Fanaticism and Firing Bullets:
Simple Ingredients to Enhance Your Business or Home
3 Lines Then Longer Version
Dreams are important, but extended stick-to-itiveness and dedication to one’s strategic plan are also essential factors for success in the workplace (and other aspects of life).
Since no one knows the future, the safest and best route to clarity is to test ones ideas through small-scale, low-risk projects.
These ideas are manifestations of the sefirot of yesod and malchut, and have been elaborated on in a book I highly recommend Good to Great.
IB Now the longer version…The sefirot for this week and the next are yesod and malchut. These concepts/ traits can be seen within the personality realm in dynamic, assertive individuals (yesods) and determined, strong-minded leaders (malchuts) [see our very popular cheat sheet].
Jim Collins’ new offering Great by Choice highlights some practices that are related to these sefirot, which can greatly enhance your life. I highly recommend the book, along with his other books, for the professional and family realms, as they highlight crucial aspects in yesod and malchut and how these middot/aspects can be harnessed to achieve success.
This new book, based on countless hours of research, entertainingly highlights several key behaviors and practices that highly successful companies virtually always utilize; they are, luckily, behaviors any one of us can master.
One of the behaviors the authors dub fanatic discipline, which, as it sounds, is a virtually obsessive dedication to the execution of the details of a business plan. The only deviation from the plan, if it is a reasonable one, should come when absolutely necessary; flip-flopping and changing a company’s trajectory is a recipe for failure, as many comparison companies demonstrate. As the book graphically highlights, staying the course with fanatic discipline even during times of unexpected industry and company turmoil is usually the correct course.
Dreams
People get caught up in their dreams. Dreams are wonderful-they keep us hopeful and they are the romantic beginning to any entrepreneurial endeavor; however, simply enjoying ones dreams does not help one to reach their dreams. What will get you to success, the majority of the time, is hard work and patience; it involves genuine, steadfast stick-to-itiveness.
Yesods and malchut-types do not achieve higher levels of success because, using their stronger personalities, they assert themselves 
over others. Assertiveness is very important, but these types also utilize key unique practices in their work ethic; they maintain a big vision—the dream[1]—and are, more often than not, willing to stay the course. Any personality can practice these behaviors, and, if they do, will find much fruit at the end of their labors.
One needs to keep a big vision, but a realistic, steady pace. No one has any idea what project will succeed in the future. As Great by Choice recommends, engage in small-scale low-risk testing of your ideas. This will clarify what areas in which to expand and will minimize poisonous emotional deflation; one is to fire “bullets” not “cannonballs”.
[to harness these and other middot/practices order The Seven Ways]
Stick-to-itiveness, determination, and a steady diet of exciting dreams will get you to wherever you want to be. IB [1] Similar to these ideas is a whimsically coined concept seen in another one of his books: a “BHAG” a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (Bee-HAG). Meant to align a company and create synergy, this is a large-scale goal that is a bit audacious, but is manifest in tangible, strategic ways.