Success Rule Book

Stop Accepting Mediocrity

Do you spend your working life doing tasks you don't want to do, just to avoid your boss catching you out?

Most people do.

They do the bare minimum their boss will accept (or notice). All they do bares a watermark, the words "Will This Do?"

If it will, work is stopped, leaving mediocre results from the minimum amount of effort required.

Most people live their working lives to the 'what can I get away with' standard. It's pathetic, lazy and spectacularly self-defeating.

Be honest with me, and with yourself, for a moment. Wouldn't you love a big increase in salary? More control over what you do? A more responsible position where YOU call the shots? Of course you would! Hell, who wouldn't?!

So what's your game plan to get it?

If it's to do everything that's expected of you, I'm afraid you're in for disappointment.

If people got promoted for doing what was expected of them, MOST people would get promoted most of the
time. But they don't, because life doesn't work like that. Your employer takes it as read that you'll do what is expected of you. There are no brownie points in it for you.

If you want to life your dream life, you will need to do MORE than is expected of you. You must be in the business of positively surprising people.

If you work to rule, you are limiting yourself to roles similar to your current one. If you want something better, you must give more of yourself, and in the short-term not give a damn about whether your job description, salary, hours of work or job title reflect the work that you do.

Either your employer will recognize your work and reward you soon after you request it OR you will have the anecdotes, experience and bullet-points for
your Resume that you need to jump ship to an employer that will reward you.

Either way you win.

You deserve your dream life. Stop accepting mediocrity and work hard damn hard, and you will succeed at grasping the life you desire.

How to Succeed...

Fail.

Repeatedly.

Make 10,000 small failures a key goal. Not because you want to fail, but because to fail 10,000 times means you've tried 10,000 times, at least. With a willingness to learn from failure, those 10,000 times would have taught you something: How to fail reliably. By a process of elimination you would learn which actions and factors make failure less likely.

Many people see a lack of failure as a badge of pride. Many people are wrong!

A lack of failure is a badge of not having had the ambition to try, the willingness to work and the determination to overcome defeat in pursuit of excellence.

You may see Kobe Bryant or David Beckham on TV, scoring almost effortlessly from a distance. Yet what you don't see is the practice that went into building their abilities. Try to score. Fail. Try to score. Fail. Try again, fail. And so on, for hours. Practicing for years, failing often.

It's that repeated failure that forms the bedrock of their success.

How easily we forget how we learned to walk, talk, read and write. Our success did not come instantly. Instead we began each task as untalented failures, and failure after failure followed. Whilst you have long since forgotten those failures, their legacy is the very thing that ensures you can read this blog entry!

Worthy goals are so high and so difficult that we cannot help but fail repeatedly in our attempts to realize them. Each failure takes us closer to success, as long as we learn from our mistakes.
I wish you much success. So, I wish you much failure!

Got a Problem?

You're not alone.

You're rarely the first person to encounter a problem. Often millions will have faced the same problem before.

There is someone out there who has a solution, a product, a set of rules or a service that can help you.

Sure, you could ignore that help, and instead try to reinventing the wheel. I guess that would save you money. But it would waste your time, and worse, it would dramatically increase your chances of failure.

Next time you hit a problem, promise you'll investigate and use the help that's available.

So, need to lose some excess weight? Buy bags of diet food and sign up to a weight-loss class.

Need to increase your performance in your job? Buy and read a couple of books on your field.
Sign up for a training course that'll teach you facts, working methods, and skills to dramatically increase your capabilities.

Need to find Mr Right or Miss Right? There are countless dating agencies, Internet dating sites and personal ads out there just waiting to help you.

Need more money? There are people out there who can help you improve your marketability, your skills and your knowledge-base. There are intensive courses will help you get professional qualifications as quickly and as easily as possible. The web is full of sites that will save you money on your mortgage, your utility bills, and many of your purchases.

Life is too short to learn everything the hard way. Resolve to seek help next time you need it. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Don't choose to stumble along on your own.

Success is worth its high price tag. Embrace help to hasten your victory.

Beware of the Poisoners

There are many people who are unhappy in their work. Bored, understretched, undervalued, underpaid. Yet rather than take action to change their situation, they choose to do nothing, to stay in their job, and just whine.

They commit no time to improving their knowledge, skills and breadth of experience.

Although they feel unappreciated and undervalued, they do not seek employment from those that would value them more.

Many come in late and most leave as soon as the clock strikes 5pm. They never fail to remark that it's Friday ('Thank God') or Monday ('Oh God').

Throughout the day they whine loudly about their work load ("I've just got SO much to do. I'm SO busy. I don't know how I'll manage to do everything").

Yet strangely, they never stay late to make progress through their supposedly impossible and mountainous workload. But they'll waste an hour each day gossiping and bitching to whomever will listen.

They bad-mouth decent colleagues behind their backs. And they blame their own failures on their boss and the members of the management team, whom they regularly paint as being clueless, indecisive and self-serving.

Stay away from these people.

They are poisoners.

If you give them a chance, they will sap your willingness to take responsibility for your working life. They'll endanger your motivation. They'll encourage the view that work is pointless and futile, and that you should give up all hope of moving beyond mediocrity, into useful excellent, innovative and rewarding work.

The whiners are not bad people, but their attitudes infect the atmosphere at work, and risk harming all who are exposed to them. Be civil to the work-haters, but recognize the danger that their inaccurate and negative worldviews affecting your attitudes, and through them your actions and outcomes.

Be aware of the risk.

Beware of the poisoners.