execute that goal! by dlm

EXECUTE THAT GOAL by DAVID LANRE MESSAN 2 | P a g e

Hello there!

I am DLM! Innovation Rules! Oh My God! (I am Squirming, chuckling and acting

now) My name is David Lanre Messan but I really, really, really love to be called

DLM – it makes me wanna innovate ‘cos that is what my whole life is about. It is

my purpose. It is my call. I execute my goals on it. I am an Innovation Strat-Artist –

I create strategies for personal and business success; I speak; I write; I sing; and I

model…crazy right? Well, it is my life and all these make me happy and I wanna

make the next man happy with it too…You get me right?

Whooosh, I am already saying much here. Let’s score GOALS now but whose

gonna SCORE it – YOU, surely will. But your jersey number must read EXECUTION!

Looool, I gotcha!!! Truthfully, I may not know you by face but I am so excited to

be a part of you all. In fact, I doff my hat for all of you listening to this audio

package at this moment as a sign of respect.

Getting Serious!!! (I am saying this with a “God like” voice)

“Vision without execution is hallucination.” It’s true. As countless people have

proved, knowing what you want to do and where you want your life to go may be

less than half the battle.

We set goals so we can live the kind of life we want but more often than not,

some of us end up not achieving these goals and become frustrated with life. To

be candid with you, your inability to achieve your goal is no one’s fault but YOURS.


Yours because, your execution strategy is either not well calculated or not well

implemented. Not well calculated because, you fail to plan, organize, prioritize

and not well implemented because you fail to engage the right communal forces,

like following one course until successful, choosing not to keep track of your last

action, as such, you can’t decipher your very next move which may be the most

essential step to your breakthrough.

Everything becomes so complicated and you just conclude that life isn’t fair at all

and then you presume that one grandma or grandpa don dey do you…funny

right?

Well that is what we are all about here, to get the armored tank set in order to

unleash an attack on complacency which I describe as goal massacre tricks. This

will enable us empower ourselves with Execution tactics for achieving our goals.

But how?

That is exactly what we will be dealing with on this audio recording and I can

assure you that we will only deal with EXECUTION…HOW TO KILL IT!

Keeping It Lively and Lifted!

Getting things done, moving from vision (goals) to reality, making your abstract

thoughts become tangible things, making your paperwork become a living world –

EXECUTION IS THE WORD!

I will tell you a story: I discovered myself at age 9, When I was 18, I already knew

what I wanted to become; my kind of career, my kind of wife, my kind of family,


my kind of dressing and so on. I was so clear about these goals that I wrote

everything out word for word on paper putting dates to all of them. But

something happened! For a whole 365 days I did nothing about what I had written

down despite the fact that I had internalized it so much that everyone knew who I

was gonna be… for me it was like I was already living my dream ‘cos truly

everyone calls me by the things I have told them about my dreams, yet in reality, I

can’t seem to get hold of any or even a bit of the stories I was telling them until

ONE DAY I looked into my Physics Textbook that I had used in school and saw the

first law of motion by Isaac Newton highlighted as, “ Every Object Continues in its

states of rest until an external force acts on it” I can never forget it anymore – this

law got into my spirit, pumping up my adrenaline and igniting something in me

called ACTION.

We can liken ACTION to EXECUTION, and that is to say nothing will ever, I mean

will ever ever ever happen to your well mapped out goals if you don’t ACT on

them. They will apparently continue in their state of rest until you do something

really pragmatic about them…..Awwwwwwwww…it is so special to execute…You

have got to KILL (Spell it) K-I-L-L the goal! By KILL, I mean Keep It Lively and Lifted.

Just as a man desirous of eating meat has to clean an animal before he can

partake of its protein rich diet, so must you KILL your GOALS so you can live your

desired life by Keeping It Lively and Lifted!

It is your right to achieve. Let me just do you a quick denotative and connotative

analysis of what I mean by KILL (Keeping It (your goals) Lively and Lifted)


The first letter is obviously K

Keep – to keep your goals is like making a PROMISE to your future and fixing an

APPOINTMENT with the components of your future and ensuring that you make

the appointment. So, when you keep your goals, it is like you doing what you have

promised to do (your goals) and going where you agreed that you will go (your

future). That is a bit clear right? Wouldn’t want to go into details, only wanted to

give you a little bit of detail on KILL! WHOOOOOOSH! So, what you can’t keep

can’t be leaped or lifted.

Now we look at the second letter in KILL

It – The IT in the word KILL represents your GOALS as in (Keeping It (your goals)

Lively and Lifted). Your goal is simply your word which you must keep. Enough

details have been said in previous lessons about GOALS so, I am done here.lol

The third letter in KILL is L

Lively – Your goal has to be full of life and energy, that means your goals need to

be SMART, you know what that means right? Ok, Specific, Measurable,

Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. Your goals also need to be concrete in such

a way that you can push it, whatever happens even when you have limited or no

resources to available; you can be flexible with it and most especially YOU need to

be active and enthusiastic with your goals…too much details again, that is crazy

and this is not what I want to talk about..Ok, ok, that is enough!


The last but not the least letter in KILL is L

Lifted –the number one reason you set the goals is for you to move from where

you are to where you really want to be. IF YOUR GOALS CAN’T LIFT YOU THEN IT

ALL BECOMES SHIT. So, you mustn’t forget to take hold of your goals and move

them until it raises YOU to a higher level or position.

So, when I say KILL the Goal, you now know what to do, you have got to simply

Keep It Lively and Lifted

Now, let’s go and deal with what is important – Executing That Goal!

The power to execute your GOALS is in the ability to JUST DO IT! Everything we

will be sharing this week is packed full in this Nike Payoff – JUST DO IT. Are you

ready? I can see you say YES! Ok, let’s go!!!

I once ran into this aphorism and it sure interests me. Read as thus;

If you doubt yourself and say you can’t do it. Buy a Nike Shoe and read the

slogan. It says: JUST DO IT

JUST DO IT is an acronym for what you need to do to execute your goals and I give

you a breakdown on how it will run in these five days we got:

Justify Your Goals

Use Benchmarks of other Goals

Seek Communal Support

Tackle the Small things first


Deadline Your Goals

Organize Your Resources

Innovate Your Goals

Take Progress Record on Your Goals

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Justify Your Goals: Before you execute those goals, it is important you sit back

and think about why exactly you would want to put your energy into writing down

goals that do not fit into your purpose. You don’t set goals because you feel it is

probably a New Year and everyone else is setting new goals or writing down their

New Year resolutions, and all you could do is join the bandwagon. You have got to

be cool, calm and collected on the inside, finding out your innate abilities and

passions upon which you consistently set goals that would transport you into your

Life desires. So, learn to justify your goals by first connecting it to your purpose,

passions and talents which all cumulatively make up your future. Justifying your

goals is like a structure upon which you nurture your future…you heard?

Justifying your goals help you to understand the journey ahead and also helps you

to know the right kind of goals you need to set to get into where you envision.

Most importantly, justifying your goals help you understand how goals work and

how you can use them to tap into new opportunities and favours which inherently

is a pedestal to securing your future in reality beyond just dreams.

When you set justifiable goals that are in coherence with your purpose and vision,

it helps you to do the following:


- It increases your Productivity: you begin to prioritize and get off distractions

while doing things real quick because in the first place, you are being

spurred by something – Your Passion which is the reason why you set the

goals in the first place.

- It instills a powerful Confidence in You: The elation you get from achieving

the little goals along the way only serve to make you feel more confidence in

yourself and your abilities. So, when your productivity amount to little

achievement, your confidence grows maximally.

- It helps you develop laser-like Focus: When you have confidence that you

will achieve your goals, you begin to Follow One Course until Successful and

that means FOCUS.

- It helps you to map out crystal clear Plans: A man who understands self,

never gets lost in his life journey because even before he starts the journey

he would have gathered enough to cover the race. This reflects in what we

call PLAN – seeing the end from the beginning with time and resource

allocation to each segment of moves.

To find out if you are on track with setting justifiable goals, ask yourself the

question: Am I in synchrony with what my life is meant for? If your answer is

YES, then you can progress into the other JUST DO IT tips for Executing that

goal but if NO, please, go back and find out who you are and what exactly

your life is meant for? That would help you a lot.


First things first. Maybe, you can contact God in prayers for some

revelations or a coach for some guidance. Just my candid advice!

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Use Benchmarks of other Goals: When you have set and justify your goals, also

seek for the advice of people in your life to find out what their goals are like. You

can also meet a mentor or someone whom you look up to brainstorm with you on

their goals as well as help you set the right kind of goal for yourself and for your

life. Also, seek for strategies on how they have executed their last goal trenches;

know what made the goal execution easy and what made it difficult. This will help

you set your own milestones and overheads. This also helps you to refine your

goals just in case there are areas that seem unclear. All these processes are

pertinent to making the execution of your goals more pragmatic and achievable.

Using bench marks help you to do the following:

- It makes you equal to the task of making your goals happen

- It empowers and positions you for action

- It prepares you ahead of experienced challenges and opportunities

- It gives you a psychological strength and the mental fitness to tackle

unforeseen contingencies during the implementation of your goals

- It is a motivation and calculation springboard for you


Seek Communal Support: It is such an amazing fact that no one is an island hence,

you can’t execute your goal alone as you have got to Involve the Right People In

The Right Decisions arenas to enable your goals reach an activation stage through

to their celebration stage. I will give you an example of how a musical producer

cum artist got his goals achieved.

His name is Emmashyne Chinonso Chijioke (as shown on Facebook), He has goals

he has set for years but did not have the right people around him to help him do

the right things to achieve the right results for him. He became stagnant yet he

knew that all he needed was the right people to get things done. One day, DLM

visited a friend in his studio and he just noticed that Emmashyne paid rapt

attention to every of his conversation with this friend. After the meeting with his

friend, he approached DLM, introduced himself and asked for his help. DLM

calmly asked him what he needed the help in and he said, “I know my business, I

have some unique ideas and I am talented but I can’t put them up in proposals.”

Wow, DLM (now that is my humble self!), was so amazed that I offered to help

him. In two months, he told me about his business and his concepts and myself

and my team put up a commercially relevant proposal for Emmashyne and this

has won him 10 million Naira grant from the Federal Government of Nigeria to

run his business, and the FG sponsored him to attend a course at the Pan African

University to study Youth Enterprise Innovation. Today, his goals of starting his

own innovatively driven company has become a reality through an outsourcing of

his weakness by seeking communal support. It was not just about me anymore, I

involved my team, the government got involved and the academic lecturers or


facilitators of The Pan African University also got involved in making the dream of

Emmashyne come true. Thanks to Communal Support but more thanks to

Emmashyne for seeking it.

So, you obviously would need people with higher knowledge, skill, strength and

other human and material resources to get your goals going. It may even be

people who are at the same level with you who can lend a hand to making your

goal a reality. So, better begin to talk to people starting with your friends on your

goals and ensure that your talk is action driven in terms of achieving the goal in

sight. Don’t just talk; make the person do something that will yield some form of

result for the goal and the entire vision process.

Tackle the Small things first: You have got to set goals and start living them on

the spot even if it is to call someone and share the goal with the person and

engage the person to do something small in relation to the goal. In executing

your goals, some things need not be ignored like the small things that really

mattered. Things like apportioning effort time to each segment of the goals set.

Your effort time is simply a time allotted plan in smaller tasks which makes up the

big goal.

Like if you want to write a book:

After gathering your thoughts from inspiration or research for the book, You need

to know how many topics or chapters will make up the book and determine how

long you intend to stay on each topic or chapter of the book,

Who is going to proofread for you and how long it will take,


When you are going to the press,

When you are going to conclude with publishing,

When you are going to talk to the media stores,

When the books will get to the stores,

How you are going to buzz about the book to make sales

These are obvious small things that make up the big picture, but breaking the

picture in time controlled structured small plans is what makes it to take flight

and become real.

A friend used to say: Preparation and Planning Prevents Poor

Performance…prepare for the small things so as to achieve the big things and

perform well.

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Deadline Your Goals: When you fix deadline for each goal you set, it puts you in a

framework of consciousness that posits that you act really fast as you will

mentally be aware that if you don’t do something about the goal, it sure will

affect other goals or tasks on ground. As such, it is important, you affix deadline

to every goal you set so as to enable you have strong adrenaline to make it

happen. When you don’t fix deadlines, you begin to procrastinate, allowing

yourself to place the goal in the distant future, in the land of "somewhere" and

"somehow." You begin to leave your goals to fate, and fate rarely has a way of

giving you anything without you putting something in first.


Now, very quickly, all the goals you have set so far should be given deadline.

I once set a goal in 2006 to win The LEAP Africa Youth Leadership Award in 2008. I

already knew that I have to make impact in the lives of people in Nigeria to be

able to earn that, so I started an initiative which began from my community and

grew it through communities in Nigeria. In 2007, my work was not yet strong so I

had to double my energy level because I knew that 2008 is already in sight and if I

don’t do anything fast or procrastinate on my project activities, I may not likely

clinch the award. I finally won the award still in 2008 and it was highly merited.

What basically motivated me was the deadline I set if not, I would have thought

that winning it in 2009 was okay or even 2010 or even 2011 simply because I

didn’t have a deadline to the goal.

So, it is imperative you deadline your goal, this helps you speed up into achieving

it just in case you are slacking

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Organize Your Resources: You need ingredients to cook a delicious Egusi soup if

you have to balance and eat steaming hot Eba, but in cooking the Egusi soup, if

you don’t have all the ingredients ready, you might be risking the good taste of

the Egusi soup. So is the case of making your goals happen as it is important you

gather and get ready all the resources needed to make the goal happen and

organize them in a priority listing format. Your resources are like your goal rudder

too as you can only drive the goals when you have the resources as such your

time is a resource; your materials are such as the things you practically need to


make possible your goals are also resources. Take for example, if you would want

to build a modern hut for your grandma who would not want to stay in the city,

how would you organize your resources? Let me help you.

- You would need a land

- You would need molded clay blocks

- You would need raft roof

Pick up a paper and pen, now fill up the rest of the spaces,

1 .………………………….. 2……………………………………3……………………………………

Use the same format to organize resources for your own goals. Is it a promise you

are going to do it? Yes! Awwwwwww. Thank you so much

Organizing your resources is not just enough, you have to also organize yourself to

make it happen based on your tasks and goals and in doing that, you can adopt

these must dos:

1. Recognize and organize tasks you do each week.

2. Expect Excellence! An assurance of achieving results.

3. Create your must work week schedules.

4. Commit to your must work week by acting on them

If you notice, I did not say “Should work week”, I said, “Must work week”….that

means until our Shoulds become Musts, NOTHING WILL BE DONE TO OUR GOALS.

You have to stay organized to attain the grandeur dreams of your life – in fact


that is the only way you properly execute your goals and achieve your Life

Desires.

Remember that the way you use your time and resources is the way you live your

life. So, you have got to gather your physical and mental resources to executing

your goals.

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Innovate Your Goals: Execution is an integral part of Innovation. In bringing your

ideas to life, you need goals, and in making the goals happen, you need an action

plan, in achieving your action plan, you need execution as such you are innovating

on your goals. To innovate on your goals, you act on them until they are achieved

because at the end of it all, results are what matters. There has to be tangibility to

your dreams and goals. Included in this is the Ability to Manage Change. We all

know that change is inevitable. However, despite their best efforts, many people

can’t seem to translate that knowledge into positive action. That’s a dangerous

shortcoming. Embracing the spirit of innovation and change can help you reach

new levels of success, while being rigid and unwilling to change can cause serious,

perhaps irreparable harm. So, as you execute your goals, also ensure that you

take cognizance of the changing times and how it affects your goals. The key thing

is for you to adjust to change and not still lose focus on achieving your goals. An

example is the last strike that held in Nigeria, the sudden change halted many

plans, for some people that’s the end of it while to some people that is the

beginning of it. Innovation should make you focus on the outcomes of your goals

and its realistic execution process.


Basically, in executing or innovating your goals, you need to breakdown your

entire goal and task list into the following:

- Action List – This should be tasks you immediately want to execute. Using

your Must Work Weekly Manual, enlist all the tasks and activities relating to

the single big goal and ensure that you KILL it. Do you remember KILL? Yes,

you definitely do!

- Next Action List – While you are working on your Action List, you should

have prepared your next tasks ready so that as you execute current Action

List, there are the next tasks on ground to be executed. This keeps you in

track and helps you maintain pace as regards Goal Execution.

- Waiting On List – For many reasons, as you execute your goals, there would

be some goals that you have taken to a certain stage and now it is out of

your control that you have to wait a while before you carry on again. For

example, If you want to travel to the United States of America and have to

get your International Passport done, after applying at the National Passport

Office, you would need to wait for a couple of days before you can possess

your passport. In that case, you shift the task to your Waiting-On List until

you get feedback on its result.

At any given time, every goal should have at least one task on either the “Next

Action” list or the “Waiting On” list.

At least once per week you’ll want to do a Weekly Review. (I do mine on Sundays

at 9pm.) During this review, you’ll want to:


Review your Next Action list to check off items that were already done and

move items you’re waiting on to your “Waiting On” list.

Review each goal’s Action list to check off completed items and look for or

identify new items to add to your Next Action list

Review your Waiting On list for items that have already been received (like

a passport) or to follow-up on items that you’re still waiting on

The weekly review is key. By checking in on your progress each week, you ensure

that none of your goals fall by the wayside, and that — even if you’re waiting on

more time or money to complete a particular goal — you’re working toward

completion.

Also, when you set goals, you should be thinking about the different ways that

you can achieve them. You want to be able to execute your goal from as many

angles and directions as possible. This will do two things: First, you will have

options if your original plan doesn't work, and secondly, by varying your execution

process, you will be consistently engaged as in the case of having a Plan A and a

Plan B.

Finally on this, ensure you buy yourself a hardcover Goal Book, that is where you

record the goals and do the classification process of Action List, Next Action List

and Waiting on List. This sure helps and put you at Ten over Ten…Shikena!!!

Take Progress Record on Your Goals: As you execute your goals, you would need

to stop and think carefully about the way in which a particular situation is

developing in order to decide what to do next.


You have set goals, created a plan of action, and have taken the first step in

achieving them, here comes the hard part—following through with them. An easy

way to do this is to monitor and evaluate your goals. Keeping track of your

progress will give you a chance to see where you are doing well, and where you

aren't and be able to adjust accordingly.

We can use a Racing approach to track progress: The first mile or two sets the

tone for your effort. Going out too fast sets you up for failure. If you go out a bit

too slow, you have adequate time to make up for it. So it’s better to err on the

side of caution. Don’t line up too far back in the pack. You’ll save time getting to

the starting line and weaving through slower runners. Look at the first mile as a

warm-up. Run it at goal pace or slightly slower.

I am sure that makes some sense to you.


My Final Words:

Key words on executing your goal: KILL it! (Keeping It (your goals) Lively and

Lifted). And JUST DO IT!

You have to know this:

Until you know the problem, you can’t fix it.

Until you know the formula for success, you can’t repeat it.

Remember: "You can't get where you're going if you don't know where you want

to be. If you don't know where you want to be, no roadmap will get you there."

Now, Go and Execute That Goal!

DLM is a fast rising Innovation Strat- Artist in the first classic ideas and Innovations

Company in Africa.

execute that goal! by dlm

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