Arel Moodie International (AMI)

What is Success? Who is Arel Moodie? Why Should I Care? These questions are answerd in this blog :)

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Secret #8: Avoid Analysis Paralysis

Analysis paralysis is a huge mistake many students make that stops them from achieving what they want. Analysis Paralysis happens when people spend so much time waiting for the perfect time to do something they never actually do it! There is always something else to research or something you’re not 100% comfortable with yet. No matter how much planning and research we do on anything, we will never know everything about it—that’s literally impossible.

Don’t get me wrong—research and planning is crucial for your preparation to success, but taking action is what will actually make you successful.

You can read every book on how to swing a baseball bat, watch every baseball game, study videotapes of a home run hitter’s swing broken down frame-by-frame, and it won’t mean anything until you actually get up to the plate and swing at a few pitches. The late

business guru David Sandler really summed it up with one of his book titles: You Can’t Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar. One step in the right direction is more valuable than years of thinking about it. This means if you want to be a leader, you need actual experience leading. No matter how much preparation you do, you won’t be good at it until you actually do it.

So whatever it is you want, ready or not (the truth is we never truly feel ready), go after it. You’ll learn a lot more from doing, failing, and regrouping than from just thinking about it.

Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Secret #7: Ask the Experts

At almost every campus I visit or student leadership retreat I speak at, a student usually asks me this question: “But Arel, what if I know what I want to do but I have no idea how to do it?” My answer is usually one and the same:


Find someone who has done what you want to do
and ask that person how you can do it too.

If you want to climb Mount Everest, you could go it alone (not rec- ommended), or you could get an experienced guide who has climbed to the mountaintop plenty of times before who can show you how to do it.

As a student, you have access to so many resources that people out- side of school have to pay a pretty penny to access. Your professor are some of your most important resources. As a student, you can go to office hours and get help on various subjects. In the real world, that kind of help is called “consulting” and could cost up to a couple thousand dollars an hour. But as a student, all the million- dollar guidance is yours... FREE. Don’t underutilize your resources, especially for your actual schoolwork.

Advanced Learning

Go to www.yourstartingpointonline.com to find out how to dramatically improve your GPA by just asking your professor one simple question.

You’ll be surprised who will help you simply if you ask for help. All you have to say is “Hi (person’s name), my name is (your name) and I would love to learn how to do X better, I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind helping me figure out how to do it?”

Think about it: experts are people who have already made all of the mistakes and can show you the quickest way to succeed in a field. Why try getting through a wall by banging your head against it, when you can ask someone on the other side where the door is and how to find it? And if you can’t get face-to-face access to the experts you need, try another expert, www.google.com. You’d be amazed what questions you can type in and get answered through articles and websites.

A problem cannot exist without a solution. Do yourself a favor and seek the answer from someone who knows instead of trying to do everything yourself. If you need help finding a job, ask a professor if he or she has any connections. Need help managing a project for a school organization? Ask a management professor. Need help working out your budget? Ask a finance professor. The list goes on and on. All you have to do is ask for help.

Do you want to know how to easily get more out of life? Just ask for what you want and ask for help when you need it. You’ll be surprised how this little technique will bring so much into your life.

Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Secret #6: Do the Toughest Things First

“Eat a live frog first thing every morning and
it’s doubtful anything worse will happen to you all day.”
- Mark Twain

To be more productive with goals you set, tackle the toughest parts of your tasks first. Normally, the toughest part is the part that causes the most stress and is probably the reason why most students won’t finish a project and remain a C instead of an O person.

Where most people go wrong is they do all the little and easy things first to get them out of the way so they can focus on the major task of the day. Usually what happens is all those little (usually less significant) things eat up your time, and then you eventually decide to put your large/important task off until the infamous “tomorrow.” Then this cycle repeats itself over and over until it messes you up completely and you get completely stressed out!

To avoid this, start with the toughest part first when your energy level is at its highest. If you can’t figure out what is the most important thing for you to do, the best technique to identify it is figuring out which part you are procrastinating on doing the most. My good friend Michael Simmons, author of The Student Success Manifesto, taught me that usually

The thing we procrastinate on the most or 
have the most resistance to wanting to do 
is most likely the most important next step.

Once you identify what that particular task is, focus on the benefit you will gain from completing the task, not the actual arduousness of the task itself. Then suck it up and start working on it ASAP.

The stress in your life will dramatically drop when you take this approach to school and to life. Usually the anticipation of the work is much worse than the actual work itself. If you want to call a company to get an internship or job, the anticipation of making the phone call is much worse than the actual phone call itself. The more you apply this principle, the more you will truly understand it.

Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Secret #5: Know WHY You Want It

Understanding why you want something is the key to staying motivated. Understanding the “Why” is a very crucial step many often overlook. The “Why” is what will drive you when you want to quit.

Have you ever started something, been really excited about it for a little while, and then just suddenly stopped doing it? Like anything in life, the honeymoon phase of most activities makes you feel like you are on cloud nine. For example, when you first start dating someone, he or she may seem perfect, or when you first start a class, the subject matter might seem so interesting. Then when that first phase wears off, most students just throw in the towel on relationships, on learning, on getting in shape, or whatever it is they really want.

The reason this happens is because they are not holding onto why it is important to them.

The quest to get a 4.0 is always an exciting one during the first week of classes. Staring into the mirror after the first few classes, student members of the Gunna family across the country say, “You know what, this semester is gunna be the semester I’m gunna get straight As!” And then after a few weeks when the real work starts, the determination it takes to get that 4.0 drops to the point they’d much rather stick a pencil in their eyes then open their textbooks.

To overcome this, you must know why you want that 4.0. What is it about getting a 4.0 that will make you really excited? Not just normal excited, but vibrating off the walls excited! Is it being able to make your parents proud? Is it because you need to maintain a certain GPA to keep a scholarship or to get into the grad school of your dreams, which will let you get that dream job you’ve so badly wanted?

Your “why” has to be bigger than any adversity you will face. If the only reason you want a 4.0 is because it would be cool, that’s not going to cut it as a motivational tool. However, if getting a 4.0 would mean you would receive $1,000,000, I bet you would be busting your hump all semester, am I right? Nothing would stand in your way of that 4.0 if you knew that kind of cash were on the line.

Trust me, you can get a 4.0 if you are dedicated. You just need to make sure why you want it is more important than any excuse you can rationalize to yourself. Got it?

Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Secret #4: Know WHAT You Want

Do you know the number one reason why people don’t get what they want out of life? They don’t know what they want. A lot of people say things like “I just want to be happy,” but they’ve never defined what makes them happy. Knowing what you want is going one step further than most people will. Most people will stop at “I want to be happy,” but that’s vague and nonspecific.

If you want to become happy, you must take it one step further and decide what makes you happy: more money, more free time, less stress, a bigger house, a pony, it doesn’t matter what it is... It seems simple, but it’s true: if you can’t specifically see what your goal is you will never reach it.

To be honest, most people don’t know what they want, but they do know what they don’t want. I see it over and over again. When I speak at college orientations or career weeks, a lot of students tell me they don’t want a job that sucks after graduation, but they have no idea what they want to do. Understanding that, I created a presentation called “Turning Your Passion into Your Profession.” Students who attend this event leave knowing exactly what they must do to love what they do as a profession and most importantly how to land that dream job!

During that presentation, we have everybody write down the things they don’t want in a job. Then we sort this list into two categories: “Never Acceptable” and “Could Live With It.” Then I ask them to state the positive version of each negative job attribute. It’s a great strategy for figuring out what you want.

For example:

Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Secret #3: Use Reverse Engineering

As we already talked about in the SMART goals section, mini-deadlines are the underused tool that will make you a champion. Mini-deadlines are your secret weapon to finishing projects on time. But how do you properly set mini-deadlines?

Use Reverse Engineering.

Reverse engineering simply means that you:
  • Start with the end in mind.
  • Work backwards from the finished result to where you are today, figuring out what needs to be done to get to that end goal.
  • Set mini-deadlines between now and then to get all of the tasks done before the final deadline.
So if your paper is due on the 25th, you want to set up a deadline to finish your first draft and a deadline for someone to review it.

At first, you might not know what to do. A good technique is to observe yourself as you go through the process of writing a paper, making notes of the steps you are taking as you are doing them. You will have to make yourself aware of each step you are taking and write them down. This list will serve as your “Paper Writing System” or manual for all of the papers you will write in the future.

So your Paper Writing System might look like:
  1. Type the name of my possible subject into Google to see what other people have written about it.
  2. Brainstorm ideas for topics I could write about based on the samples I read.
  3. Come up with a list of at least three potential ideas I would like to talk about in my paper.
  4. Turn possible paper topics into questions.
  5. Answer those questions to develop my thesis statement. Etc. etc. etc.

*** Just a side note: creating systems is what all successful people do for most aspects of their lives. Even when people don’t work, systems do. When you jot down the steps you take to write a paper, you will never have to worry again about not knowing what your next steps are because you’ll already have them written down. This little bit of planning will save you tons of time in the future. And if you don’t know how to create a system to write a good paper, you should ask someone who gets good grades, your TA, or a tutor how they do it.

Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Secret #2: Set a Deadline

We all work on deadlines. Without deadlines, nothing would get done because “tomorrow” always seems be the best day to start something you really aren’t too excited about. Setting a deadline creates a sense of urgency to complete your goal.

A deadline puts a healthy pressure on you to start taking action. Start using the power of deadlines in everything in your life such as finishing your résumé, writing a handwritten letter to a loved one, and buying your first car. Literally everything you want to achieve must have a deadline.

The only difference between
a dream and a goal is a deadline.

Let me give you an example of the power of deadlines. Let’s say on February 1st you get assigned a fifteen-page paper due March 25th. What day is that paper getting done? Keep it real, March 24th (and for some of us, March 25th really early in the morning, right?).

The deadline is what makes you take action.

What is interesting is that many students seem to only need one day to write an entire paper. So perhaps we should only be given two days to write our papers. (Just kidding—that would not be fun AT ALL!)

One of the worst things you can do to sabotage your success is wait to get something done “when you feel like it” because chances are you will never feel like it. In school, we have deadlines for papers and dates for exams, but in life there is no authority figure to set a deadline on the things you need to accomplish to become successful.

You have to be that authority figure in your own life. (Remember the First Pillar? Take responsibility!)

Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Secret #1: Know Your Very Next Step

Knowing specifically what your next steps are will keep you constantly moving forward. A huge stopping point for many students is having no clear idea what to do next. Here’s something to think about: when we don’t know what to do next, we do nothing.

Let me know if this scenario sounds familiar. John is your classic C person. He has a paper to write. John sets a vague goal of “getting my paper done.” However, it is unclear what his very next actionable step will be. So John will sit down, stare at his computer screen, move papers around on his desk, and right before he starts, he will check his Facebook account, see a newsfeed of someone’s new photo album, and check it out.

Then all of a sudden, five hours of his life have disappeared and he has accomplished nothing with his paper. Sound familiar?

Let’s change his goal from vague to specific: “I will complete my paper by Friday of this week so that I can enjoy my weekend stress-free.” An actionable step to help him get started is “I will go to the library after my English class and ask the librarian to help me find three books and then use Google to find two Internet sources.”

With this action step, he knows exactly what he has to do, where to go, and whom to ask for help.

What this also means is there will be planning involved. Most people don’t like planning, but as Brian Tracy states in his book Time Power,

“Every minute in planning
saves you ten minutes in execution.”

So six minutes of planning will save you one hour of time. Not bad, huh?

Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Taking Action With 3 to Succeed

Here’s how you can start using 3 to Succeed today to start skyrocketing toward your success.

First you will need a pack of index cards; you can get them from the dollar store. Write your main goal down on the back of the index card on the blank side. Let’s imagine your dream is to become a doctor one day, so that you can help keep children healthy. You would write the following on the back of the card:

I will have a 3.5 this semester, so that
I can get into a top med school.

Starting today, (yes, today, I don’t care what time it is) you will set three specific goals you want to accomplish for the day.

You will set at least two academic goals and one life goal daily. Setting an academic goal is pretty self-explanatory; it’s a goal that moves you toward academic success. But there is much more to success as a student than just what you do inside the classroom, so the life goal will cover the outside of the classroom stuff.

For example, if you wanted to become a doctor, your goals could look like this:


Academic

1. I will read three chapters of my biology book today before 5 pm.

2. I will attend the chemistry study group tonight at 8 pm.Life

Life

3. I will call three doctors’ offices today before noon to see if at least one of the doctors would be interested in being interviewed by me so that I can find out how the doctor chose his or her particular specialty.

That’s the recipe. Two academic, one life. Now I know what you are probably thinking: “Arel, there are WAY more than three things I need to do in a day!” And I understand that. You live a busy, active, exciting life. But under no circumstances do these three things not get done. They are nonnegotiable.

Many times in the day we get inundated with so many things to do that the most important stuff gets put on the back burner of your To Do List. Not this time! The 3 to Succeed goals you write on this particular list should get done as soon as you possibly can.

Oh, by the way, you do have an actual, physical To Do List, right? Not just something you keep in your head, but something you can look at. A huge mistake many people make is trying to keep something in their heads, because they are guaranteed to forget something. As the ancient Chinese proverb says,

The faintest ink is better than the best memory.

Case in point, have you ever gone to the supermarket to buy eggs and come home with bags full of groceries, but no eggs? Be honest. Using lists is a critical tool of the successful.

Now that we’ve settled that argument, I want you to write down your big goal with a “so that I can” on one side of the card, and your 3 to Succeed action steps on the other.

The following is how it might look:


Arel Moodie is widely known as America's Top Young Speaker. He has spoken to over 65,000 students in 39 states and 2 countries on the topics of student success, student leadership and student entrepreneurship. He is a leading authority on helping students of this generation succeed in school and in life. He is also the best selling author of the book Your Starting Point For Student Success. To find out more about Arel's book, go to www.startingpointbook.com. To find out more about Arel's speaking please go to www.arelmoodie.com.