100 Ways to Improve Your Business
This excellent and comprehensive list of tips from Entrepreneur.com serves as a checklist with explanation for achieving your business (and life) goals. For example, consider the following excerpts:
"96. Revisiting Your Goals
The value of a goal lies in the way it provides you with a relatively steady, unwinking light toward which to steer in the fog of everyday business life. But that doesn't mean a goal should be as immovable as a lighthouse. You should periodically take a fresh look at your goals to see if they need to be changed or, perhaps, dumped. Changes in your personal situation, such as a desire to spend more time with your family, may cause some goals to become irrelevant to your true desires. Of course, the best reason to scrap a goal is because it's been accomplished....
97. Loosen Up!
If setting and achieving your goals isn't fun, then why bother?... And if you fail? Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and create a new goal...
99. Creating Targets Worth Reaching
When looking at new goals, make sure they have the following qualities:
Specificity. You stand a better chance of achieving a goal if it's specific. "Raising capital" isn't a specific goal; "raising $10,000 by July 1" is.
Optimism. Goals should be positive and uplifting...
Realism....Begin with small steps, such as increasing your monthly income by 25 percent. Once your first goal is met, you can reach for larger ones.
Thinking short- and long-term. Short-term goals are attainable in a period of weeks to a year. Long-term goals can be achieved five, 10 or even 20 years from now; they should be substantially greater than short-term goals but should still be realistic..."
