You are the CEO of YOU.
Great CEO’s set goals, decide upon priorities, make plans, and then commit to execute on those plans.
TIP – Follow along with the Big Rocks Worksheet. Complete this when you have quiet time.
1. Begin at the beginning – Goal setting
Set goals in the seven areas of your life. Take each of these one at a time and set both short and long-term goals. Do this alone or with help from those who are involved with each key area. Write these down.
- Family
- Faith
- Your lifelong career
- Your current job
- Personal enrichment
- Social/friends
- Community
2. Prioritize within each area of your life
What things matter the MOST in achieving each one of your life goals?
Examples are education, experience, allocating quality time, and eliminating time wasters.
Organize your goals and priorities on the chart. DO THIS FIRST before moving on. Get comfortable with it. Be patient, as it may take a few tries.
3. Planning – “People don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan”
Planning is done once you have a good idea about your priorities, actions, and tasks.
The most successful people use a good planning calendar. Today, there are lots of planning apps and calendar tools on your phone. HOWEVER, I recommend carrying an old fashioned planning calendar because IMO, it is still superior in terms of getting organized and being able to see your day, week, and month at a glance. Also, there is something to be said for writing things down by hand.
4. Doing the work – 100% of successful people have goals, set priorities, and have a plan. Most importantly, they stick to it.
The “D’s: the BIG D is Discipline
Daily D’s – Apply the Four D’s of disciplined decision-making :
Delegate – Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.
Defer – Put first things first – the Big Rocks. Defer the small non-urgent stuff, intentionally.
Delete – Eliminate unimportant and non-urgent things “Is what I am doing helping me reach any of my goals?”
Do it – Take committed action.
Jot down how each of these can be applied to your goals and priorities. Follow this simple chart to prioritize both your long-term activities and your daily activities.
About Charlie
Charlie Horn, the GA Founder, has experienced several transformations in his life and continues a journey of new possibilities as he approaches his eighth decade on earth.
After flunking out of college after only three semesters and taking a job repairing termite damage in household basements and crawl spaces, as an 18 year old, he took night school classes and qualified to re-enter the University. He was also re-admitted to the college golf team and later became Captain of the team and set a career scoring record that stood for 35 years. While still in school he made a living selling cemetery lots. Upon graduation, he entered the life insurance business and immediately earned many production awards and in five years became a CLU, the industry’s highest designation. After three years he established his own agency, then two years later sold it and took a position as an executive at an insurance company where at the age of 28 with no prior experience or management training, he became the youngest officer of an insurance company in the U.S. Eight years later, after creating numerous innovative insurance products, and realizing his future potential could only be achieved as an entrepreneur, he co-founded two new insurance businesses with a partner. Two years later, not satisfied with the status quo, he sold his interest in one business and acquired the other business and moved his young family to Arizona to seek his next business venture. In 1994 he founded an innovative new company called ScriptSave that disrupted and transformed the way retail pharmacies engaged with their cash paying customers. Never before had a legitimate RX discount program been established, much less sold on a nationwide basis. The result of this was an entire industry was born. Charlie, with no CEO experience, led the company to achieve five consecutive Inc 500 designations, one of only a small handful to do so. He also co-founded a technology company in Denver, Colorado called HealthTrans which also was a two time Inc 500 winner before it was sold to a large PBM. In 2012 Charlie, with no experience in higher education, founded the Entrepreneurship education program at the University of Delaware, his alma mater. Horn Entrepreneurship has become a model for other entrepreneurship programs and is already ranked in the top 10% nationally and its high school program is recognized as the preeminent lobal leader and in 2020 launched a groundbreaking new high school Entre-Ed offerings in the U.S. market called EntreX Labs.
In 2014, Charlie once again ventured into uncharted territory by founding 5Lights, a boutique investment and management company to support highly promising new and early stage ventures. One investment example is Dr Martha Hall Designs, a company that commercializes revolutionary patented products in the medical device industry.
Genius Avenue was born as an offshoot of Ternian Insurance Group, a company he held a majority interest in until he sold the insurance side of Ternian to Axis Insurance in 2013. GA was the in-house tech platform that performed the administration for Ternian’s voluntary products. Today, after several iterations, the platform continues to evolve to meet the demands of the market. Charlies’ vision for GA is to develop an organizational innovative mindset where anything is possible. The business model is to identify under-served markets and deliver a compelling new value proposition that can scale like a flywheel. GA’s team has pioneered several new concepts including Breakroom Benefits and Peppermint 401-k, digital storefronts and new digital payments technology offerings. These innovations are lead and supported by an outstanding team that is creating a very bright future for the company and for themselves.
