Filling Your Pipeline With Real Opportunities

As you navigate through time in building your career and ultimately creating your future, filling the pipeline with legitimate opportunities is one of the key elements to success. Always having viable opportunities to work on and finding a way to spend the majority of your days on such opportunities is what will lead you to the promised land. It really is a fairly simple equation: The more time you spend working on legitimate opportunities, the more likely you are to succeed.

So, the question becomes: What can we do to ensure that our days are as full as possible with legitimate projects to work on? While the answer is fairly simple, it can also be a bit tricky.

One of the basic precepts of business that I have noticed time and again is that our success and our biggest wins often come from the most unlikely of places. We spend time creating our roadmap, laying out and executing our strategy, and low and behold the biggest piece of business we close was not part of the original plan. How can this be, and what can we learn from it?

The most successful people that I have known tend to follow a few basic rules that guide everything they do and deliver great results.

Keep it simple: One technique that can be easy to implement, but will also deliver strong results is to keep things as simple as possible. In planning your work, and working your plan, there are only two days that you need to be concerned with. Today and tomorrow.

If you focus your time and energy on making sure that you are as productive as possible today, while also aligning your work for tomorrow, the rest will take care of itself. Today and tomorrow. Take care of these two days all day, every day and, over time, your productivity will soar.

Put all of your ideas into action: Most of us have many viable ideas that if/when implemented will deliver strong results. Unfortunately, many of them get lost in the day-to-day shuffle and are never implemented. Find a way to implement all of your ideas as quickly as possible.

Have you ever heard the adage that time is money? Here is another twist you may not have heard. One very successful entrepreneur that I know once told me this: When he has a good idea for a business, he implements it immediately and as fast as he can. Why? Because experience has taught him that on average there are at least 10 other people who are having the same thought at the same time. He who hesitates is lost.

There is an additional benefit that comes from putting all of your ideas into action. You really don’t know which ones will take off and be a huge hit and which ones will flounder for one reason or another. To this extent, it can be a bit of a numbers game. The more you implement, the more you try, the greater your likelihood of success.

Bottom line is action will overtake inaction 100% of the time. Remember the adage of the two frogs sitting on a log. One decides to jump off. How many frogs are there remaining on the Log? The answer is two. Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two very different things. 

As the Nike slogan says, “Just Do It!”