For freelance work creating an avenue for success leads toward goals that may be scary and risky, but imagining how others will perceive you nurtures your internal perception and can encourage success. Risk can be very uncomfortable, but let me give you a couple words of advice that I learned from control systems theory. Nothing is controllable if it’s not observable. Let’s put the brakes on a second and I’ll repeat that differently.
You can only control your life if it can be observed. When you decide you want to take control of your life and career that means you need to start an imaging process. The imaging is fundamentally the most important part of the process to control your situation and condition. Spend part of your day evaluating and imagining situations and secondly applying a value of efficiency scale to your condition and then make a control choice.
Come back to the two words I mentioned risk and control. Risk always raises my heart rate and makes me want to run to safety. Getting comfortable with risk requires two things. The first is that you have a plan and the second is you have control. Thus, falls order. Observe, plan, control. Risk gets squashed because the result is control.
Now let me mention a couple things about nurture. You cannot achieve any goals nor trust in yourself without nurture. Nurture comes from within and created from an outward perception looking inward. Here are a couple things that you can do to nurture yourself.
Imagine how your friend will perceive you after you created something or solved a problem. Picture the positive. Your friend tells you, “good job” and “congratulations, let’s celebrate.” Create an image of yourself at a party or gathering of family or friends and they see your success and happiness. Tell yourself how you feel about that image.
The image of yourself and the control achieved is through daily goals. The most important goals are those small goals. The smaller the better sometimes because through achievement you not only provide yourself nurturing self worth, but the smallest goals have the lowest risk and provide the control necessary to capture your complete image.
All of us can be inspired by our inward perception or we can sink in the mud and trudge along a road of self pity and never reach success. Observe what you know and what intellectual property you have in your mind. Make a plan to create that material. Control your life and make your future a vision under your control. We are imagining the peak of your success everyday.
Sometimes I think back to the start of my venture and what terms I would place on success. Could it be fancy things or employees that look up to me? I think the most important thing has been making small progress daily. Two quarters have past and I’m working toward the same goal. At the start of my venture I created an inflection point milestone. This is a point where introspection and a deep breath occur. This is a point where you put a log on the fire and curl up with a cup of tea to observe, plan, and control.
Mid-November was this critical point where I had to evaluate my situation and decide what needed adjustment to get through another two quarters. I decided to get more work from outside and told a friend the plan. They happened to have some medical database software work that needed automation. They are ok with my ownership of the material copyright and this will give me material that I can add to our license library. Success is using tools to observe, plan, and control. Nurture yourself on every small goal you achieve.
-Jeff
