Tell me, what do you do after a win of any kind?
You probably celebrate, right? That’s great. But if you want to rack up even more wins in your future, then you also need to take a moment and analyze your successes.
Of course this goes for your failures too.
You can’t just shrug off your disappointments and say, “Well that was some bad luck.” Instead, you need to reflect on them… and grow strong and better as a result of them.
How? By learning how to T.W.E.A.K. your way to big wins with these five steps:
T – TAKE Inventory
W – WEIGH Options
E – ELIMINATE Waste
A – ASK for Help
K – KEEP Moving
Let’s look at each of these components in more detail…
1. TAKE Inventory
This is something you need to do on a regular basis. You might take inventory of your past week, a project you just wrapped up, or even take inventory of what’s happened in the last month.
Basically, you ask yourself two questions:
What went right?
What went wrong?
Both of those questions are important.
If you’re only focusing on what went right, you’re just setting yourself up to make the same mistakes next time. And if you only focus on what went wrong, you’ll totally overlook taking the steps that made this particular project or time period so successful.
2. WEIGH Options
Your next step is to take a good look at the mistakes you identified in step 1.
You now need to figure out what you can do better and how you can avoid making this mistake again. To that end, ask yourself these questions:
What can you do to correct the problem?
What can you do to avoid the problem in the future?
What can you do to get better results?
Of course you also need to look at the wins you identified in the previous step. Ask yourself:
What can you do to duplicate and multiply your successes?
What can you do to get even better results?
Go ahead and brainstorm. Think outside the box. Don’t censor yourself… just let your creative mind come up with creative solutions and ideas.
Tip: For best results, turn this into a true brainstorming session. First, block off a chunk of uninterrupted time (at least 60 minutes). Then eliminate all other distractions, such as by turning off your cell phone and shutting down your email client. Finally, just start brainstorming without judging or censoring your ideas. You might be surprised at just how powerful your mind is when you completely unleash it on a problem!
3. ELIMINATE Waste
You’re looking for wins. So if you see that you have an ongoing problem (one that’s not easily corrected) or there’s something that creates a lot of waste, consider cutting it.
Example: Maybe you’ve created a book that’s not selling. You’ve tried tweaking the sales letter, you’ve tried alternate traffic sources… and the darn thing just won’t sell. So maybe you just take it off the market so that you don’t have to spend any more money advertising or hosting a product that doesn’t convert.
You might even re-purpose or recycle the content to at least get some benefit out of (such as by chopping the book up into articles and posting it on your blog).
4. ASK for Help
The idea here is to focus on your strengths. There are certain things you like to do, and you likely also do those things really well. But on the other side of the coin, there are certain tasks that you just don’t do well. They frustrate you, they take a long time and maybe you’re not very good at them.
You know what? Stop struggling.
Instead, hand those tasks over to an expert. That frees up your time to focus on what you do well, which in turn helps you rack up more wins.
Take me as an example…
Example: I love sharing ideas through the written word. I’m good at it. And so that’s why I focus on writing articles, blog posts, reports and more.
However, tech stuff makes my eyes roll back in my head. I’d rather not sit around trying to figure out what line of code I need to tweak in order to make a blog theme look better. Instead, I hand this sort of stuff over to a coding and design expert, which free up more of my time to focus on writing. (And it also puts me in a better head space, because having someone else handle the tech end of my business relieves me of a lot of hair-pulling stress.)
I used a business example above. However, this certainly extends to your personal life, too.
Example: If cleaning isn’t your thing – if you don’t do it well or it just seems to take a lot of time – delegate it to another family member or hire a professional. Either way, you’ll free up your valuable time to focus on more important things.
5. KEEP Moving
So at this point you’ve done a pretty good evaluation of what went wrong with a project, what went well, and how you can do everything even better next time.
However, now isn’t the time to just nod and agree that your evaluation was useful. Instead, it’s time to take action based on what you just learned. And that means you need to plan your next steps.
Example: Let’s suppose you wrote a book and put it in the Kindle marketplace, but it didn’t do well. And let’s suppose one reason it didn’t do well is because you tried to make your own book cover, which wasn’t very good. As such, one of your next action steps is to have a professional create a new cover. And you’ll also make a note to have a professional designer create all future book covers, too.
Conclusion
You just discovered how to T.W.E.A.K. your success using this formula:
T – TAKE Inventory
W – WEIGH Options
E – ELIMINATE Waste
A – ASK for Help
K – KEEP Moving
The idea is to analyze your successes and failures, determine what you can do better next time, get rid of things that aren’t working, outsource or delegate tasks that are difficult for you and keep moving forward.
Simple, right?
And it’s very powerful. Because once you start to T.W.E.A.K. your success, you too will start racking up more wins!