Instant Viability Assessment Test
An instant viability test will not necessarily prove whether your plan will work or not, but it will give you an idea if your plan has a reasonable chance of being successful. Now, don’t confuse a reasonable probability of being successful with being easy.
A reasonable probability just assures that your plan to achieve your dream appears to be possible. For example, it doesn’t matter if I decided to exercise and strengthen my legs for ten hours a day. There is simply no amount of exercise that would allow me to jump so high that I could land on the moon.
Your dreams can be very hard to attain—perhaps so difficult that others might think it’s as impossible as jumping into outer space. But the dream must be grounded in enough reality that you aren’t deluding yourself.
Again, you don’t need to know for sure that your dream will happen for you, but you must be able to assess if it is actually possible using the Instant Viability Assessment Test. Here are the steps that you’ll need to follow in order to complete the test:
Instant Viability Assessment Test Procedures:
Step #1: Identify and quantify the dream or goal.
In order to achieve a dream you must be able to state clearly and concisely what your dream is, preferably in one sentence. If you don’t have a very clear and measurable target, you’re likely to flounder around. That was certainly my problem when I was hoping to make money selling fine china.
I didn’t have an exact goal. In that case, maybe my goal should’ve been, “I want to make $500 a week for the entire summer selling this company’s fine china door-to-door.” So, if you want to be a VIP corporate executive, your goal can’t be, “I want to be a big wig in a large corporation”. It needs to be something like, “By the time I am 45 years old I want to be the CEO of a publicly owned company that has no less than $100 million in annual sales.” So, step one: take out a piece of paper and identify and quantify your goal.
Step #2: Determine what actions (in a general sense) will be needed to achieve the goal
If I’d done this step when considering the idea of selling fine china, I’d have realized that in order to do this job a person would have to do a lot of cold call knocking on doors.
In fact it would probably be as many as 30-50 a day. If I’d faced that cold hard fact then, I would’ve realized that this wasn’t a goal with a reasonable probability of success for me. I just wouldn’t want to take that kind of rejection every day—at least not for $500 a week.
With a fair assessment of what it will take to accomplish your dream, you’ll be able to determine if this is something that you are both able and willing to do.
Step #3: Evaluate how the outside world is likely to respond
An ambitious young man I know decided that he wanted to be in business for himself. He came across an opportunity to be a distributor of electric signs that scroll messages across them. So, he went out and spent his life savings on five of these signs at $5000 each.
Next, he created some fine literature to promote them and proceeded to set up appointments with small business people or other professionals like doctors to pitch his signs. He was sure that they would be a winner. After all, a doctor could have the sign in his waiting room scrawling a message that let people know if they were backed up, etc.
Unfortunately, nobody wanted to spend more than $5000 on an electronic sign. Thus, this ambitious man lost all of his money, gave up his dreams of being an entrepreneur and obtained a corporate job, where he remains today. In the world of business they’d call this a “market test or market research.” Well, regardless of what your dream is, you should do a test so that you know not only that you’re willing to do the work to make your dream come true, but that the world will be cooperative.
Again, don’t take this to mean that if there will be resistance you should toss in the towel. You just want to make sure that there aren’t obstacles that make your dream unattainable because of factors that are outside of your control. Once you’ve ascertained that the dream appears viable, you can begin the process of making it happen. If after researching it, you are realizing that it’s more than just difficult…it’s impossible, you should consider adjusting the dream without giving it up entirely.
Making your dreams come true isn’t easy, but it’s possible. The author of the “Dare to Live Your Dreams” program, Paul Lawrence turned himself from a broke, single, miserable guy who couldn’t hold a job into a happily married man who achieved his dream of getting into the movie business by writing and producing a multimillion dollar film called CRUEL WORLD that has major stars in it like Jaime Pressly (NBC’s major hit, “My Name Is Earl”) and Eddie Furlong (“Terminator II).
He’s also the president of a large direct mail order company, has appeared as an actor with several different roles in major feature films, performed onstage as a professional ballroom and Latin dancer over 150 times and as a stand up comedian in major comedy clubs in Los Angeles and south Florida as a stand up comedian.
If you want more information on the secrets he used to change his life, follow this link: