Success

Ten Things to Start Doing to Improve Your Life

Ten Things to Start Doing to Improve Your Life by Chris Banescu –
There are many books and articles written about improving your life and achieving success. Often these resources cover common principles and truths you can apply for personal self-improvement, motivation, and inspiration. Others discuss pitfalls and problem areas in your life to watch out for and avoid. Listed below are ten important concepts to start practicing in order to improve your quality of life and get back on the road towards peace and happiness.

  1. Pursue a career you love and are passionate about. – When you love what you do, working hard is enjoyable and making sacrifices for what you’re passionate about is worthwhile. Hard work doesn’t feel hard when you devote yourself fully to it and really like doing it. Don’t settle on a career field you’re not passionate about, don’t feel comfortable in, or hold on to simply because you need the money. Do everything possible to leave a dysfunctional work environment. If you’re not sure what career to pursue, then try different things, read good books, educate yourself, and ask trusted mentors for feedback and advice. Continue searching for something that you’re really good at doing, others appreciate, and you would love to do for the rest of your life. Look diligently and follow your heart and you’ll eventually find it. If you catch yourself working hard and loving every minute of it, don’t stop; you’re on to something big.
  2. Maintain a healthy body and a rested mind. – Your health is your life! It is more important than wealth or success. Don’t sacrifice your health in pursuit of other goals. A tired mind and an unhealthy body are rarely conducive to productive and efficient work and excellent results. Don’t abuse your body and mind. Everything in moderation is key when it comes to eating and drinking. Eat healthy, wholesome, and balanced meals. Exercise regularly, both by lifting weights (strength training) and doing aerobic exercises that improve cardiovascular fitness. Get enough sleep every night and sufficient rest during the day. [Read more…]

Stop Procrastinating…Now

Harvard Business Review logo by Amy Gallo –

It seems that no one is immune to the tendency to procrastinate. When someone asked Ernest Hemingway how to write a novel, his response was “First you defrost the refrigerator.” But putting off tasks takes a big hit on our productivity, and psyche. Procrastination is not inevitable. Figuring out why you postpone work and then taking concrete steps to prevent it will help you get more done and feel good about yourself.

What the Experts Say
According to Ned Hallowell, a psychiatrist and the author of 12 books, including Driven to Distraction, delaying work is often a symptom of how busy you are. “We procrastinate because we all have too much to do,” he says. And of course, we want to dodge things we don’t like. “Many people procrastinate because they fear the drudgery or the difficulty of the task they are avoiding,” says Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and coauthor of The Progress Principle. But, as you have likely learned, it doesn’t pay to dawdle. “Putting it off doesn’t make it go away. Getting it done does,” says Hallowell. Here are five principles to follow next time you find yourself deferring important work. [Read more…]

Five Reasons Why You Should Write Down Your Goals

Write Your Goals Down, Commit Your Goals to Writing

There is incredible power in writing down one’s goals. This sage advice comes from an entry written by Michael Hyatt on his blog Intentional Leadership. The five (5) useful tips he mentions can help us focus our efforts, clarify our desires, motivate us into action, and give us an opportunity for self-reflection and self-improvement; key elements in finding purpose and meaning in our lives. I encourage everyone to visit Michael’s site often, he posts a lot of other great stuff there also!

Most people don’t bother to write down their goals. Instead, they drift through life aimlessly, wondering why their life lacks purpose and significance. I am not saying that committing your goals to writing is the end-game. It’s not. But it is the beginning.

Here are five reasons you should commit your goals to writing:

1. Because it will force you to clarify what you want. Imagine setting out on a trip with no particular destination in mind. How do you pack? What roads do you take? How do you know when you have arrived? Instead, you start by picking a destination. The same is true with the milestones in your life. Writing down your goals forces you to select something specific and decide what you want. [Read more…]

How To Brand Yourself Like A Celebrity

Brand Yourself Successby Nick Nanton & JW Dicks –
As I tell my clients over and over, your personal branding campaign should be primarily centered on the goal of branding yourself as a celebrity within your market. The key phrase here is “within your market.” You don’t need to become the next Hollywood superstar, you just need to become the go-to guy in your field, within your market. And as you know if you’ve been paying attention, that involves branding yourself both as an expert and as an interesting individual. Why interesting? Because it’s not good enough simply to be considered good at what you do; you also need to be memorable. You need to stick in the minds of potential clients, so that when they need your services, you are the first person they think of. For some clients I’ve spoken to, this seems to present a problem. “There’s simply nothing memorable about me,” they say. If you identify with that notion, pay attention, because today I’m going to show you that anyone can brand themselves as an expert and a celebrity if they are willing to commit 100% to that goal. [Read more…]

How P&G Tripled Its Innovation Success Rate

Tide logo success by Bruce Brown and Scott D. Anthony –
Back in 2000 the prospects for Procter & Gamble’s Tide, the biggest brand in the company’s fabric and household care division, seemed limited. The laundry detergent had been around for more than 50 years and still dominated its core markets, but it was no longer growing fast enough to support P&G’s needs. A decade later Tide’s revenues have nearly doubled, helping push annual division revenues from $12 billion to almost $24 billion. The brand is surging in emerging markets, and its iconic bull’s-eye logo is turning up on an array of new products and even new businesses, from instant clothes fresheners to neighborhood dry cleaners.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the result of a strategic effort by P&G over the past decade to systematize innovation and growth.

To understand P&G’s strategy, we need to go back more than a century to the sources of its inspiration—Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. In the 1870s Edison created the world’s first industrial research lab, Menlo Park, which gave rise to the technologies behind the modern electric-power and motion-picture industries. [Read more…]

How to Build Confidence

Self-Confidence Success by Amy Gallo –
Very few people succeed in business without a degree of confidence. Yet everyone, from young people in their first real jobs to seasoned leaders in the upper ranks of organizations, have moments — or days, months, or even years — when they are unsure of their ability to tackle challenges. No one is immune to these bouts of insecurity at work, but they don’t have to hold you back.

What the Experts Say
“Confidence equals security equals positive emotion equals better performance,” says Tony Schwartz, the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live. And yet he concedes that “insecurity plagues consciously or subconsciously every human being I’ve met.” Overcoming this self-doubt starts with honestly assessing your abilities (and your shortcomings) and then getting comfortable enough to capitalize on (and correct) them, adds Deborah H. Gruenfeld, the Moghadam Family Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior and Co-Director of the Executive Program for Women Leaders at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Here’s how to do that and get into the virtuous cycle that Schwartz describes. [Read more…]

How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs

How the Mighty FallBy Jim Collins –
The author of Good to Great on how to spot the subtle signs that your successful company is actually on course to sputter—and how to reverse the slide before it’s too late.

I pondered and puzzled and finally settled upon the question: Is America renewing its greatness, or is America dangerously on the cusp of falling from great to good? While I intended the question to be rhetorical (I believe America carries a responsibility to continuously renew itself, and it has met that responsibility throughout its history), the West Point gathering nonetheless erupted into an intense debate. Half of the participants argued that America stands as strong as ever, while the other half contended that America teeters on the edge of decline.

History shows, repeatedly, that the mighty can fall. The Egyptian Old Kingdom, the Chou Dynasty, the Hittite Empire—all fell. Athens fell. Rome fell. Even Britain, which stood a century before as a global superpower, saw its position erode. Is that the U.S.’s fate? Or will America always find a way to meet Lincoln’s challenge to be the last best hope of Earth?

At a break, the chief executive of one of America’s most successful companies pulled me aside. “I’ve been thinking about your question in the context of my company all morning,” he said. “We’ve had tremendous success in recent years, and I worry about that. So what I want to know is: How would you know?” [Read more…]