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.

Go The Extra Mile

Your many skills go unused, your knowledge goes untapped and your creativity has been muzzled.

You desperately need a solution. And that solution exists. You must 'Go The Extra Mile'

'Going the extra mile' lets you get to these really important things. The things that make the difference between Mediocrity and Excellence. It's not altruistic, there's a great deal in it for you.

These tasks have the biggest pay-off, they the most difference to your life and those of others, and they utilize your skills, knowledge and creativity to the full.

Workloads often vary according to customer requirements and in-house deadlines such as promotion schedules. If you're usually busy, these temporary increases in workload will create a backlog of work. A little bit of extra work will save you the anxiety the backlog would cause you, and reduce the risk of confrontations and loss of credibility arising from missing deadlines and work delivered late, caused by the backlog.

Working a few extra hours occasionally frees up time during the working day, allowing you to cope with urgent work that may arrive. You'll be able to give your coworkers a better idea of when the work they have asked you to do will be done, as the answer will no longer be contingent on the end date of 3 or 4 more important or urgent pieces of work. The extra time in the working day helps you answer coworkers emails more quickly, and deliver on minor requests with minimal delay.

You can do what you want outside working hours. So when you work late you can ignore urgent but unimportant work, and concentrate on the non-urgent important work that gets shunted to the back of your to-do list. This non-urgent important work is often more interesting than the 'day to day' stuff that clutters you working hours.

Outside working hours you're be able to work in peace, without constant interruptions by coworkers and customers.

Being seen to work longer hours flags your commitment to your coworkers and bosses, and due to their feelings of sympathy/guilt they will tend to reduce what they demand of you, leaving you with a greater degree of autonomy.

You need not justify anything you do in your own time. So you can spend time on unrequested and speculative projects which could improve your company's products or services, or your own efficiency. You can spend time brainstorming, and engaging in 'blue sky' thinking. You can spend time on tasks and projects for which the pay-off is hard to predict, and making the business case would prove problematic.

You can spend extra time 'polishing' things. Many people spend hours researching and analyzing, leaving themselves little time to work on their PowerPoint Presentation or an Excel spreadsheet. Had they chosen to spend a little more time after work their presentation could have gone from mundane to memorable and remarkable. Half of success in business is in the presentation and communication.

Salary and Responsibilities are strongly related. If you want a good salary, you will need to gain responsibility. You will only gain responsibility within the workplace if your Boss feels you have the skills, knowledge, character and motivation required to handle any extra responsibility. In addition, they must be confident that you're coping well with your existing workload, and that the extra-responsibilities are not going to be neglected, or fulfilled at the expense of your existing work. No-one wants to delegate responsibility to someone who doesn't have the time to do the necessary work.

Volunteering to help others outside your area of action adds to your experience and understanding, but is rarely justified within the specialization-of-production / division-of-labor operated during working hours. If you do it in your own time, you don't need to justify it to your boss or others.

If you work long hours, no-one minds whether you are a bit late occasionally.

While scoffers may prefer to let work pile up and deadlines pass, I believe that do to so would be stupid and irresponsible. You cannot be a success in life if for 40 hours each week you are a failure.

Going the Extra Mile is a choice all life's winners make. And you can and must join them, and grab the great opportunities work offers you.