illvillja consulting

A week ago me and my family got an unexpected good news. My wife has a heart disease and was due to another heart surgery with a long and painful recovery period afterwards. However, the doctor informed us last week that this time they do not have to have the surgery this year. The heart can be good for another 20 years if we are lucky. This was very surprising as we had earlier been told that a surgery was inevitable. Since I got that information everything around me have seen so easy, and it feels like everything is currently going my way. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that good news are very motivating, no matter how you get them. Unfortunately good news are sometimes more rare than the negative ones. Especially in an industry like the poker industry that have had a rough year.

When I was jogging the other day over to Catalan Bay everything went fine on the way there despite my lacking stamina. When I reached the small village on the eastern side of Gibraltar I could not help to stay there for a few minutes watching the beautiful scene in front of me with the waves hitting the empty beach and the birds circling above it. Just a few meters out in the water lays a huge stone that in the past was used by the fishermen to get good fortune by touching it on their way out to make their living. On the way back from the beach the shortcomings in my physics started to be more apparent to me and immediately I start to look around to find ways of tricking myself to be able to go further.

– “Ok, now fight your way to Filomena House”, I said to myself.

When I reached this point I could then much easier determine my next goal, for instance the roundabout a couple of hundred meters further down the road. Through this method I could push myself all the way to the marina in Ocean Village where I decided it was time to start cooling down anyway.

When combining these two stories I think you get a very good method for setting goals and to keep yourself and your co-workers motivated. Even though I am raised with the Swedish expression “aim for the skies and reach the top of the trees” I think that this only can be the reality if you split that goal into smaller reachable pieces. If you do so I think you also have a very good chance of actually reaching the skies while you are on it.

In order to reach the toughest goals you need to be able to celebrate all the small victories. If your expectation is to “make $X amount in profit Q1” and your method of doing this is to reduce the cost and increase the revenues through a detailed plan you must also allow yourself to celebrate when you see that your renewed cost structure works fine and gives the expected outcome. You also must be able to celebrate when you see that your methods of increasing the revenues also works, and when you see your January numbers rise. By doing so you ensure that yourself and your co-workers are kept motivated to keep struggling towards the overall goal. The celebration itself can be a very small thing, even just allowing yourself to say

– “Hey, I made it, let us continue towards the next goal”

Doing this post is also a way for me to celebrate, and praise my colleagues that are working hard to make us reach our goals. We have several small victories to celebrate! Be proud of what you have done so far, and we will keep doing it even better going forward!