You're striving for career success. How can you juggle short-term goals with long-term innovation?

To juggle short-term goals with long-term innovation for career success: 1. Set Clear Priorities: Define both short-term objectives and long-term vision. Ensure short-term goals align with your overarching career aspirations. 2. Create a Balanced Plan: Allocate time and resources to immediate tasks while dedicating periods for innovative thinking and strategic development. 3. Track Progress: Regularly review short-term achievements and assess their contribution to long-term goals. Adjust plans as needed. 4. Stay Agile: Be flexible in your approach. Adapt short-term actions based on insights gained from long-term innovation efforts.

Life is a lot like agile project or product management. You have an overall goal that seems bigger than you or the world you live in. Maybe you aren't sure this is the goal that you want for your life but you are curious, or the time or funds aren't available So what do you do? You break it down into parts. You set easy-to-reach, measurable goals for yourself. You start listening to a podcast, you sign up for an industry newsletter, and you talk with people who have similar ambitions. The next week you review what you have accomplished and what you have learned. You revise or add on something new like checking out a virtual conference. Rinse, repeat/revise. Next thing you know, you are just a few steps away from your ultimate goal.

Life is all about managing your priorities. This means that you can't do everything, you need to prioritize what is most important and take action on that action. Then you move on to the next priority as it related to your objectives.

To me, Success equals Progress. If you improve a bit each day, if you are a bit better than yesterday, you are on track. Sometimes, it won't feel like you are making progress. This is why it is essential to measure and keep score. Even the tiniest improvement can yield exponential results.

I believe in having a vision before you set yourself on a mission. It is important to be able to see what kind of success you are aiming for. With that image in mind, you can set missions, to do tasks and whatever you have to do to achieve it.

I agree that a successful life is one that aligns with your values and your overarching life’s mission, to me it is also about considering new opportunities and directions as they arise. Not everyone’s career follows a direct path to a defined objective.

Success is a sliding scale of my creating an innovative and useful perspective that the intended audience appreciates enough to utilize the concept. Why a sliding scale? Well, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Audience appreciation may be less/greater than my perspective value. Either way, I learn and improve. Either way, it's success.

Short term goals can be broken down into seasonal goals and tasks which goes along with budget constraints. 30/60/90 days in a good start to have timelines, agendas and re-assess outcomes. It is however useful to nurture gratitude and appreciation for small wins as well as keeping our eyes to the end result.

The key to prioritization is... wait for it... do less. I once heard Tony Robbins say that most people overestimate what they can do in a year but underestimate what they can do in a decade. If this is the case, then really focus on only two or three things that you want to accomplish. If you can get it down to one, that would be even better. The idea here is to do whatever you do to the best of your ability. When you do that, prioritizing becomes a lot easier because you prioritize what gives you the one, two, or three outcomes that you're trying to produce, and everything else can wait until next year.

There are way too many things to do daily. From personal to professional, it might be hard to know what to prioritize. When setting goals for your professional career, I like to think of anything that I have to do, if it links directly to the end goal. If it does not directly help, I will set it aside.

As life teaches us, there are a lot of curveballs, therefore, when planning, and strategizing, always consider the fact that you need room for buffers and to be flexible to correct yourself.

One of my favorite phrases is being, flexibly committed. Strongly focused, not easily distracted. Yet having a third eye that's continually observant for valued-options potential.

Time and effort are necessarily focused on one's strategic journey. However, tactical options continually evolve. Provide just sufficient consideration to either reject or (learn enough to) implement for enhanced, productive value.

Don't overlook the power of diverse networks. Engaging with professionals from different industries can spark innovative ideas and offer unique perspectives on tackling challenges. Diversifying your network can lead to unexpected opportunities and collaborative projects that drive both short-term success and long-term innovation.

There's a man on a horse crossing the plains, in the mid day sun The horse becomes weary but raises it head to catch a distance sound of a brook, recognising the horses instinct he does not attempt to continue his journey and spurs on for the brook. How many leaders are in this story?