We are constantly told to conquer that next mountain. To grow our businesses and our careers as big as possible. To get richer, bigger better faster, Achievement has become our addiction. If so, why can’t we just lower the bar a bit. Get in touch with that inner laziness that up to this point has eluded us.

That is why I want all of you to commit to me that after this meeting that you will downsize our dreams and begin too define our own brand of success – not someone elses. Forget the grand vision. Besides there is always someone that is going to be richer, smarter or better looking than you- I know, not you but for the most of us.

First, we need to set patient, interim goals…get small!. I remember when I asked my Zen master when I first began mediating, how long I should mediate for- 15 minutes, half hour or an hour each day? He said that I should try it for a minute for each day for the next few months. If I was successful, I should go to two minutes. He always taught me to strive for minimal achievement by focusing on one small goal at a time This is where I learned when striving for new goals, what we important in the climb was not even to get a foothold. Get a toehold…if you can get some progress toward your goal, you have a better chance of achieving it in the long run.

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Who won the race, the tortoise or the hare? And who lives longer. Hares live to 4 years old and tortoises, well the can live to 100

After downsizing our dreams and getting that toehold, we next figure out what will make us happily successful. Most of us will immediately say is to make a lot of money. Money is an important measure of success. It is how we keep score. But if we never get to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, will our life trip be for nothing. However, we can all take solace that many people that have a lot of money are really unhappy!

What happens if you go out there and only hit that big success one time like those one hit wonders? Remember, it doesn’t matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right. No one is going to know or care about your failures, and neither should you. All that matters in business is that you get it right once. Wayne Gretzky said that “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” We can’t get caught up in the failures. It only matters that we met our success requirements that one time. When things go bad, we can think back to perhaps that one time where the planets aligned, and we got to the goal line.

With true business confidence, we can look back a single success and enjoy it for what it was. Maybe there is only one success on a particular path. We may need to bounce to an entirely different path to get another success. The complete answer to this puzzle can’t be known until the end of our lives. The order of successes and failures does not diminish the high point. Hitting it once can help root a sense of business confidence that will carry through whether the rest of the path is filled with failure, success, or a mix of both. It will give us the resiliency spring to bounce through the rest of our business lives

Well the first thing we need to do is stop letting our egos brag about our successes but instead Honor Our Failures. A year after leaving a 9 year career at IBM, I was fired from my new job. Then I was kicked out of business in my second company by my two partners. This was the first place where I learned I could actually fail in a huge way. This is the first place I diverged from the master plan of success my mother had for me.

Now unfortunately in our culture, business wisdom tell us that when we fail there is always something to learn

We are continually reminded by those around us that failure is an important ingredient in the next success, possibly even a prerequisite. We tell ourselves that failure “happened to us” so that we could learn some important lesson that would later propel us to even more success.

Let me tell you the truth, when we fail. Sometimes it just sucks. There is absolutely nothing to learn. When I lost my largest client because they were indicted by the SEC, what did I learn? That I wasn’t suppose to do business with criminals? I knew this… When my best employee left my company because her husband got a job in another state, what was I to learn? Not to hire people who are married?

Failure is valuable only when we realize it is a normal part of the business process even when there always isn’t something to learn.

And there can be a lot of fear involved in this whole failing process. We have all heard about being afraid of failure and more recently, we are supposed to be now be afraid of success.

The fear in this process is not brought on by our competitors or other outside people. It mostly originates within us. The biggest fear we have is that someone in our position would have done better than us, made better decisions than us and would have built it faster and more profitably than we did. We believe that that we should be in a different place than where we are right now, and that we would be, if only we had made better decisions. Nonsense. You can’t be anywhere except right here right now. Zen Philosophy says that we need to start from where we are.