The ebook basically prepares anyone to build implementation capacity for dreams and goals.

2. Hello there!
I am DLM! Innovation Rules! Oh My God! (I am Squirming, chuckling and acting
now) My name is David Lanre Messan but I really, really, really love to be called
DLM – it makes me wanna innovate ‘cos that is what my whole life is about. It is
my purpose. It is my call. I execute my goals on it. I am an Innovation Strat-Artist –
I create strategies for personal and business success; I speak; I write; I sing; and I
model…crazy right? Well, it is my life and all these make me happy and I wanna
make the next man happy with it too…You get me right?
Whooosh, I am already saying much here. Let’s score GOALS now but whose
gonna SCORE it – YOU, surely will. But your jersey number must read EXECUTION!
Looool, I gotcha!!! Truthfully, I may not know you by face but I am so excited to
be a part of you all. In fact, I doff my hat for all of you listening to this audio
package at this moment as a sign of respect.
Getting Serious!!! (I am saying this with a “God like” voice)
“Vision without execution is hallucination.” It’s true. As countless people have
proved, knowing what you want to do and where you want your life to go may be
less than half the battle.
We set goals so we can live the kind of life we want but more often than not,
some of us end up not achieving these goals and become frustrated with life. To
be candid with you, your inability to achieve your goal is no one’s fault but YOURS.
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3. Yours because, your execution strategy is either not well calculated or not well
implemented. Not well calculated because, you fail to plan, organize, prioritize
and not well implemented because you fail to engage the right communal forces,
like following one course until successful, choosing not to keep track of your last
action, as such, you can’t decipher your very next move which may be the most
essential step to your breakthrough.
Everything becomes so complicated and you just conclude that life isn’t fair at all
and then you presume that one grandma or grandpa don dey do you…funny
right?
Well that is what we are all about here, to get the armored tank set in order to
unleash an attack on complacency which I describe as goal massacre tricks. This
will enable us empower ourselves with Execution tactics for achieving our goals.
But how?
That is exactly what we will be dealing with on this audio recording and I can
assure you that we will only deal with EXECUTION…HOW TO KILL IT!
Keeping It Lively and Lifted!
Getting things done, moving from vision (goals) to reality, making your abstract
thoughts become tangible things, making your paperwork become a living world –
EXECUTION IS THE WORD!
I will tell you a story: I discovered myself at age 9, When I was 18, I already knew
what I wanted to become; my kind of career, my kind of wife, my kind of family,
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4. my kind of dressing and so on. I was so clear about these goals that I wrote
everything out word for word on paper putting dates to all of them. But
something happened! For a whole 365 days I did nothing about what I had written
down despite the fact that I had internalized it so much that everyone knew who I
was gonna be… for me it was like I was already living my dream ‘cos truly
everyone calls me by the things I have told them about my dreams, yet in reality, I
can’t seem to get hold of any or even a bit of the stories I was telling them until
ONE DAY I looked into my Physics Textbook that I had used in school and saw the
first law of motion by Isaac Newton highlighted as, “ Every Object Continues in its
states of rest until an external force acts on it” I can never forget it anymore – this
law got into my spirit, pumping up my adrenaline and igniting something in me
called ACTION.
We can liken ACTION to EXECUTION, and that is to say nothing will ever, I mean
will ever ever ever happen to your well mapped out goals if you don’t ACT on
them. They will apparently continue in their state of rest until you do something
really pragmatic about them…..Awwwwwwwww…it is so special to execute…You
have got to KILL (Spell it) K-I-L-L the goal! By KILL, I mean Keep It Lively and Lifted.
Just as a man desirous of eating meat has to clean an animal before he can
partake of its protein rich diet, so must you KILL your GOALS so you can live your
desired life by Keeping It Lively and Lifted!
It is your right to achieve. Let me just do you a quick denotative and connotative
analysis of what I mean by KILL (Keeping It (your goals) Lively and Lifted)
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5. The first letter is obviously K
Keep – to keep your goals is like making a PROMISE to your future and fixing an
APPOINTMENT with the components of your future and ensuring that you make
the appointment. So, when you keep your goals, it is like you doing what you have
promised to do (your goals) and going where you agreed that you will go (your
future). That is a bit clear right? Wouldn’t want to go into details, only wanted to
give you a little bit of detail on KILL! WHOOOOOOSH! So, what you can’t keep
can’t be leaped or lifted.
Now we look at the second letter in KILL
It – The IT in the word KILL represents your GOALS as in (Keeping It (your goals)
Lively and Lifted). Your goal is simply your word which you must keep. Enough
details have been said in previous lessons about GOALS so, I am done here.lol
The third letter in KILL is L
Lively – Your goal has to be full of life and energy, that means your goals need to
be SMART, you know what that means right? Ok, Specific, Measurable,
Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. Your goals also need to be concrete in such
a way that you can push it, whatever happens even when you have limited or no
resources to available; you can be flexible with it and most especially YOU need to
be active and enthusiastic with your goals…too much details again, that is crazy
and this is not what I want to talk about..Ok, ok, that is enough!
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6. The last but not the least letter in KILL is L
Lifted –the number one reason you set the goals is for you to move from where
you are to where you really want to be. IF YOUR GOALS CAN’T LIFT YOU THEN IT
ALL BECOMES SHIT. So, you mustn’t forget to take hold of your goals and move
them until it raises YOU to a higher level or position.
So, when I say KILL the Goal, you now know what to do, you have got to simply
Keep It Lively and Lifted
Now, let’s go and deal with what is important – Executing That Goal!
The power to execute your GOALS is in the ability to JUST DO IT! Everything we
will be sharing this week is packed full in this Nike Payoff – JUST DO IT. Are you
ready? I can see you say YES! Ok, let’s go!!!
I once ran into this aphorism and it sure interests me. Read as thus;
If you doubt yourself and say you can’t do it. Buy a Nike Shoe and read the
slogan. It says: JUST DO IT
JUST DO IT is an acronym for what you need to do to execute your goals and I give
you a breakdown on how it will run in these five days we got:
Justify Your Goals
Use Benchmarks of other Goals
Seek Communal Support
Tackle the Small things first
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7. Deadline Your Goals
Organize Your Resources
Innovate Your Goals
Take Progress Record on Your Goals
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Justify Your Goals: Before you execute those goals, it is important you sit back
and think about why exactly you would want to put your energy into writing down
goals that do not fit into your purpose. You don’t set goals because you feel it is
probably a New Year and everyone else is setting new goals or writing down their
New Year resolutions, and all you could do is join the bandwagon. You have got to
be cool, calm and collected on the inside, finding out your innate abilities and
passions upon which you consistently set goals that would transport you into your
Life desires. So, learn to justify your goals by first connecting it to your purpose,
passions and talents which all cumulatively make up your future. Justifying your
goals is like a structure upon which you nurture your future…you heard?
Justifying your goals help you to understand the journey ahead and also helps you
to know the right kind of goals you need to set to get into where you envision.
Most importantly, justifying your goals help you understand how goals work and
how you can use them to tap into new opportunities and favours which inherently
is a pedestal to securing your future in reality beyond just dreams.
When you set justifiable goals that are in coherence with your purpose and vision,
it helps you to do the following:
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8. - It increases your Productivity: you begin to prioritize and get off distractions
while doing things real quick because in the first place, you are being
spurred by something – Your Passion which is the reason why you set the
goals in the first place.
- It instills a powerful Confidence in You: The elation you get from achieving
the little goals along the way only serve to make you feel more confidence in
yourself and your abilities. So, when your productivity amount to little
achievement, your confidence grows maximally.
- It helps you develop laser-like Focus: When you have confidence that you
will achieve your goals, you begin to Follow One Course until Successful and
that means FOCUS.
- It helps you to map out crystal clear Plans: A man who understands self,
never gets lost in his life journey because even before he starts the journey
he would have gathered enough to cover the race. This reflects in what we
call PLAN – seeing the end from the beginning with time and resource
allocation to each segment of moves.
To find out if you are on track with setting justifiable goals, ask yourself the
question: Am I in synchrony with what my life is meant for? If your answer is
YES, then you can progress into the other JUST DO IT tips for Executing that
goal but if NO, please, go back and find out who you are and what exactly
your life is meant for? That would help you a lot.
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9. First things first. Maybe, you can contact God in prayers for some
revelations or a coach for some guidance. Just my candid advice!
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Use Benchmarks of other Goals: When you have set and justify your goals, also
seek for the advice of people in your life to find out what their goals are like. You
can also meet a mentor or someone whom you look up to brainstorm with you on
their goals as well as help you set the right kind of goal for yourself and for your
life. Also, seek for strategies on how they have executed their last goal trenches;
know what made the goal execution easy and what made it difficult. This will help
you set your own milestones and overheads. This also helps you to refine your
goals just in case there are areas that seem unclear. All these processes are
pertinent to making the execution of your goals more pragmatic and achievable.
Using bench marks help you to do the following:
- It makes you equal to the task of making your goals happen
- It empowers and positions you for action
- It prepares you ahead of experienced challenges and opportunities
- It gives you a psychological strength and the mental fitness to tackle
unforeseen contingencies during the implementation of your goals
- It is a motivation and calculation springboard for you
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10. Seek Communal Support: It is such an amazing fact that no one is an island hence,
you can’t execute your goal alone as you have got to Involve the Right People In
The Right Decisions arenas to enable your goals reach an activation stage through
to their celebration stage. I will give you an example of how a musical producer
cum artist got his goals achieved.
His name is Emmashyne Chinonso Chijioke (as shown on Facebook), He has goals
he has set for years but did not have the right people around him to help him do
the right things to achieve the right results for him. He became stagnant yet he
knew that all he needed was the right people to get things done. One day, DLM
visited a friend in his studio and he just noticed that Emmashyne paid rapt
attention to every of his conversation with this friend. After the meeting with his
friend, he approached DLM, introduced himself and asked for his help. DLM
calmly asked him what he needed the help in and he said, “I know my business, I
have some unique ideas and I am talented but I can’t put them up in proposals.”
Wow, DLM (now that is my humble self!), was so amazed that I offered to help
him. In two months, he told me about his business and his concepts and myself
and my team put up a commercially relevant proposal for Emmashyne and this
has won him 10 million Naira grant from the Federal Government of Nigeria to
run his business, and the FG sponsored him to attend a course at the Pan African
University to study Youth Enterprise Innovation. Today, his goals of starting his
own innovatively driven company has become a reality through an outsourcing of
his weakness by seeking communal support. It was not just about me anymore, I
involved my team, the government got involved and the academic lecturers or
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11. facilitators of The Pan African University also got involved in making the dream of
Emmashyne come true. Thanks to Communal Support but more thanks to
Emmashyne for seeking it.
So, you obviously would need people with higher knowledge, skill, strength and
other human and material resources to get your goals going. It may even be
people who are at the same level with you who can lend a hand to making your
goal a reality. So, better begin to talk to people starting with your friends on your
goals and ensure that your talk is action driven in terms of achieving the goal in
sight. Don’t just talk; make the person do something that will yield some form of
result for the goal and the entire vision process.
Tackle the Small things first: You have got to set goals and start living them on
the spot even if it is to call someone and share the goal with the person and
engage the person to do something small in relation to the goal. In executing
your goals, some things need not be ignored like the small things that really
mattered. Things like apportioning effort time to each segment of the goals set.
Your effort time is simply a time allotted plan in smaller tasks which makes up the
big goal.
Like if you want to write a book:
After gathering your thoughts from inspiration or research for the book, You need
to know how many topics or chapters will make up the book and determine how
long you intend to stay on each topic or chapter of the book,
Who is going to proofread for you and how long it will take,
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12. When you are going to the press,
When you are going to conclude with publishing,
When you are going to talk to the media stores,
When the books will get to the stores,
How you are going to buzz about the book to make sales
These are obvious small things that make up the big picture, but breaking the
picture in time controlled structured small plans is what makes it to take flight
and become real.
A friend used to say: Preparation and Planning Prevents Poor
Performance…prepare for the small things so as to achieve the big things and
perform well.
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Deadline Your Goals: When you fix deadline for each goal you set, it puts you in a
framework of consciousness that posits that you act really fast as you will
mentally be aware that if you don’t do something about the goal, it sure will
affect other goals or tasks on ground. As such, it is important, you affix deadline
to every goal you set so as to enable you have strong adrenaline to make it
happen. When you don’t fix deadlines, you begin to procrastinate, allowing
yourself to place the goal in the distant future, in the land of "somewhere" and
"somehow." You begin to leave your goals to fate, and fate rarely has a way of
giving you anything without you putting something in first.
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13. Now, very quickly, all the goals you have set so far should be given deadline.
I once set a goal in 2006 to win The LEAP Africa Youth Leadership Award in 2008. I
already knew that I have to make impact in the lives of people in Nigeria to be
able to earn that, so I started an initiative which began from my community and
grew it through communities in Nigeria. In 2007, my work was not yet strong so I
had to double my energy level because I knew that 2008 is already in sight and if I
don’t do anything fast or procrastinate on my project activities, I may not likely
clinch the award. I finally won the award still in 2008 and it was highly merited.
What basically motivated me was the deadline I set if not, I would have thought
that winning it in 2009 was okay or even 2010 or even 2011 simply because I
didn’t have a deadline to the goal.
So, it is imperative you deadline your goal, this helps you speed up into achieving
it just in case you are slacking
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Organize Your Resources: You need ingredients to cook a delicious Egusi soup if
you have to balance and eat steaming hot Eba, but in cooking the Egusi soup, if
you don’t have all the ingredients ready, you might be risking the good taste of
the Egusi soup. So is the case of making your goals happen as it is important you
gather and get ready all the resources needed to make the goal happen and
organize them in a priority listing format. Your resources are like your goal rudder
too as you can only drive the goals when you have the resources as such your
time is a resource; your materials are such as the things you practically need to
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14. make possible your goals are also resources. Take for example, if you would want
to build a modern hut for your grandma who would not want to stay in the city,
how would you organize your resources? Let me help you.
- You would need a land
- You would need molded clay blocks
- You would need raft roof
Pick up a paper and pen, now fill up the rest of the spaces,
1 .………………………….. 2……………………………………3……………………………………
Use the same format to organize resources for your own goals. Is it a promise you
are going to do it? Yes! Awwwwwww. Thank you so much
Organizing your resources is not just enough, you have to also organize yourself to
make it happen based on your tasks and goals and in doing that, you can adopt
these must dos:
1. Recognize and organize tasks you do each week.
2. Expect Excellence! An assurance of achieving results.
3. Create your must work week schedules.
4. Commit to your must work week by acting on them
If you notice, I did not say “Should work week”, I said, “Must work week”….that
means until our Shoulds become Musts, NOTHING WILL BE DONE TO OUR GOALS.
You have to stay organized to attain the grandeur dreams of your life – in fact
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15. that is the only way you properly execute your goals and achieve your Life
Desires.
Remember that the way you use your time and resources is the way you live your
life. So, you have got to gather your physical and mental resources to executing
your goals.
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Innovate Your Goals: Execution is an integral part of Innovation. In bringing your
ideas to life, you need goals, and in making the goals happen, you need an action
plan, in achieving your action plan, you need execution as such you are innovating
on your goals. To innovate on your goals, you act on them until they are achieved
because at the end of it all, results are what matters. There has to be tangibility to
your dreams and goals. Included in this is the Ability to Manage Change. We all
know that change is inevitable. However, despite their best efforts, many people
can’t seem to translate that knowledge into positive action. That’s a dangerous
shortcoming. Embracing the spirit of innovation and change can help you reach
new levels of success, while being rigid and unwilling to change can cause serious,
perhaps irreparable harm. So, as you execute your goals, also ensure that you
take cognizance of the changing times and how it affects your goals. The key thing
is for you to adjust to change and not still lose focus on achieving your goals. An
example is the last strike that held in Nigeria, the sudden change halted many
plans, for some people that’s the end of it while to some people that is the
beginning of it. Innovation should make you focus on the outcomes of your goals
and its realistic execution process.
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16. Basically, in executing or innovating your goals, you need to breakdown your
entire goal and task list into the following:
- Action List – This should be tasks you immediately want to execute. Using
your Must Work Weekly Manual, enlist all the tasks and activities relating to
the single big goal and ensure that you KILL it. Do you remember KILL? Yes,
you definitely do!
- Next Action List – While you are working on your Action List, you should
have prepared your next tasks ready so that as you execute current Action
List, there are the next tasks on ground to be executed. This keeps you in
track and helps you maintain pace as regards Goal Execution.
- Waiting On List – For many reasons, as you execute your goals, there would
be some goals that you have taken to a certain stage and now it is out of
your control that you have to wait a while before you carry on again. For
example, If you want to travel to the United States of America and have to
get your International Passport done, after applying at the National Passport
Office, you would need to wait for a couple of days before you can possess
your passport. In that case, you shift the task to your Waiting-On List until
you get feedback on its result.
At any given time, every goal should have at least one task on either the “Next
Action” list or the “Waiting On” list.
At least once per week you’ll want to do a Weekly Review. (I do mine on Sundays
at 9pm.) During this review, you’ll want to:
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17. Review your Next Action list to check off items that were already done and
move items you’re waiting on to your “Waiting On” list.
Review each goal’s Action list to check off completed items and look for or
identify new items to add to your Next Action list
Review your Waiting On list for items that have already been received (like
a passport) or to follow-up on items that you’re still waiting on
The weekly review is key. By checking in on your progress each week, you ensure
that none of your goals fall by the wayside, and that — even if you’re waiting on
more time or money to complete a particular goal — you’re working toward
completion.
Also, when you set goals, you should be thinking about the different ways that
you can achieve them. You want to be able to execute your goal from as many
angles and directions as possible. This will do two things: First, you will have
options if your original plan doesn't work, and secondly, by varying your execution
process, you will be consistently engaged as in the case of having a Plan A and a
Plan B.
Finally on this, ensure you buy yourself a hardcover Goal Book, that is where you
record the goals and do the classification process of Action List, Next Action List
and Waiting on List. This sure helps and put you at Ten over Ten…Shikena!!!
Take Progress Record on Your Goals: As you execute your goals, you would need
to stop and think carefully about the way in which a particular situation is
developing in order to decide what to do next.
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18. You have set goals, created a plan of action, and have taken the first step in
achieving them, here comes the hard part—following through with them. An easy
way to do this is to monitor and evaluate your goals. Keeping track of your
progress will give you a chance to see where you are doing well, and where you
aren't and be able to adjust accordingly.
We can use a Racing approach to track progress: The first mile or two sets the
tone for your effort. Going out too fast sets you up for failure. If you go out a bit
too slow, you have adequate time to make up for it. So it’s better to err on the
side of caution. Don’t line up too far back in the pack. You’ll save time getting to
the starting line and weaving through slower runners. Look at the first mile as a
warm-up. Run it at goal pace or slightly slower.
I am sure that makes some sense to you.
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19. My Final Words:
Key words on executing your goal: KILL it! (Keeping It (your goals) Lively and
Lifted). And JUST DO IT!
You have to know this:
Until you know the problem, you can’t fix it.
Until you know the formula for success, you can’t repeat it.
Remember: "You can't get where you're going if you don't know where you want
to be. If you don't know where you want to be, no roadmap will get you there."
Now, Go and Execute That Goal!
DLM is a fast rising Innovation Strat- Artist in the first classic ideas and Innovations
Company in Africa.
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