Advancing at a measured pace—step by step, from where you are to a little bit better—may seem the logical and safe way to proceed. But you can and should think in terms of skipping levels and making quantum leaps. You can move rapidly, easily, and surprisingly safely from your present level of accomplishment to a place that is several stages higher. You can do it instantly—and directly. And you can do it in virtually every aspect of your business or career activities. You can do it by not limiting yourself to following only those practices people in your industry follow.
Think about it logically. You can’t be a follower and expect to ever really become a leader in your field. It just doesn’t work that way in today’s fast-changing world. Instead, you need to see the overlooked opportunities that are all around you and act on the vast sums of untapped income and unclaimed success just waiting to be harnessed. You probably spend too little time studying the most successful, innovative, and profitable ideas people in other industries use to grow and prosper. Yet, if you start focusing on other industries’ success practices, you’ll be amazed at how easily you can adapt these ideas to your own business situation. Suddenly, you’ll see significantly better ways to produce significantly better results from the same time, manpower, effort, activity, and capital. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham (To become a master) We generally follow what others have done, performing the accepted exercises for these skills. This is the path of amateurs. To attain mastery, you must adopt what we shall call Resistance Practice.
The principle is simple—you go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice. First, you resist the temptation to be nice to yourself. You become your own worst critic; you see your work as if through the eyes of others. You recognize your weaknesses, precisely the elements you are not good at. Those are the aspects you give precedence to in your practice. You find a kind of perverse pleasure in moving past the pain this might bring. Second, you resist the lure of easing up on your focus. You train yourself to concentrate in practice with double the intensity, as if it were the real thing times two. In devising your own routines, you become as creative as possible. You invent exercises that work upon your weaknesses. You give yourself arbitrary deadlines to meet certain standards, constantly pushing yourself past perceived limits. In this way you develop your own standards for excellence, generally higher than those of others. In the end, your five hours of intense, focused work are the equivalent of ten for most people. Soon enough you will see the results of such practice, and others will marvel at the apparent ease in which you accomplish your deeds. Mastery by Robert Greene When it comes to mastering a skill, time is the magic ingredient.
Assuming your practice proceeds at a steady level, over days and weeks certain elements of the skill become hardwired. Slowly, the entire skill becomes internalized, part of your nervous system. The mind is no longer mired in the details, but can see the larger picture. It is a miraculous sensation and practice will lead you to that point, no matter the talent level you are born with. The only real impediment to this is yourself and your emotions—boredom, panic, frustration, insecurity. You cannot suppress such emotions—they are normal to the process and are experienced by everyone, including Masters. What you can do is have faith in the process. The boredom will go away once you enter the cycle. The panic disappears after repeated exposure. The frustration is a sign of progress—a signal that your mind is processing complexity and requires more practice. The insecurities will transform into their opposites when you gain mastery. Mastery by Robert Greene The best way to get that is to meet people that are polar opposites; you learn the most from them3/5/2013 People ask me what my greatest strengths are and I say perspective. The best way to get that is to meet people that are polar opposites; you learn the most from them. There are pieces of you that are inherently yours, but everything else is a collection of the things you’ve seen and the people you’ve met.
I found my voice and no one was going to take it from me. It wasn’t Swift’s voice, it was mine, but he gave me the confidence to let it go. My dad urged me to fight, but Swift taught me how. It wasn’t just sparring in the kung fu room or wearing a belt. I started to study the mechanics that writers and orators used: complex sentences, allusions, metaphors, framing, satire, parody, alliteration, syntax, logos, pathos, and ethos. It wasn’t enough to be right; you had to know how to argue. I started reading classic essays like “American Scholar” or Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” There was a formula to being persuasive and I wanted to figure it out. Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir by Eddie Huang You want a promotion. Go to your supervisor and offer to work in the higher position for sixty to ninety days at your current salary. You can guarantee either that the company will be completely satisfied or guarantee a specific level of performance or result. At the end of the trial period, they can make the promotion and raise official or you’ll return to your previous position. As president of Chrysler, Lee Iacocca took only a $1 annual salary and stock options that would pay off only if he improved the company’s bottom line. Once you’ve offered a risk-free opportunity and people are ready to do business with you, what’s the best thing and the right thing to sell them? . . .
Increased income is a by-product of management’s perception of your worth. Find something that no one else in your company is doing (or doing well) and voluntarily add it onto your responsibilities. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham Before Henry Ford would hire anyone for an important position, he would have lunch with them. If the potential employee would salt the food before tasting it, Mr. Ford would not hire the person. The reason? Salting the food before tasting it indicated the person would implement a plan before testing it—ergo, no job. Test everything. It’s simple and the payoff can be enormous. It’s not at all unusual when you test and compare the effectiveness of one approach against another for the superior approach to outperform the inferior one by as much as ten or twenty times.
Until you start testing different responses and performance levels, you’re leaving massive potential on the table. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham By making a family, we had sewn our lives together. Cut one thread and destroy them all. Words from The Godfather echoed in my head: “Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written, “Being a man is, precisely, being responsible.”
That’s the secret philosophy of real manhood—a man takes responsibility for everything that happens. He never, ever makes excuses. If it’s bad, he should have seen it coming, avoided it. He’s a master of his fate. The Disaster Diaries: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Apocalypse by Sam Sheridan |
Click to set custom HTML
Categories
All
Disclosure of Material Connection:
Some of the links in the post above are “affiliate links.” This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” |