Replicate
In all my life, I have not been able to find a more powerful word than replicate—except maybe the word grace.
The ability to replicate can be a blessing or a curse in your business and personal life. Much of life is how you cast it—what light you cast your
victories and defeats in, whom you cast as the key actors in the play we call life, and where you cast your worries and concerns when they become too much to bear. These actions we commit every day can be our rule or our ruin, and we do these things to ourselves over and over again. We replicate them.
Replication is the act of reproducing a result. You can’t have a result without participation. Life either happens to you, or you hurl your will upon it. Actively or passively, life continues to happen, and we all have a role in it. When good things happen to us, we rarely ask, “Why is this happening to me?” But when life goes poorly, we lament, thrusting our hands toward the sky, exclaiming, “Why is this happening to me?” and sometimes “Why does this always happen to me?”
Maybe you just don’t understand the concept of replication. Maybe you created a system of replication and built a machine that produces the same results over and over in your life.
Results are what we all want. Give me results. I love the results! Results can be measured. Results can be quantified. I can be praised for my results. Results might even gain me favor with my most important relationships. I judge my performance by my results. After all, is not a tree judged by its fruit—a result?
However, if your life has not gone well and your machine is running funky, the results might be addiction, divorce, debt, unemployment, underemployment, spiritual darkness, hate, fear, loneliness, apathy, and poor self-esteem. You might self-describe as a loser because you’re not winning.
To replicate is a to have a “more” concept. If you want more of what you have, you replicate the things that you want more of. If you want more sales, you do more advertising, right? No—absolutely not! As a technique for replicating, whatever you mean by more needs to be qualified. You want more of the good stuff, not the bad stuff, right? Some of your advertising might be drawing the wrong customers and driving your overall average sale down. You need the right customers, so you need more of the advertising that gets you the right customers, and you need to prune away the advertising that brings in the wrong customers. You must identify the more you actually need.
A lot of work goes on before and after the concept of replication. We want more of the good things in our lives. Replicating the same old junk over and over while expecting a different result is the basic definition of insanity. The best way to avoid this is to take an inventory of all the things you think are going well in your life. Good things are happening, believe me—you just need to recognize them.
Here is a simple five-step system I use every day to win way more often than I lose, accomplishing seemingly impossible tasks on a regular basis:
- Be deliberate. Have a written plan. Goals are plans!
- Execute. Get off the couch, and work your plan. This is the hardest step, by far.
- Analyze. Stop, reflect, and measure your results. Prune away the bad, and focus on the good.
- Replicate. Do more of the good stuff, and drop the bad stuff. It’s that simple.
- Systemize. Once you have identified the good stuff that can be replicated to create a system, it perpetuates.
Understand that this is not easy. Nothing admirable is ever easily accomplished, and success rarely goes uncriticized. You will know you are truly getting traction in making your life better when Satan attacks you through your family, friends, circumstances, and life. When that happens, relish it. You are now significant! Satan only attacks those he is worried about losing.
The late Zig Ziglar said, “We are all designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, endowed by the Creator with the seeds of greatness.” God wants you to live a powerful life, but you may have to make some changes. The concept of replication might mean pruning away some negative results and influences before entering the replication stage. This is a hard teaching. However, once you do you that, you can take ownership of your life and start replicating good fruits and success in your wheel of life—spiritually, personally, and professionally.
