At the time of the writing of this post, I’m currently reading Michael Gerber’s famous bestseller business book “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work And What To Do About It.” It was written a while back now, but I’d heard rave reviews about it from friends, articles and even Internet sites that I had to read it myself. As you can judge by its title, it deals with the E-Myth, which stands for the Entrepreneurial Myth, and explores why 80 percent of businesses fail and how your business can be successful.
I still haven’t finished reading the book, in fact, I’m not even half way. But I’ve just finished reading Chapter 7 which features Ray Kroc and the whole McDonald’s story. It’s fair to say that if you haven’t heard of McDonald’s by now, you have been living on another planet on the other side of the universe.
Put simply, McDonald’s is immense, The last time I heard, it owned more real estate worldwide than the Roman Catholic Church. Now that’s saying something. But what’s more incredible is the story about how McDonald’s came about which is inspirational for those aspiring similar success.
The figure at the centre of it all was Ray Kroc. If it wasn’t for him, McDonald’s would either still be a small American operation or bankrupt today. Yet Ray Kroc was an average milkshake-mixer salesman. As part of his daily job, one day he casually walked into a McDonald’s restaurant in 1954 to sell mixers to the MacDonald brothers. What he saw was something incredible. He saw a restaurant that was more efficient and served customers quicker than any other place he’d been to. McDonald’s had a defined, yet efficient system that he believed could be sold and replicated on every streetcorner in America, if not, the world.
His vision for McDonald’s was something much bigger and much more ambitious than the one shared by the McDonald brothers. His vision was what separated him from the rest and let him transform McDonald’s into one of the world’s most well-known and most loved companies.
The one thing we should take away from Ray Kroc and the McDonald’s phenomenon is that success begins with a defined vision. Some people don’t differentiate the word ‘vision’ from the words ‘goals’ and ‘objectives. But I strongly believe that they’re 2 completely different things because a vision incorporates many more things than what a goal or objective could ever incorporate. A vision is also much greater motivational tool than a simple goal or objective. A vision has far greater capacity to inspire and generate emotions, innovations and ideas than a simple goal or objective.
As a result, it’s imperative that if you want to be successful that you have to develop a vision for yourself, one so grand, so ambitious and so wonderful, that it will motivate you to take immediate action. It must be a vision so great that it would be unbearably painful if you didn’t take any action. There is also strong correlation between how well you describe your vision and the speed at which you take action to achieve it. So it’s best to use as many adjectives, paragraphs, A4 pages to describe your extraordinary vision.
Once you have your vision written up, put it somewhere where you will always see it as soon as soon as you wake up. And every morning you get up, and look at it, ask yourself one simple question: “What can I do today to make this vision a reality?” And then go out and do it.
From what I’ve learnt from reading about the most successful people in the world, I believe that all success in life begins with a vision. It’s true because everything we see, touch, hear, taste and feel today is the direct result of someone else’s vision. So if you haven’t designed a vision for yourself, I suggest you do it right now. Success begins with a first step and this first step is having a accurately-defined highly motivational vision.
Have a most extraordinary day.
Martin Sejas
Success Believer
Martin Sejas.com © 2009