From the Author

Managing your expectations is important, primarily because the extent to which your work and your life match your expectations greatly influences your mood, your attitude, and your feelings of satisfaction and success. Experience shows that managing your expectations also impacts the objective reality of your work and your life. It’ll all become clear to you […]

I’ve written many times about the commonality – even the necessity, in some cases – of working with others (and I’ve given some suggestions here about how to do it well). This time I’d like to lay out some specific benefits (and dangers) of working with others when compared with working on your own. Better

You hear quite often that “hindsight is always 20/20.” By this, people mean that things are often obvious when looking backward, but not so clear when looking ahead. That’s mostly true, but it doesn’t automatically follow that looking backward has no value. People also commonly say: “It’s hard to drive forward by looking in your

Almost everyone agrees with the simple idea that passion is important. So I don’t have to justify diving into the process of supplementing your efforts to be productive and successful by adding extra passion. Here are some ideas on passion for you to ponder: Good and Bad Passion Everyone agrees passion is important, but you

Communication is central to our efforts toward productivity and success. But few of us communicate as productively as we could. One reason is that too much communication is haphazard, misdirected, poorly constructed, or intentionally outright manipulative. Productive communication, on the other hand, aims to understand other people, help them understand us, and get people’s priorities

There are several reasons to keep your focus on delivering high-quality results. These include: But none of this suggests that producing high-quality work is easy. Quality improvements usually require an intense focus on expertise, technique, and detail. Unfortunately, some people don’t enjoy or don’t value these requirements. Nevertheless, if you want to strengthen the quality

Too much advice is misleading. It’s too often based on incomplete information, incorrect assumptions, or irrelevant experience. Even if it’s helpful, on another level it can make the receiver feel less confident and more dependent on the advice giver. Whether you give it or get it, advice is too often much less worthwhile than you

As I’ve written before, self-awareness is an important building block of both productivity and success. The better you know yourself, the more accurately you can steer your efforts and your Basic Choices in directions that are most likely to satisfy and succeed. But self-awareness, like the self, is not a static body of knowledge. It’s

Some work is never done. Whether it’s cleaning your house, improving your personality, or anything in between, some types of work just go on and on without end. Many of us naturally feel a tendency to get tired of these routines, of doing the same things in the same ways every day, week, month, or

Increasing your level of productivity and success obviously depends to a great degree on your drive, as well as your native level of aptitude, talent, and energy. But there’s another important component that will help determine how high you can rise in any organization or endeavor: your hard skills. The plain fact is that, to