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TruckingOffice Wants Truckers to Succeed
We’ve been focusing some of our blog posts on goals and goal setting.
- SMART goal setting
- SCHEMES to figure out your action plan
- Measurements to determine where your strengths and weaknesses are
- Handling the Challenges of emergencies
- Staying Motivated on your trucking business goals
- Understand Your Numbers and make them work for you
- Set Benchmarks to determine your progress
- Building a team to support your business
This multi-part series will continue to help truckers reach their dream of success as owner-operators.
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Are you a victim of dumb luck? Or maybe you’re just generally lucky? Ever thought about goals and luck at the same time?
What Do Goals and Luck Have to Do With Each Other?
There’s that old quotation that’s often applied to Thomas Jefferson
I’m a Great Believer in Luck. The Harder I Work, the More Luck I Have
Thomas Jefferson*
I’m not a big believer in luck. I am a believer in working.
Get a Look at the Past
When you think about your best week, do you think you were lucky? Or were you prepared?
Find your best week in the past three months and look at what you did, not just how you did. Did you do anything new? Different? More successful?
A lot of “good luck” is based on our willingness to try new things. By being open to new opportunities, such as new dispatchers or even leasing to a new agency, you may find you’re making your own luck by being prepared.
Get Prepared
I found this quotation recently:
Set Performance Goals, Not Outcome Goals
You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. There is nothing more dispiriting than failing to achieve a personal goal for reasons that are beyond your control. These could be bad business environments, poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck.
Deedee Moore is right… right up until she says “plain bad luck.”
Too often, I find that “plain bad luck” is nothing more than not being prepared.
When an owner-operator looks at setting goals, there are a lot of things outside his control.
- The seasonal nature of trucking can force a driver to take loads that aren’t as profitable.
- An unexpected family emergency can keep them at home.
- Weather and road conditions
But there are a lot more things we do have control over – the condition of our rigs and our loads. Regular, scheduled maintenance provides more protection from “bad luck” than any rabbit’s foot or four-leaf clover. Having an enough insurance for those loads over the usual value. Making sure to park in a safe location. These things seem nitpicky, but being prepared to handle the unexpected saves you from bad luck.
Get Skills
When we get started as truckers, we learn the basics. We’re told it takes time and experience on the road to hone our skills.
Maybe so. But unless we make an effort to learn the skills, we have to wait for experience – aka bad luck.
You know your job as a trucker. Do you know your job as a business owner? You can get these skills even if you’re on the road.
- Take a class online or listen to audio books about running a successful business.
- Learn how to use the best software to manage your income, expenses and profits. (We recommend TruckingOffice, of course. 30 day free trial! Why wouldn’t you try it?)
- Get together with others who can help you succeed in a mentorship or mastermind group.
Do goals require good luck?
No, I don’t think so. If you follow the advice above about setting performance goals and not outcome goals, you have control over what you do. Maybe the circumstances don’t work out the way that you would want, but that’s not bad luck. That’s just life. You can control only so much – but you’ll have more control and options if you’re prepared. Then when those random chances come along, you’re ready to deal with them.
What gives you good luck?
Prepared With the right data from a highly successful week, you can examine what you need to do regularly to improve your business. By using that information to create systems in your business, you will find that luck has nothing to do with it. It’s about what you know and what you need to know.
Do you know how to find that data out?
We’ve got the program that can help you do it without any extra computer data entry. With TruckingOffice’s maintenance module and accounting module, you can examine the data quickly. You can produce reports in a matter of seconds that will show you what you can do now to achieve your goals. You can make your own luck with TruckingOffice trucking management system.
Would you like to see how we do it?
We’ll give you the first 30 days as a free trial and be on hand whenever you need help.
Why don’t you give us a try to help you achieve your goals and luck?
What are your goals? Do you think luck has an impact on achieving them?
*Historians at Monticello deny that he said it.
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