every single week?’ The answer could be divided into several parts; for example I could talk about how I get the ideas for the articles, also how long it takes me to write them and when I find the best time to do the writing…but the truth is that I wanted and chose to write an article of value every week and that’s the end of that! All the rest is detail really, interesting or not.

Husbands and wives that become parents have no choice except to succeed, after all their child is a miracle, helpless…and theirs! The success of parents then has little or nothing to do with going to seminars; it has everything to do with an undying and worthy commitment to achieve success…for and with their child. On the business front, if you have ever wondered why so many sales people fail to reach their monthly budgets, ask yourself another question: ‘why do the same under-achievers always pay their mortgages on time?’ In one area they have no choice and in the other they obviously feel that they do have a choice! The key to success is to make ‘complete choices’, not partial ones…as follows:

• To choose not only to go to work each day but to make a success of your work…for customers, the company and yourself
• To choose not only to work throughout each year, but also to enjoy yourself at work…every day
• To choose not only to run a business but to do so in a manner that is distinctive, dynamic and highly successful…for the markets you serve, also for the people you employ and for yourself

You didn’t decide when to be born, and you won’t decide when to die, but everything else that happens in your life is something that you can control…by making a complete choice.

The best way to make complete choices is to follow this simple, 3-step plan: make a decision, make it yours…and stick by it. Here are the details:

• MAKE A DECISION! The primary reason that people fail to make decisions is that they want to be sure that the outcome is ‘right’ before they go ahead. It actually works the exact opposite: you make a decision and then spend your life ‘making it right’…providing of course that the decision was based on sound motives for all concerned. I work with companies that have ‘me-too’ offerings and ‘say’ that they want to go to market with ‘me-best’ propositions…but when it comes to promising more to customers in marketing, sales and service effort, they find it hard if not impossible to make such decisions. They want to know ‘how will we do it’ instead of saying ‘let’s do it and then find the best ways of making it work.’

• MAKE IT YOURS! When it comes to decisions, don’t be a spectator, be a key player…along with other people you choose to involve. If you allow ‘others’ to make a decision that belongs to you, you will always have an excuse if things go wrong…but when going forward with ‘your decisions’, you will do what it takes to succeed.

• STICK BY IT! No one ever made a decision that didn’t appear to be partially or totally wrong soon after they made it. The reason for this is that we don’t know if anything is going to work until the end, and the end is usually a long way from the start…and so if your motives were sound when you made your decision, don’t betray yourself and everyone else.

None of this suggests that you shouldn’t make modifications ‘as you go’, but don’t go to the other extreme and abandon or seriously neglect the decisions you have ‘made’. During the ‘conquest of Mexico’, the mission leader (Hernan Cortez) made the key decision to burn their boats, thus sending a clear message to his lethargic soldiers: “We must win, for there is no way back from here!