And if the point of the Zen Habits article strikes a chord, try this book by Stephen M. Shapiro to see if you really want to keep setting goals! Success without goals, hmmm. Less stress, more serendipity, more success. Depending, of course on how you define success.

No matter what stage of growth your business is in, this is an extremely valuable question. When you answer it, you’ll have a much better chance of developing a successful, sustainable business. Tim Berry in this article from Entrepreneur, suggests three questions for people to ask themselves prior to writing their business plan. But question #1 is the most important and can make an important difference in how you think about your business at any stage.

How do you define success?

Did you know that for many people, the answer is not profits or revenue? Your definition of success might seem random to others but it’s your company and knowing your own criteria for success will help you align your rational and emotional intelligences and greatly increase your chances of “getting there”, wherever “there” happens to be!

So what’s your definition of success?

Yet today, most of our businesses are run as if the guy/gal at the top knows everything, knows how to best accomplish each task and you better do it their way because otherwise it’s the highway! This mistake starts when the founder, working alone figures out the best/right way. As the organization grows, instead of passing down the desire to reach company goals, the edict is some version of “do it my way.” But the Army doesn’t do it that way any more and hasn’t for a long time. Why? Because listening and evolving their strategies based on front-line suggestions simply is more effective!

What can you learn from this article about a different way to run your company?

‘”There’s a temptation in our networked age to think ideas can be developed by email and iChat” he said. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”‘

So in designing Pixar’s new headquarters, he insisted that it be designed to promote encounters and unplanned collaborations. When the building was completed, Pixar’s co-founder, John Lassiter, said Steve’s theory worked from the day the building opened. From day one, he kept running into people he hadn’t seen in ages, even though they’d worked in the same company for years!

How does your company promote informal collaboration?

Do you have a deliberate strategy to make your everyday decisions effectively? If not you might want to take a look at this short article from FastCompany to discover three things you can begin doing right now to make wiser decisions!

Although this article’s headline make it sound like Apple is not interested in profits, too many decisions have to be made in a company Apple’s size for profits to be totally ignored. Like, how do they decide to price their products, if not at an acceptable margin above their costs? Nevertheless, the point about focus is well made!

She was 91 and lived a relatively happy life. But she had a heart attack 2 days ago and slipped quickly away. The day she died was exactly 23 years after my dad was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer. He died 10 months later.

Mom was lost for how to spend her last 22 years. I am convinced she could have lived even longer and more happily had she been pursuing a purpose, doing something to contribute to others. But she could not imagine that. Dad had retired and there was nothing else to do but wait to join him, to wait to die. And she was mad at him for all those years because he left her to play alone.

Her passing has opened a new door for me. I feel a bit like a hot air balloon that had been tethered to the ground. I still have plenty of ballast to keep me from sailing wildly away but I am now ready to pursue what has been my passion for years now – what do people do when they “retire”.

I plan to re-conceptualize our culture’s view of  ”Retirement”, life’s 5th stage. Without getting too caught up in discussing the exact ages of the stages, our current view is something like this:

Stages of a Life

Stage 1  Birth to age 5 – - Play

Stage 2  Age  5 to 18 – - School

Stage 3* Age 18 to 22 (or – 30) – - College (grad or med school, etc.)

Stage 4  Age 22 (-30) to 65 – - Life

Stage 5  Age 65 to death – - Retirement (where retirement means purposeless Play)

[*Stage 3 is an optional stage and may last a year or as many as 12]

I’d like to see Stage 5 called — Fulfillment (where fulfillment means you find your purpose for your remaining years and pursue that purpose passionately).

The focus of my coaching is this subject. I give presentations to baby boomers who are reaching “retirement age” but are afraid to retire because they are healthy but not ready for the purposeless play that leads to an unfulfilling 30 – 40 years.

People turn to self discipline when they don’t want to do something they think they should do.  It’s like having a boss, parent or spouse on your case about something you should do but have not. It’s no fun. So why we do this to ourselves and call it discipline?

Here’s the way it works. When you are doing something, really engaged and fully concentrating on getting it done, you are not aware of liking the process or not.  You are simply too focused on the project. We do not hate doing things, we hate thinking about doing them. And if in the middle of the process of getting it done, the thought comes up that “This is not fun.” Have another thought “So what! I’m just going to get it done as fast as possible so I can turn to things I like!” Motivation focused. Not a lot of anger directed at yourself. Not a lot of judgment. Just getting it done with as little effort as possible spent focusing on anything but the task.

In the late 70s, I spent three years as a buyer for B. Dalton. In those semi-computerized times, we had to review on paper lists of weekly sales of hot titles in over 300 stores and design reorder quantities for each store for each title. We had to calculate the reorder size (in our own head) based on the quantity on hand, the sales the previous week(s), sales trend, store location/size and several other variables at each store. Pressure was always on from management not to over order and certainly not to run out of stock, in NYC, LA or Bemidji! I learned to stay fully engaged in the process and ignore or laugh at thoughts about liking the process or not because I was focused forward, on the payoff. I wanted to have the highest sales and the lowest rate of return on over-ordered books!

In his article, The Myth of Discipline, Leo Babauta discusses self discipline from a different perspective and offers tools to help you learn to differentiate discipline from motivation. Enjoy the process!

If the circumstances are just right though, a frown can be good news, even something to strive for. Seems contradictory, right? As with every other thing in business or in life, it all depends on your perspective!

See how a professional cyclist/ESPN writer used a frown to motivate herself to do an extraordinarily difficult workout!