Is There a Secret to Success? 22 Ways
Productive People Reach the Top
Whether you are an
entrepreneur, business owner or work for someone else, staying productive to
reach the top of your game does not have to be a constant challenge. The secret
to success is not so much a secret after all.
When you grow a strong grip on what inspires
and motivates you as well as what throws you off course, your honed ability to
harness your productivity can only set you on the path for success.
Increasing your productivity like the Elon
Musks and Richard Bransons of the world can be surprisingly simple.
Here are 22
of the ways they do it:
1.
Be emotionally connected to clear goals
Clarity is a must-have ingredient to being
productive. Leading marketing consultant, speaker and best-selling author Simon
Sinek explains in his book Start With Why that
in deciding between manipulation or inspiration as stronger influences of human
behavior, inspiration is more powerful and sustainable.
When you have an emotional connection to your
goals, you become better at searching for the means to achieve them.
2.
Revisit goals daily
Dedicate time each morning before your day
starts to review your goals. Stop, think and ask yourself:
“Regardless of whether or not my days are
great or challenging, do I still feel emotionally connected to this?”
Look for an underlying, resounding ‘yes’ and
a physical, positive shift of excitement. If you feel this, then your
productivity will be greater than if you are forcing yourself to work for a
purpose that does not give you a mental nor emotional return on investment.
3.
Use visualization to reach targets sooner
Thomas Edison envisioned the concept of the
light globe and eventually turned his imagined idea into reality. Much research
has shown that physical performance is greatly improved when the time is taken
to engage in carefully constructed imagery and visualization that ignites the
human senses.
Functional MRIs now showing our brains don’t
know the difference between what is real and what is imagined. This helps us
realize that using visualization techniques can accelerate the efficiency and
quality of our work in more focused ways without the same amount of physical
effort.
Instead of just imagine what you might have
for lunch, direct your daydreaming toward what you want to achieve, experience
and feel from your efforts!
4.
Re-prioritize throughout your day
In the best-selling book The One Thing,
Gary Keller and Jay Papasan advise that by asking yourself constantly:
“What is the one thing I can do, such that by
doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”
Your activity will be focused and aligned to
meeting your goals. You will spend far less time losing energy to distractions
which take you off course.
5.
Create a daily today list, not a to-do list
Being busy does not necessarily mean you are
productive. Having a long to-do list can sometimes be quite de-motivating.
Tony Schwartz, CEO of the Energy Project,
advises starting each day with one key task and ensuring that completing it (or
making good progress on it) moves you toward achieving your goals.
Should the first task be complete early on in
your day, move on to the second and third activity. However, if you still don’t
complete that one task, start the next day with completing it. Only move on to
the next task when you have completed the present one.
6.
Get up early
We don’t all have time or capacity to do a
5km run at 5 am, however, research shows the morning is the best time to set
your framework for a productive day. Our minds are freshest at this time of
day.
Before anything else, dedicate time to review
your goals, your key priorities for the day, exercise and nourishing your body.
Top performers allocate their first few hours
to projects relevant to their top priorities and delay meetings and
appointments until later. The satisfaction alone of seeing what you have
accomplished before 10 am alone helps you sustain a greater level of
productivity throughout the day even though your energy levels may start to
wane.
7.
Fuel your body according to your activity
Your body is your engine room, so it makes
sense to fuel it for the performance you want it to achieve.
Twenty-three time’s Olympic gold-medal winner
Michael Phelps does not eat the same carbohydrate-rich diet in offseason as
when he’s competing.
Whilst you may not be an elite athlete,
applying this mindset approach might mean increasing your intake of
nutrient-dense, low glycaemic food at planned intervals according to your day’s
schedule.
8.
Treat your mind like an asset
Top performers know their mindset and mental
health are the cornerstones that dictate their productivity. They guard their
exposure to energy-draining circumstances, people and media, and carefully
choose activities and events which are soul-enriching, energizing and relevant
to their goals and purpose.
Because they have a strong sense of purpose,
they choose reading material, networking and personal growth opportunities that
help them grow through the challenges they are facing at those points.
9.
Surround yourself with productive people
Identify and surround yourself with people
who talk less and do more. Even if those people fail and make mistakes more but
still make progress, they are improving and are much more likely to get the
results they seek.
This goes beyond simply reading about what
top performers do and socializing with those you identify as top performers.
Find programs that incorporate highly
productive practices and join mastermind groups where the members are long-term
communities that continually reap the results they seek.
Proactively choose to try and spend more time
with those people in their activity phases.
Not only will your productivity go through
the roof, your learning curve will be exponential.
10.
Nourish your mind strategically for your growth and development
Top performers are avid readers. They take
charge of their journey by committing to continually learning.
But it’s important to recognize that whilst
others have found certain literature to be extremely helpful for themselves,
this does not mean it is directly relevant to you or maybe it is….just not
right now.
Pick and choose considerately and steadily
what is relevant to you right now and put aside the other content for later.
You can always come back to it.
11.
Choose mentors wisely
Even if you don’t work in an industry that
requires you to commit to professional development and gaining supervision from
an expert, it is wise to seek out mentors.
Personal or professional mentors should not
have any invested agenda in helping you in order for you to get the best
objective advice and wisdom.
Seek out and ask for opportunities that allow
you to learn experientially or shadow them in action. Also, seek a couple of
different mentors. The more variety, the better and faster quality of learning
you will have.
12.
Always seek detailed and constructive feedback
No top performer is satisfied with general or
wishy-washy feedback. If you get no feedback – positive or negative – ask for
it.
Being told to simply do a better job next
time does not help you to improve. Invite and tease out instructions for
change. Gaining this will help you to accept failings and mistakes as well as
give you clear plan to already start moving forward.
Licking your wounds of disappointment will be
short-lived and any memories of receiving negative feedback will quickly become
yesterday’s news.
13.
Plan your day the night before
Closing your previous day recognizing what
you have achieved and planning what your next day will entail does for reducing
anxiety and experiencing better quality sleep.
Your plan does not have to be too detailed
but putting pen to paper and reflecting this back to yourself gives your mind a
sense of closure on the day. It also acknowledges unfinished items that will
take priority the next day.
14.
Perfect practice makes perfect
World renowned Grand Prix dressage trainer
Maria Gunther would teach her students that it wasn’t just practice that makes
perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.
It’s ok to make mistakes but even in
practice, we are always aiming to achieve our personal best.
Improving any technique or skill involves
constant refining and tweaking. It can also involve feeling discomfort which is
often a misunderstood sign of stretching and growing.
Top performers know and have a healthy
acceptance that there is no such thing as perfection but use their practice
opportunities as wisely as if they were in a once in a lifetime situation.
15.
Efficiency and effectiveness are not mutually exclusive
The best outcomes are achieved when the right
processes and techniques are executed to the finest detail.
When the steps that need to be taken are
clear, your focus on executing each of those steps well can only lead to better
results.
Ensure you’re not under pressure when
choosing a course of action to undertake and honor your own decision-making
process. Then concentrate on doing each step well.
“Efficiency is doing the thing right.
Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” ~ Peter Drucker
16.
Use the Four Ds for effective prioritization
Having meetings and sorting emails at the
expense of finalizing and sending a new business proposal is clearly
non-productive. The four Ds are an extremely quick way to identify time-wasting
activities and enrich your focus to things that truly matter:
- Do – do it straight away
- Delay – schedule a time to come back to it
later
- Delegate – allocate the activity to someone
with better capacity to complete it
- Dump – discard it permanently
Whenever you have difficulty deciding what
needs to happen, make it a rule to apply one of the four Ds and you will make
decisions more quickly, easily and effectively.
17.
Invest in developing resilience skills
Top performers have excellent emotional
regulation skills and have become skillful in observing and mastering
regulating those of others.
Through learning coping and stress management
techniques such as meditation and mindfulness, top performers strengthen self-awareness,
which helps them to quickly identify what they need to do to heal, recover and
bounce back better and stronger.
Top performers invest in personal
development, knowing that they need to become and behave like the person who
produces great results before they start to see those results.
18.
Monitor and manage your energy
The amount of time we spend sitting each day
is a far cry from the 12 miles an average human used to walk daily. Research
quantifying the effects of physical inactivity has found that reducing
inactivity by even 10% could avert 533,000 deaths globally.
In reviewing such research, Silicon
Valley-based author and speaker Nilofer Merchant has resorted to having ‘walk
and talk’ meetings. Merchant reports not only does she feels
the physical benefits of walking 20-30 miles a week, she says she has become a
better listener as the activity forces her to concentrate on what is being
discussed.
The next time you take a break, consider
having a walking meeting or undertake five minutes of yoga poses or mobility stretching.
19.
Develop and strengthen your mindset
When we are faced with tough challenges and
feel stuck, Carol Dweck , Psychology Professor at Stanford University advocates
the practice of regularly asking ourselves if there are other perspectives and
possibilities we cannot see yet.
By asking ourselves this question, we stop
thought rumination and downward thought-spiraling, and start activating a part
of our brain that helps us claw our way back toward finding solutions.
20.
Work with performance psychologists and coaches
Highly productive performers seek the support
and help of a team but not just employees and work associates. Collaborating
with a coach to develop your future goals and action plans increases your
accountability.
The added advantage of working with a
performance psychologist means you can understand and uncover unexplained
blockages, resistance and behavior that have kept you stuck.
You can develop emotionally intelligent goals
as well as mental fitness techniques and strategies to skyrocket your
productivity, performance and results.
21.
Have less and shorter meetings
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recommends
having a meeting of a small number of people, a succinct agenda and closing a
one-hour meeting early if the key agenda items are covered in the first 15
minutes.
CEO and Chairman of the
Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance Carlos Ghosn recommends giving people less
time than they request for a meeting, saying it drives them to be more
effective, punctual and direct with the agenda.
Free up valuable time if you don’t really
need the full hour that was scheduled.
22.
Become masterful at saying no
When success starts to mound, people take
notice and new requests come knocking at your door. As flattering and
validating as this is, invitations, requests for help and support can quickly
derail you.
Developing several responses which respectfully
appreciate but generally explain why you cannot honor those requests will help
you maintain good relationships whilst protecting your time, energy and
resources. You’ll actually feel good about saying no and keeping your
productivity wheels turning.
Focus
on one small thing first
After examining the 22 ways productive people
reach the top, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed.
The secret to success here is to simply
pick one area to focus on at a given time until it has become your second nature.
For example, you might start going to bed an
hour early to rise an hour early to do some kind of physical workout
activities. Once you have mastered this, you might move on to working on to
surrounding yourself with positive productive individuals.
The point here is it takes continuous
practice to reach the top.
Malachi
Thompson https://www.lifehack.org/789823/secret-to-success
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