Great Work, Great Career

A great career is all about solving great problems, meeting great challenges, and making great contributions. Satisfaction is found in providing meaningful service and giving yourself to the needs of others. “A great career requires both of these dimensions—the desire and skill to contribute and a character worthy of the trust and loyalty of others.”
A great career:

1. taps your talent,
   
2. fuels your passions, and
   
3. satisfies your conscience.
   

Change your mindset. Understand that your mentality is governed by your thinking and your actions. Adopt a solution mind-set. Recognize the opportunities around you and then go after them. Create authentic relationships with the key people around you. Support each other.
Build your village:

1. Identify the members of your village:
   There are two kinds of people:
   1. Those you serve and support
   2. Those who serve and support you
   
2. Create an emotional bank account:
   The amount of confidence and trust there is in a relationship
   
3. Practice synergy.
   

“The energy you invest in regularly and frequently building your village will pay dividends not only in advancing your career but also in personal satisfaction.” 

Getting Things Done
by David Allen

Our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effect results and unleash our creative potential.

Stress comes from our commitments. First we ned to consider any unfitted commitments and what we have to do to make progress toward fulling it.
The key to managing everything is managing your actions.
5 Stages of Mastering Work Flow

1. 1)  Collect the things that command our attention
   
2. 2)  Process what they mean and what to do about them
   
3. 3)  organize the results
   
4. 4)  which we review as options for what we choose to
   
5. 5)  Do!
   

A simple step to organizing our required tasks is to write them down. Figure out what is most important to do first and what can be done later. Once we decide to complete a task, we must either do it ourselves or delegate it. Ultimately, the only way to get things done is to start doing. Don’t procrastinate. Just do! 

Communicate with Power

In your communications with others, there are five goals that you want to accomplish:

1. You want people to like and respect you.
   
2. You want people to recognize that you are valuable and important.
   
3. You want to be able to persuade people to accept your point of view.
   
4. You want to get people to change their minds and to cooperate with you in
   achieving your goals.
   
5. Overall, you want to be more personally powerful and influential in all your
   relationships, personal and business.
   

Remember that communication has a lot to do with how you make people feel when you deliver your message. 

10 Things Successful People Never Do Again

We all make mistakes but the people who thrive from their mistakes are the successful ones.

Dr. Henry Cloud

“Never go back.” What does that mean? From observations of successful people, clinical psychologist and author of Never Go Back: 10 Things You'll Never Do Again (Howard Books, June 2014), Dr. Henry Cloud has discovered certain “awakenings” that people have—in life and in business—that once they have them, they never go back to the old way of doing things. And when that happens, they are never the same. In short, they got it.

“Years ago, a bad business decision of mine led to an interesting discussion with my mentor,” Dr. Cloud says. “I had learned a valuable lesson the hard way, and he reassured me: ‘The good thing is once you learn that lesson, you never go back. You never do it again.’

“I wondered, what are the key awakenings that successful people go through that forever change how they do things, which propel them to succeed in business, relationships, and life? I began to study these awakenings, researching them over the years.”

Although life and business have many lessons to teach us, Dr. Cloud observed 10 “doorways” of learning that high performers go through, never to return again.

Successful people never again…

1. Return to what hasn’t worked. Whether a job, or a broken relationship that was ended for a good reason, we should never go back to the same thing, expecting different results, without something being different.

2. Do anything that requires them to be someone they are not. In everything we do, we have to ask ourselves, “Why am I doing this? Am I suited for it? Does it fit me? Is it sustainable?” If the answer is no to any of these questions, you better have a very good reason to proceed.

3. Try to change another person. When you realize that you cannot force someone into doing something, you give him or her freedom and allow them to experience the consequences. In doing so, you find your own freedom as well.

4. Believe they can please everyone. Once you get that it truly is impossible to please everyone, you begin to live purposefully, trying to please the right people.

5. Choose short-term comfort over long-term benefit. Once successful people know they want something that requires a painful, time-limited step, they do not mind the painful step because it gets them to a long-term benefit. Living out this principle is one of the most fundamental differences between successful and unsuccessful people, both personally and professionally.

6. Trust someone or something that appears flawless. It’s natural for us to be drawn to things and people that appear "incredible." We love excellence and should always be looking for it. We should pursue people who are great at what they do, employees who are high performers, dates who are exceptional people, friends who have stellar character, and companies that excel. But when someone or something looks too good to be true, he, she, or it is. The world is imperfect. Period. No one and no thing is without flaw, and if they appear that way, hit pause.

7. Take their eyes off the big picture. We function better emotionally and perform better in our lives when we can see the big picture. For successful people, no one event is ever the whole story. Winners remember that – each and every day.

8. Neglect to do due diligence. No matter how good something looks on the outside, it is only by taking a deeper, diligent, and honest look that we will find out what we truly need to know: the reality that we owe ourselves.

9. Fail to ask why they are where they find themselves. One of the biggest differences between successful people and others is that in love and in life, in relationships and in business, successful people always ask themselves, what part am I playing in this situation? Said another way, they do not see themselves only as victims, even when they are.

10. Forget that their inner life determines their outer success. The good life sometimes has little to do with outside circumstances. We are happy and fulfilled mostly by who we are on the inside. Research validates that. And our internal lives largely contribute to producing many of our external circumstances.

And, the converse is true: people who are still trying to find success in various areas of life can almost always point to one or more of these patterns as a reason they are repeating the same mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes…even the most successful people out there. But, what achievers do better than others is recognize the patterns that are causing those mistakes and never repeat them again. In short, they learn from pain—their own and the pain of others.

A good thing to remember is this: pain is unavoidable, but repeating the same pain twice, when we could choose to learn and do something different, is certainly avoidable. I like to say, “we don’t need new ways to fail….the old ones are working just fine!” Our task, in business and in life, is to observe what they are, and never go back to doing them again.

4 Secrets of Insanely Successful People

Everybody loves a good secret. In fact, the juicier, the better. Why? Because we all love being insiders. We love the feeling of exclusivity, of knowing something that’s just ours and no one else’s.

But in business, secrets do more than just stroke our egos.We love having the upper hand. We love having the “unfair advantage,” to borrow entrepreneur Jason Cohen’s term.

So when someone like Dr. Ivan Misner, founder and chairman of BNI, the world’s largest business networking organization boasting 5.4 million referrals and more than $6.5 billion in resulting revenue, asks, “Do you want to know the secret to success?” you listen.

What’s “the secret”? Well, there isn’t just one. But think about this: “Success is the uncommon application of common knowledge.”

In other words, when it comes to success, what matters isn’t so much learning something new but putting into practice what we already know.

Here are four not-so-secret secrets of insanely successful people:

1. They have a vision.

According to Warren Bennis’s classic On Becoming a Leader, leadership is “the capacity to translate vision into reality.” This means that success starts with answering a fundamental question, What do I really want?

Whether you call the answer to that question your mission statement, core values, brand identity or just your goals doesn’t really matter. Because “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Here’s how Bennis unpacks the idea: The leader has a clear idea of what he or she wants to do—professionally and personally—and the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures.

The key word is “clear.” And clarity means writing it down.

In fact, as SUCCESS.com’s infographic on the habits of the world’s wealthiest people points out, two of the most statistically significant factors that set the richest people apart from everyone else is that 81 percent of them maintain a to-do list and 80 percent focus on accomplishing a specific goal.

2. They are honest.

Successful people tell the truth.This sounds so obvious that you might think it doesn’t even need to be said. But in a climate where the pressure to look good, perform well, eke out profits and win by any means necessary is constantly increasing, honesty is becoming a scarce commodity.

And yet, honesty pays.

According to research in Robert B. Cialdini’s Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, when companies “explained failures in their annual reports, those that pointed to internal and controllable factors had higher stock prices one year later than those that pointed to external and uncontrollable factors.”

In other words, taking responsibility for our mistakes and admitting when we’re wrong isn’t just relationally smart—it’s financially savvy.

Another study, conducted by the Corporate Executive Board, found companies that “rated highly in the area of open communication” and encouraged honest feedback among their staff delivered a “10-year total shareholder return that was 270 percent more than other companies.”

And what’s true for companies is just as true for us. As Bennis wrote, “Leaders never lie to themselves, especially about themselves…. You are your own raw material.”

3. They show gratitude.

Without gratitude, you aren’t being mindful or totally thankful of the good things in life—and your perspective is probably skewed to the negative as a result. You might even have less motivation to go after more good things, if you aren’t grateful of the ones you already have.

We tend to think of gratitude as a spontaneous emotion, something that just happens to us in moments of triumph or success. In reality, though, gratitude is something we develop.And just like all the other not-so-secret secrets on this list, it is something we choose, something we make a wide-eyed, premeditated, self-determined decision to experience.

How? By actively looking for reasons to be grateful and second, by simply saying, “thank you.”

When we look for reasons to be grateful—when we make that our intentional focus—we find them. On top of that, when we call attention to those reasons, we cultivate gratitude not only within ourselves but within our relationships and organizations.

4. They are adaptive.

Success isn’t about avoiding failure. It’s about learning from failure.

Take Thomas Edison’s famous quote about inventing the light bulb: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

The key is to cultivate what Eric Ries in The Lean Startup calls “validated learning.”“Validated learning is not an after-the-fact realization or a good story designed to hide failure,” he says. “It is the principal antidote to the lethal problem of achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.”

For Ries, this antidote comes down to one skill: the ability to adapt.“What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.”

All this means is that instead of hiding from failure, insanely successful people anticipate and integrate failure into their lives in ways that transform it from an end into a means.

We all love a good secret. But the truth is, when it comes to success, there’s no such thing.So start small, but start today. Pick one of these four “secrets” and put it to work.