Michael Anderson – Success Principles Key Takeaways

Local meetups OpenCoffee and SplitBiz 007 welcomed Michael Anderson back to Split to share his passion for leadership and success. Having set up and run various impressive companies himself, he read and read all the best authors in order to work out how to be more productive, less stressed and still have fun. It wouldn’t be fair if we kept his top tips from you, so here they are in bitesize form.

“The more you can be honest…to bring out some vulnerable things, the more you’re going to learn.”

Think about your commitments, and make sure what you say is what you can actually deliver. If you’re unable to do something, it can affect you psychologically and can sap your energy. Therefore when organising or arranging things it’s important to commit to things we actually can whilst thinking about the language we use for other tasks or projects – using words such as trial or experiment.

“It’s not a might do something, it’s a will do something.”

Think about life goals, what’s stopping you from achieving them, how is it affecting you because you aren’t reaching them, and finally what is everyone else missing out on because you’re not reaching your goals. After all, our decisions affect more than just us.

Once you know what your goals are, review them on a daily basis with a 15 minute walk, in silence, with no distractions (no phones, just a pen and paper), following up with 45 minutes committed to strategical thinking. Doing this at the beginning of day before your coffee makes that coffee even better, give it a try.

“If you allocate the time for something, it will get done.”

Turn off your notifications on all your devices – these just cause distractions and cause you to lose concentration on what you wanted to work on. You can even get a social media monitoring tool to see how much time you’re spending on there.

If people come and ask you for help or support, then give yourself 24 hours to think about it. Don’t say yes or no but give yourself time to reflect and think “Is this moving me forward in your life goals?”.

“The things that really bother you – do them first.”

Free up time on your calendar so you can do the things you need to, isolate yourself when you have a whole load of work on and never put off things that you will worry about all day.

“Procrastination is – Not putting ourselves out there, until we know we can be perfect.”

To avoid procrastination, try reframing what you want to do, call it an experiment, as the only way an experiment can fail is if we don’t do it and don’t learn anything about it.

Finally get someone to check in with you, this will give you accountability, and have someone see how you’re doing. This is one of the commitments that you should have.

From young professionals with ideas and dreams, students looking to their future, individuals who feel like aliens in their country to retired individuals who have the itch to do more, the lecture was valuable to all those attended. Give some of the above a go, and see how you can overcome whatever you’re procrastinating.