Archive

Welcome to the archives. These articles represent many different seasons of my career. You’ll find posts written during my doctoral studies, years of marketing consulting, entrepreneurial experiments, and the occasional reflection on whatever happened to be capturing my attention at the time.

Blogging looked very different when many of these posts were published. Rather than removing them or fixing broken links from now defunct themes, I’ve chosen to preserve them as a snapshot of where I was, what I was learning, and how my thinking has evolved over the years.

Some ideas have stood the test of time. Others reflect the questions I was wrestling with at that particular moment. Either way, they tell part of the story.

Success Myths – 4 that Nearly Ended My Business

by Jason Owens | Oct 27, 2013 | Core Content

One of the many things I cover in my book Finding My Voice is about how often I used to read success books, hoping to find the secret sauce for getting ahead. Turns out most of what I believed then ended up being success myths.

This is the first in a series of articles that I have written on what I have learned on my pursuit for success — the hard lessons that have stood the test over the past dozen or so years.

Here I separate the success myths from the real deal.

While the formulas offered in most success books just don’t seem to work for me, these are the lessons that do. I can count on them, and I hope they offer some value to you.

Success Myth 1 – Setting goals works all the time

In Does Goal Setting Really Work? I talk about my frustration of setting goal after goal for years on end only to see most of them turn to sawdust. I talk about where goal setting works and where it doesn’t.

Success Myth 2 – Just stay motivated; it’s easy

My article What Really is Motivation? talks about my recent discovery of a single diagram that explained everything. In 30 seconds I could finally see why I kept getting stuck in the cycle of false starts, why I kept pulling up short all the time, and why I was failing to reach my goals.

Success Myth 3 – Plan your work and work your plan

In Effectuation – A Very Surprising Way to Make Things Work I unpack the most vital lesson of everything I have learned in the past dozen or so years. Here, I tell how I realized that my long, long road was worth it.

Success Myth 4 – God will make this easy for me

How Does God Factor Into Your Success? is where I touch on the critical aspect of faith in our pursuit of reaching our goals. Here I wrestle with the age-old question: Does God really care if I am successful?

Bonus – 1 Fast way to bounce back after a setback

Reboot is where I talk about one exercise I do to keep myself in productive head-space. This skill is a must for entrepreneurs who experience setbacks on a daily basis.

What may surprise you is:

That there are times when goal setting just isn’t going to work for you.
Why all the tips and techniques out there are more like mental junk food that can rot your brain, and why you need to “brush” daily.
When God thinks of you, your being an outrageous success isn’t the first thing on His mind.