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Successful people continually put the pressure on themselves to perform at high levels. Unsuccessful people have to be instructed and pressured by others.
Most of your emotions, positive or negative, are determined by how you talk to yourself on a minute-to-minute basis.
It is not what happens to you but the way that you interpret the things that are happening to you that determines how you feel.
You must refuse to let the unavoidable difficulties and setbacks of daily life affect your mood or emotions.
“The last of the human freedoms [is] to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
“You should never share your problems with others because 80 percent of people don’t care about them anyway, and the other 20 percent are kind of glad that you’ve got them in the first place.”
“difficulties come not to obstruct but to instruct.”
For you to stay calm, clearheaded, and capable of performing at your best, detach on a regular basis from the technology that overwhelms you.
We taught him about the 80/20 Rule and how it applied to e-mails. He deleted and unsubscribed from the 80 percent of his e-mails that had no value. Of the remaining 20 percent, only 4 percent required immediate responses. The other 16 percent could be transferred to an action folder to be worked on later.
“But don’t you have to stay plugged into technology to keep current with the news?” I tell them, “If it is really important, someone will tell you.”
When you start your day with a few shots of dopamine triggered by your e-mail or IM bell going off, you find it extremely difficult to pay close attention to your important tasks for the rest of the day.
When you develop the habit of completing three hours of important work each morning, first thing, you will both double your productivity and break yourself of the habit of checking your e-mail all day long. You will regain full control of your life.
An important point to remember is that you have deep within you an “urge to completion,” or what is often referred to as a “compulsion to closure.”
This means that you actually feel happier and more powerful when you start and complete a task of any kind. You satisfy a deep subconscious need to bring finality to a job or project. This sense of completion or closure motivates you to start the next task or project and then to persist toward final completion. This act of completion triggers the release of endorphins in your brain, mentioned earlier.
Set aside thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-minute time segments that you use to work on and complete important tasks.
Many highly productive people schedule specific activities in preplanned time slots all day long. These people build their work lives around accomplishing key tasks one at a time.
One of the best work habits of all is to get up early and work at home in the morning for two to three hours.
Perhaps the most outwardly identifiable quality of high-performing men and women is action orientation. They are in a hurry to get their key tasks completed.
Highly productive people take the time to think, plan, and set priorities.
When you work on your most important tasks at a high and continuous level of activity, you can actually enter into an amazing mental state called “flow.”
One of the ways you can trigger this state of flow is by developing a sense of urgency. This is an inner drive and desire to get on with the job quickly and get it done fast.
The faster you work and the more you get done, the higher will be your levels of self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride. You will feel in complete control of your life and your work.
In the final analysis, nothing will help you more in your career than for you to get the reputation for being the kind of person who gets important work done quickly and well.
Elbert Hubbard defined self-discipline as “the ability to make yourself do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.”
