Good Success

Proverbs 3:1-4  My son, do not forget my teaching, but let your heart keep my commandments, for length of days and years of life and peace they will add to you. Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart. So you will find favor and good success in the sight of God and man.

I have been fascinated and constantly pursue to understand more about good success. There are several types of successes, which generally fall into 3:

1. Good success where people generally “do good and do no wrong”
2. Bad success where people are willing to do bad, evil and whatever it takes to get what they want
3. Godly good success where people do, build and live lives and businesses that are in line with biblical and God’s principles, and even better is with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

And it is #3 that I am focusing on since 2006.

This is my personal experiences, observations and conclusions to how to attract, live and cultivate a successful living/lifestyle, from my years of reading, testing, experimentation and more. It is how I prioritize and arrange my time, resources, focus, business and life as a whole – I will add to it and update too with time and experience.

My Definition

To me, success by itself isn’t complete – and that is why there are so many unhappy millionaires who “achieved” but still depressed and aimless and meaningless.

To me, I believe true success is and needs to be truly “good success”, where individuals and organizations balances all three realms of achievement, fulfillment and happiness; often in spite of overwhelming or underwhelming odds and the battlefield of the mind and life as it is.

Good success will include gratitude for the present, faithfulness in the little things, creating positive lasting and sustainable hope, experiences and growth for the future; being able to dance be it rain or shine; able to bring smiles to the faces of little ones; being able to stop to observe, smell the roses, and to be present. And to be mindful of God in all we see, do and hope for – Nigel, 2020.

Core Sections in what I believe to guide and put me in the right path of good success and wisdom.

1. Good Success Areas Of Mastery
2. Good Success – What Matters Most
3. Good Success Guiding Principles, Philosophy & Process
4. The Do Not Do List
5. Wisdom From The Book Of Proverbs

Refer to my Resources for tool and products that I use to improve my life and achieve/maintain good success.

I’ve been fascinated with “good”, “goodness” and “good success” ever since I read it in the bible as well have the chance to observe what bad success and pursuits are, and I believe Good Success is can be broken into few core sections:

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Good Success Areas Of Mastery

Good success covers all the different aspect of our lives that require our attention, effort and mastery for them to work well; and they include:

1. Wealth, Passive Income & Lifestyle
2. Vitality, Wellness & Fitness
3. Love, Friendship, Parenting & Relationships
4. Mind, Thoughts, Values, Emotions & Meaning
5. Fatherhood & Manhood
6. Business & Entrepreneurship
7. Offline / Online Business
8. Productivity & Performance
9. Leadership, Impact & Legacy

These all are important different sections of our lives that cannot be ignored, isolated nor left alone, and are interconnected with each other – truly every aspect of our lives.

It doesn’t make sense to master just one area but neglect everything else, for example

• becoming rich but losing one’s health, relationship with spouse or kids etc
• having health and relationships but unable to pay the bills
• becoming successful but broken and unhappy inside

That’s really failure, because that’s a very linear and one-track, single-dimensional approach to life. It’s very unbalanced and lacks in meaning and fulfillment.

In fact, a life of achievement without fulfillment is a failure.

Good success to me is when there is a balance of achievement AND fulfillment. Only by and which we strive towards excellence in ALL areas of your life can you achieve an extraordinary life beyond your wildest imagination.

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Good Success – What Matters Most

These are the guiding principles, philosophy and processes behind good success as well the process of doing/executing/enforcing them to achieve and maintain areas of Good Success – it’s a fairly important page to me, and I think and hope, works as a guide to you too.

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Good Success Guiding Principles-Process-Philosophy

1. Understand your Kingdom priorities (What to focus/do these first)
   • Choose God first – nothing is greater than God’s love for us, other than His presence.
   • Followed by you/yourself (self care / take care of yourself)
   • Then partner/spouse, children and family
   • Then friends and colleagues
   • Then work, business, career and money including pursuing and sustaining The Passive Income Lifestyle
   • A big portion of Good Success
2. God is awesome and great, and so are you (now or in time) – as long as you do not give up. If you have done wrong, repent and repay whatever you had cheated/taken from others (before God intervenes). If you have done right, good – keep doing good.
3. You don’t have to be great to get started…but you have to get started to become/be great.
4. Choose yourself. If not you, then who?
5. Get started today. If not now, then when? The best time was then, and the next best time is today. Now.
6. Start where you are. Wherever, whenever, however you are.
7. You get what you give. The laws of seed time and harvest time still rings true today.
8. Be faithful and accountable in the small things and you will be given much more to be faithful over.
9. No one’s gonna save you, no one is going make you rich or healthier or sexier, or write your book or song or whatever for you. You can pay them for it but remember that’s 100% your life and 100% your own responsibility. Take control and responsibility over your own life.
10. People will lie to save themselves from embarrassment, pain, shame and more. Watch what they do, not what they say.
11. There will always be people who loves to just hear and talk and believe superficially – avoid these like the plague.
12. Decide today, to grow, to love, to be courageous and to be conscious.
13. Be here AND at the same time anticipate forward, visualize, plan and map your future.
14. Your feelings and thoughts are your own, and for you to control. Recognize the lizard/herd mentality and the reactive feelings/thoughts, but don’t give in.
15. You are not who they say you are – you are who YOU say you are and what you do consistently.
16. Excellence is based on excellent systems and routines, not willpower or empty show. Build a routine and sytem that brings you closer and in success, day in, day out.
17. Your health matters, physical health, mental health, emotional health and spiritual health. These are the inward health. The outward health are health pertaining to relationships, money, career/business and more. Those matter too. Remember, take care of yourself too.
18. Be careful who you hang out with. You typically become who you hang out with.
19. Know your core strengths, then choose the best one that matches with your interest and its profitability.
20. Don’t wait for others unless you have to.
21. Walk away from people who are toxic, who hold you back, whom you have outgrown.
22. Ready Player One: You are the controller and director of your own life and don’t be a NPC (non playable character with a fixed and broken scipt).
23. Knowing is just 2% of something – acting on it, refining and growing is the 98% reason to success.
24. Mistakes aren’t failure, and they’re required (will happen) en-route to success. Take them as data points.
25. You have finite time, energy and resources. I rather not waste time trying to convince people to believe, to listen or to like you.
26. Focus on the important things (refer to Things That Tuly Matter TTTM).
27. There is no shortcut or hacks to success. Yes, you can do things smarter, but the focus is the DO THINGS, not just the smarter bit.
28. How things are done is as important as the why. The what is the least important, as it is the by-product. How we live, how we speak, how we build value, in a good, positive and value-adding way, is important.
29. Have a steady income first then think/talk about getting rich. If you’re wired to be an employee, it’s great. If you’re wired to be an entrepreneur, that’s good too. But have a fixed income first, to pay rent and so that you (and your loved ones) can eat and sleep well.
30. Cashflow are more important than assets that are more important than liabilities. Your #1 financial job is to keep accumulating assets that keeps paying you a steady and growing pool of income regularly.
31. Passive income and the passive income lifestyle is a worthy goal to unlock the next level of your life. It is very hard to grow when you’re worried about putting food on the table and paying the bills.
32. Be able to think independently.
33. Being able to take hits…and get up. If you fall, make sure to land on your back so you can look at the stars and skies above you, and see the wonders of the Lord. Then get up.
34. The truth and your character is more important than lying or selling out or back-pedalling just to protect yourself.
35. Review your actions, days, weeks, months and years regularly. Learn and grow from both successes and mistakes of yourself and others.
36. Don’t waste money trying to impress others or yourself.
37. Live for a cause and not applause.
38. Learn how to make money…and then how to transform them into physical or digital assets that keeps paying you passive income.
39. Don’t major on the minors, but major on the majors – productivity with Pareto’s Law (80/20 Rule): that 80% of your outcomes comes from the core 20%, and vice versa, that 80% of your problems comes from core 20%. So your job is to find the good 20% that gives you the 80% outcomes you want, and cull the 20% that gives you 80% of your problems. This means that you’d have bandwidth for up to another 4 more meaningful 20% effort life projects.
40. Bad people…do bad things. It’s what they do and who they are. It’s not that important to understand why, because (most of the time it’s because of stuff you cannot control or influence anyway) and you have more important things to do with your time, effort and resources.
41. Revenge is best served by way of massive success…and don’t worry too about the stuff that was stolen or taken from you. Some will not come back, but material things will find their way back to their rightful owners, usually 10-100X than before.
42. Life is a fascinating adventure and journey of growth, self discovery, learning and loving. Or not, if you decide not to.
43. To become rich, yes, follow the money BUT don’t sellout your values for money. Sellout money for values, love and growth. And you’d earn 10-100X more.
44. Do and say the right thing, even if it’s hard or scary. And do it anyway. You’d be grateful for it in the long term.
45. You doing the right thing doesn’t mean people will do the right thing. Misguided and bad people may still cheat you, rob you, hurt you, slander you, spread nasty rumors about you…but keep doing the right thing. Most of the bad people will get what is due to them, as it’s a vicious cycle for them anyway.
46. Only quality people
47. You don’t get what you want in life but you get what and who you are.
48. If you do what is easy…your life will be hard. If you do what is hard…your life will be easy
49. Things happen for you not to you.
50. Life and God is on your side. I’m on your side.
51. Focus on the important things that matter. Not the things or people that don’t.
52. You’ll get opportunity. You’ll make mistakes. You’ll get hurt. Yes.
53. Build to last.
54. Think and ponder.
55. Look for your 0.01% tribe.
56. The more consistent, honest and industrious I am, the more lucky and successful I seem to be.
57. We become what we think about.
58. In order to be successful, we have to do and invest today to get the fruits down the road later. Directly, consciously or otherwise.
59. Wiring/programming your mind for success, wealth, love and whatever you want.
60. In the beginning you must compensate for lack of experience, expertise and knowhow with time, effort and hours. And often, being used and cheated by others (at least in the earlier, initial stages).
61. Yes you can.
62. Good success.
63. Values, principles and virtues-based success.
64. You get what you tolerate.
65. Don’t be a volunteer or willing victim.
66. Most people fail or become bad because they don’t know that they don’t know but they think they know.
67. It’s not over until you become successful. Until then, you do not stop.
68. First things first. First order prioritization.
69. Go deeper. Seek to understand the truths and apply them.
70. State of Constant optimization
71. Have/get a life. Don’t just sit around watch TV and trying to catch or comment on what people say or do.
72. Watch your money – everyone and every organizations want your money.
73. Especially when you have no plans for your money.
74. If you’re going through hell or a dark place now…dont stop or stay there or worse, don’t become like them – go through and exit it.
75. Label/Limit Breaker
76. Invisible scripts
77. (Pre)Position Yourself For Success
78. Above all, choose God, love, forgiveness, hope and faith.

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The Do Not Do List

The Do Not Do List is inspired by Tim Ferriss, where we need not only to do more of what’s good and right, but also to remove and lessen the stuff that are not good, distractions and the downright bad from our lives. The original post can be found here, I have reworded and expanded the original to suit my style of writing and thinking more.

“Not-to-do” lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance…because what you don’t do allows and determines what you actually can do.

Here are nine stressful and common habits that entrepreneurs, employees and individuals need to eliminate. They are bulleted with a short descriptions. Focus on one or two at a time, just as you would with high-priority to-do items. I’ve worded them in no-to-do action form:

1. Do not answer calls from unrecognized phone numbers

I usually do not answer calls from unrecognized numbers, simply because

• I dont like to be interrupted – too much noise nowadays anyway
• Poor negotiating position so I prefer to get email or Whatsapp where I can read, understand and prepare the best of my ability
• I’m not that important that I need to make an immediate or impulse decision (even then, even if I’m really really that important, important decisions cannot be made immediately or impulsively anyway)

So I let calls go to voicemail or better still, if it’s important or urgent enough, it will come to be in an email or WhatsApp message where I can then read and reread, understand, clarify and prepare to the best of my ability.

2. Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night

Reading and answering emails first thing in the morning just scrambles your priorities and plans for the day; whereas reading and answering emails last thing in the night may just well keep you up at night as it triggers, stimulates and jolts your mind.

Any emails can wait until the next day after 1 PM, after you’ve completed at least one of your critical / vital to do priorities for the day.

3. Do not agree to meetings or calls with no clear agenda or end time

If you call or anyone calls you for a productive / work-related meeting, always asks for a clear objective and agenda with the list of topics and questions or points to cover, and NO meeting should last more than 30 minutes.

Ask for these objectives and agendas in advance so that everyone can best prepare before the meeting and make full and good use of the time together, rather than everyone-wait-for-someone-then-someone-else, which takes a lot of time and makes for poor use of time of a group of people.

4. Do not let people ramble, get them to focus

When it comes to productivity or work or finance related time, please do spend too much time with preliminary small talks of “how are you” or “how’s things going” – keep these to not more than a few minutes or sentences. Go straight then to

• “What’s up?” or
• “I’m in the middle of something, but what’s going on?”

A large part of getting priorities and critical stuff done is Get To The Point.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to social or family events – it all depends on the settings and context.

5. Do not check e-mail constantly — “batch” and check at set times only

This is the similar to what I had shared above – do not spend to much time on non-important communication work; spend most time on what matters most and do what you do best and on most critical and vital tasks.

You can answer emails once at 1 PM and another once more at 6 PM, and that’s it.

6. Do not over-communicate with low-profit, high-maintenance customers

I know there is no “clear” path to success, but the most confirmed path to failure is trying to please everyone.

Herein, do an 80/20 analysis on and of your clients to determine:

• which 20% are producing to 80%+ of profits
• which 20% are taking 80%+ of my time

Then for the clients who are the loudest and least productive time sucking clients…put them on autopilot by citing a change in company policies – send them an email with new rules as bullet points:

• number of permissible calls
• email response time
• minimum orders
• etc

Offer to send them to another provider if they cant conform to the new policies.

7. Do not work more to fix overwhelm — prioritize

If you do not have a priority and critical to do list, then what happens is then everything seems urgent and important.

Define the most important projects, and the most important 1-3 tasks for the day, and this will be your guiding points – this is the same and inline with my Things That Truly Matter (TTTM) which helps splendidly guide what is important and what isn’t.

Sometimes, this may mean that you have to allow little bad things to happen, such as

• return a phone call later and apologizing
• paying a small late fee
• lose an unreasonable client (this is perfectly okay for me)

to get the large, critical and important things done.

The answer to overwhelm isn’t learning how to spin more plates or doing more, it is really defining the few core things that will fundamentally change you income, business, relationships and life.

8. Do not carry a cellphone or Crackberry 24/7

In fact my phone has been placed on silent mode since 2014 because I’m a clinician, and when I see and treat patients, I do not answer my phone. If I’m in a meeting or with my family, I do not answer my phone…and this habit has stuck.

And I’m perfectly fine with it.

I recommend to take at least a half day off all digital leashes (such as phone, laptop, TV – anything digital) at least once per week. Or a few times.

Leave the phone in the car or home, and go out for a walk.

Leave the phone at home if you go out for dinner.

It’s okay to return that phone call you missed the next day. Same for that email or message or post. It’s really okay you know. Others may work 24/7 and they may expect you to do the same…but why should you?

We’re not presidents of the country therabouts. No one will need us to answer a call or message at 8 PM or 12 AM at night. Yeah, okay, maybe someone was looking for me but I wasn’t able to answer at that time…but what’s the outcome or issue?

Nothing for at least 99% of the time.

And that 1%? It’s fine too.

9. Do not expect work to fill a void that non-work relationships and activities should

Work is work, and it isn’t all of life.

Your colleagues and co-workers shouldn’t be your only friends.

Please, schedule life and defend that schedule just as how you would an important business meeting.

Don’t say things like “I’ll get it done this weekend” – weekends you can keep for yourself, your loved ones or your side hustle, where it’s something that is outside of regular work. Unless you’re already running a business for yourself, then remember to carve out some time for yourself and your loved ones.

It’s great to focus on getting things done, but remember:

•  focus on the critical few, get those done, and get out and have a life.
• sidestep the constant noise, distractions and the lowto-no value tasks and distractions

If you have trouble deciding what to do, just focus on not doing. Different means, same end.

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Wisdom From The Biblical Book Of Proverbs

The book of proverbs from the bible is an amazing, classic book written by King Solomon, known as the wisest man on earth. He asked for divine wisdom when God asked him what he wanted, and that’s when God poured His divine wisdom into him, transforming him to the wisest king and man on earth.

The lessons on wisdom still rings true today, especially in the ever-growing-faster pace and noise in and of the world. When I need more wisdom, I quiet myself to read, meditate and pray over the lessons taught in the book of proverbs.

How Proverbs Can Be Used

Warnings against Bad Friends

Wisdom Speaks

You Can’t Hide behind Evil

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