We’ve been talking about productivity and success from many angles and with focus on many different elements. This time, let’s take a step back and look at the big picture: what kind of person tends to be the most productive and successful? What do they know that others don’t? What do they do that others can’t? What are the attributes that others lack, that lead them to be so marvelously successful?
In fact, just who exactly is the “Productivity and Success Star?”
The Person with Goals
Becoming a “Productivity and Success Star” is impossible if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish. So your first step on this road is to determine what you really want to achieve.
You can accomplish the goals that other people set for you. But to deliver a long-term effort at an extremely high level, you’ll almost certainly have to draw on inner motivations. And that nearly always requires being driven by insatiable desires to accomplish goals that you have identified and targeted for yourself.
The more accurately you recognize your own vision for your own future, the more likely you can stay on the road to becoming a “Productivity and Success Star.”
The Person with Self-Control
Just as striving for externally-imposed goals will generally not draw out your best efforts, reacting to externally-imposed feelings, attitudes, and values will distract you from giving your all to the goals you care most about.
This is why a “Productivity and Success Star” tends to exercise a high degree of self-control. S/he doesn’t wilt under criticism, doesn’t lose confidence when others make different choices, doesn’t quit when others offer discouraging words.
The “Productivity and Success Star” remains resolute and confident about following their own inner-compass. They accept setbacks for what they are, and respond to them by searching even harder for other ways forward.
The Person with Courage
Productivity and success rarely come easily. If they did, we’d all be highly productive and successful.
They actually come more often to those who overcome the fears and uncertainties that are such common experiences for most of us, and who take whatever next steps are appropriate, despite all the disincentives that surround us.
When we strive to reach difficult goals, disappointment, failure, embarrassment, pain, and other negatives are always possible outcomes. The “Productivity and Success Star” is just as aware as we are of these possibilities, but doesn’t allow them to deter taking the next step.
The Person with Focus
At any given moment, there is always a long list of things we might do. Many of them are tempting. Many of them are relatively easy, and highly rewarding. But few of them hold the promise of bringing you closer to your most important objectives.
The “Productivity and Success Star” has the same kind of long list of actions to choose from, but has the tendency to select the one or two tasks that will lead most directly toward an important goal.
Becoming a “Productivity and Success Star” is a long-term project that involves upgrading and strengthening key aspects of your work and your life. But while it’s not easy, the good new is that if you want to get there, and you’re willing to put in the time and effort, you almost certainly can.
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