Achieving Competence And Personal Mastery
The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, no matter what their chosen field.
—Vince Lombardi
You will only be happy, satisfied, and capable of enjoying high levels of self-confidence when you know that you are absolutely excellent at doing something that is important to yourself and others. What is it? What could it be? These are two of the great questions of life.
Fortunately, you and every other person has the inborn ability to become excellent at what you do, and to achieve peak performance in your life and in your chosen field. You have the capacity to function in the “exceptional” range and to achieve mastery in any area that is important to you.
The Edge of the Envelope
In the world of test pilots and prototype aircraft, as described in the book and the movie The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), they refer continually to what is called the “envelope.”
This “envelope” consists of an upper and lower edge. The upper edge marks the height and speed that any previous aircraft or jet has flown, up to the time of the most current test run. This upper edge of the “envelope” is the maximum height and speed deemed possible for a new aircraft before it theoretically comes apart in the air or malfunctions or self-destructs.
The goal of the test pilot is to expand the edge of the envelope. His job is to fly ever faster and higher in order to discover the outer limits of speed, height, and endurance that a particular aircraft is capable of achieving. The test pilot continually takes the aircraft higher and faster until he feels that the plane has reached its absolute outer limits. This is where and when he pulls back to avoid destroying the aircraft, and even fatally crashing.
This is called the “outer edge of the envelope” and it then becomes the “lower edge of the envelope” for the next aircraft and the next round of testing.
Every aircraft, no matter how well made, has an outer limit on its capabilities. It can fly only so fast and so high, and no further. Very little can be done to expand the mechanical ability of something made of metal by the hands of man.
Expand Your Envelope
The major difference between you and an aircraft is that there is no “outer edge” to your personal envelope. As Emerson said, “The power which resides in man is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
Thomas Edison said, “If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.” Maxwell Maltz, the author of “Psycho-Cybernetics,” said, “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. And this power becomes available to you just as soon as you can change your beliefs.”
In other words, the outer limit of your envelope, or the outer limit of your potential, is not fixed in time or space, like that of an aircraft. Your limits are determined solely by your own beliefs and by your own confidence in what you think is possible for you.
Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem
Your self-confidence is closely connected to your self-esteem, and to “how much you like yourself.” Dr. Nathaniel Brandon calls self-esteem “your reputation with yourself.” It is how you feel about yourself and your abilities, in relation to any situation, that determines how much you like yourself and consider yourself to be a valuable and worthwhile person. The more you like
yourself, the better you do.
The flip side of self-esteem is what psychologists call “self-efficacy.” Self-efficacy is a measure of how effective and competent you feel you are to perform a particular task or to achieve your goals. This is called “performance-based self-esteem.” What this means is that if your self-
confidence and your belief in yourself are determined by your self-esteem or how much you like yourself, then your self-esteem is determined by how capable you feel you are in any given set of circumstances.
For example, if a problem comes up at work or home and you are so familiar with it that you can solve it quickly and correctly, your self-efficacy and your self-esteem goes up. You feel more capable and confident and more willing to take on other challenges and difficulties. You feel more positive and optimistic. You feel like an excellent person.
If, on the other hand, a problem or difficulty came up and you were unable to do anything to solve it, and you felt frustrated or ineffective, your self-esteem would suffer and your self-confidence would go down. You would feel negative about yourself and your abilities. You might even become angry or depressed. You would feel powerless rather than powerful.
That’s why they say, in playing poker, “The winners laugh and tell jokes while the losers say, ‘shut up and deal.’ ”
Build Your Own Self-Confidence
The law of cause and effect applies to everything you are today and to everything that you become. If the effect that you desire is high and unshakable levels of self-confidence, then it is necessary that you engage in the same behaviours practiced by others who enjoy high and unshakable levels of self-confidence, and you will soon experience high levels of self-confidence yourself.
Studies conducted on thousands of men and women who have moved from ordinary to extraordinary performance, and who have moved from feelings of inadequacy to feeling great about themselves, show that there is a direct cause-effect relationship between competence and mastery on the one hand, and self-confidence on the other.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago wrote an excellent book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008). Peak experience is a form of “natural high” that causes you to feel absolutely terrific about yourself, and it gives you a wonderful overall feeling of well-being and happiness. The causes of this effect are now well known.
Achieving Peak Performance
To attain this wonderful, healthy feeling of optimal performance, you need clear goals, challenging standards, regular feedback, total concentration, step-by-step success, and a feeling that you are expanding your capabilities to a new, higher level.
When you have created a situation in which you experience all of these, you sense that you are working at the outer edge of your own personal envelope. You feel that you are getting progressively better and better at something you are ideally suited to do, and that while you are still working within the range of your capabilities, you are stretching yourself at every moment.
When you are caught up in this kind of experience, you often lose track of time. You become unaware of hunger, thirst, or fatigue. You feel calm and clear-headed and euphoric. Tests show when you are in this state of flow, your brain releases endorphins, nature’s happy drug, which causes you to feel happy and energized.
Often, while you are in this state, the rest of the world seems to slow down. You seem to function with extraordinary clarity. You seem capable of accomplishing great quantities of work in a shorter period of time, with great accuracy and few mistakes. You realize that if you could have this flow
experience on a regular basis, you could do incredible things in your work and in your life.
Getting Into the Flow Experience
Everyone has had this heightened experience at some time, usually when they have been under a tremendous amount of stress to get a lot done in a short period of time. However, at the same time,they had clear goals and a strong belief that they were capable of meeting the challenge. At this point, they kicked into “flow” and felt as though they had taken off and left the ground.
You have had this experience yourself in the past. Often, it was so extraordinary that you remembered it for many months or even years. And here’s the point. Men and women who achieve extraordinary things in life are merely ordinary men and women who have learned how to put themselves into “flow” and to function at peak performance more often than the average person. And what someone else has done, you can do too.
In every study of success and self-confidence, in every situation in which a person enjoys high levels of self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride, we find that they all have one thing in common. And that one thing is that each high-achieving man or woman is in the right place, at the right time, doing exactly the work that he or she is uniquely qualified to do. Not only are these
people the happiest and highest-performing men and women in our society, but you personally will never be truly happy and truly satisfied until you take your rightful place among them.
Find Your True Place
One of the greatest joys of human existence is to find your “true place,” the job or occupation that is ideally meant for you, and then to throw your whole heart into doing it and doing it well. The most fortunate people in our society are those who are so totally absorbed in their work that they don’t know where their work ends and their play begins. If they could, many of them would do what they love for free, and many do. If they won 10 million dollars in the lottery, this is what they would consciously choose to do for the rest of their lives or until the money ran out.
Spiritual teacher Emmet Fox referred to this as your “heart’s desire.” He said that you are here on Earth to do something special, something that perhaps only you can do, and that you will never be truly fulfilled until you find it and completely commit yourself to it.
The remarkable thing, said Fox, is that you almost always have an idea of what it is. You only need to listen to yourself, and then trust the guidance you receive.
Grandma Moses
When Grandma Moses, as she came to be called, was a young farm girl, she had a desire to paint, but her family and friends told her that that was nonsense. They told her that, as a farm girl, her role in life was to marry a farm boy and to have and raise farm kids. So she put her heart’s desire aside and did what she thought she was supposed to do.
She had children by the time she was out of her teens, and more children in her 20s. In her 40s she became a grandmother, and in her 60s a great-grandmother. When she turned 75, her husband was dead and her children were grown, and the doctor told her that she was too old to work on the farmany longer. She felt that she didn’t have much time left, so she decided to fulfill her “heart’s desire” and do some painting before she passed on.
She went to a nearby town and visited an art store. The person in the art store sold her some paints and canvasses and brushes, and showed her how to use them. She went back to her farm and sat down and began painting what came to be called “primitive American landscapes.”
Grandma Moses finished her first painting when she was 78. When she was one 101 years old, a major gallery in New York City held a showing of her works. In the last 10 years of her life, some of her paintings were selling for more than a $100,000 each.
Now, here’s the rub. She was told as a young girl that she couldn’t paint because it cost too much and no one could afford it. Yet, when she began painting, she earned more in a year from her paintings than she and her husband had earned in an entire lifetime of hard work on the farm. She
was not only a complete natural; she was also a totally original talent.
It’s been estimated that, if she had begun painting in her late teens as she really wanted to do, and her paintings had been as successful commercially as they still are today, she might have become one of the richest women in America.
Follow Your Heart
The history of the human race is written in the life stories of men and women who followed their heart’s desires and did what they were uniquely qualified to do, and did it with all their heart. And no matter what your situation, this possibility lies open to you, right now.
Colonel Harland Sanders was 66 years old before he sold his first chicken based on his Kentucky Fried Chicken recipe. He had been working as a cook as the owner of his own small café, all his life, preparing fried chicken with his recipe. Then, at the age of 66, when he started doing what he should have been doing decades before, he began building his franchise business and became one of the best known and wealthiest people in the world.
Courage and Confidence Are Essential
Many men and women have told me that summing up the courage to do what they really wanted to do was the turning point in their lives. Some of them had dramatically increased their incomes, 5 and 10 times, although some had not. In every case, they were working harder than ever before, but as a result, they were happier than they had ever been. Their postures are strong and straight, their eyes shine, their voices are clear, their language is positive, and it’s obvious that they are really enjoying their lives. They have a calm, quiet confidence in themselves that is unmistakable, and it makes them stand out from others around them.
Your development of competence and mastery, and the self-confidence that goes with it, actually begin with self-analysis and self-awareness. Socrates said that the beginning of all wisdom and understanding is contained in the words: “Man, know thyself.” In analyzing yourself to determine what it is that would be ideal for you to do, there are six approaches you can use.
First, ask yourself these questions:
1. What talents, skills, and abilities do you have that seem to be natural to you?
2. What have you been able to do easily and well in the past that seems to be difficult for other people?
3. What subjects in school and what parts of your work have you naturally gravitated toward?
4. What did you most enjoy doing between the ages of 7 and 14? (Ask your mother!) This is often a predictor of what you should be doing as an adult.
5. What parts of your work do you love to do and seem to do well?
6. What work or activities give you a natural high? They give you energy, fill you with enthusiasm, and you lose track of time when you are doing them.
Every person is put on this earth with a unique combination of talents and inclinations that makes him or her different from anyone else who has ever lived. And it only is when you find the special situation that can most benefit from your unique capabilities that you will be able to make the greatest contribution and enjoy the great rewards, both tangible and intangible. Finding the right job for you, and then becoming excellent at that job, is one of the chief responsibilities of adult life.
The Four Quadrants of Work
An excellent exercise in self-discovery is for you to divide your work activities into four quadrants. (This was first suggested by Victor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy.) The four quadrants are divided by what is hard to learn versus what is easy to learn and what is hard to do versus what is easy to do.
Quadrant One: In the first quadrant you find those jobs and activities that are hard to learn and hard to do. These are probably areas for which you have no natural facility and from which you get very little pleasure. Like a sales person having to do detailed account reports or financial analysis, or a computer programmer expected to make sales calls or do public speaking. The individual and the occupation are not suited to each other. They are hard to learn and always hard to do.
Quadrant Two: This quadrant contains things that are easy to learn but hard to do. Hard physical labour might fall into this category, like digging a ditch with a shovel. It’s easy to learn, but it’s always hard to do.
Quadrant Three: This quadrant contains those jobs or activities that are hard to learn, but easy to do. Driving a car or typing with a typewriter might fall into this category. They are difficult to learn at first, but once you have learned them, they are easy to do afterwards.
Quadrant Four: This quadrant, in terms of what you should ideally be doing, is the most important. These are the jobs that are easy to do and they were so easy to learn that you often forgot how you learned them at all. These are invariably the types of jobs or the kind of work at which you excel and which are almost effortless for you, although they may be difficult for others. This is the work or job that you should be doing with your life.
Examine Your Work History
Look back over your life and ask yourself, “What activities, behaviours, or decisions have been most responsible for my success in life, to date?”
You will probably find that less than 5 percent of the things that you have said or done have accounted for most of the success you have enjoyed. You may find that it was your unique ability to solve a particular kind of problem or to take advantage of a particular type of opportunity. You may find that your special talent was an interpersonal skill that enabled you to influence and persuade other people at a particular time and place. You may find, on analysis, that it was an ability to take charge and accept responsibility for accomplishing a particular goal.
Whatever has been responsible for your successes in life to date may be a good indication what you should be doing in the future.
Design Your Ideal Work Life
Describe in detail the amount of money you would like to earn, the kind of work you would like to do, the size and character of the company you would like to work for, the type of people you would like to work with, the kind of customers that you would like to sell to, and the level of responsibility or position you would like to attain. As you think through the kind of job that would make you happy, you may find that it is a completely different field than the one you are in now.
Maximize Your Return on Energy
Analyze your work based on the measure that I call “return on energy.” Leaders in every field deliberately apply their talents and energies where they can achieve their greatest return on the amount of energy—mental, emotional, and physical—that they invest in any endeavour. They refuse to take on jobs or work in areas where they cannot perform at exceptional levels. They treat themselves as valuable resources and they spend their energies very carefully.
One of the questions that you might continually ask yourself is, “Is this the best possible use of my time and energy?”
Is what you are doing right now the most valuable thing that you could be doing, given your particular combination of talents and abilities? Often, answering this question will help you to see that there is a vast difference between what you are currently doing and what you should be doing if you want to be fulfilling more of your potential.
Do What You Love
Marsha Sinetar wrote a top-selling book a few years ago whose title says it all: Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow (Dell Publishing Company, 1987). Almost every really successful, happy man or woman will say that the reason for their success is that they are “doing what they love to do.”
Whenever a person is unhappy for any reason, I always ask them how much they enjoy their work, and would they choose to do this type of work if there were other options open to them? Invariably when someone is generally unhappy with their life, especially a man, they are dissatisfied with
their work for some reason.
Unfortunately, there is an old myth in our society that suggests that work is a penalty you pay during the day so that you can get your enjoyment from other things in the evenings and on the weekends. Many people view work as a punishment that is unavoidable. They try to do it as well as they need to so that they don’t get fired, but they never really think about whether they enjoy it.
However, this attitude is not for you. Your life is too precious and valuable to spend it doing something you don’t enjoy. Every minute of it should be spent doing things that you love and care about, and that make you happy.
The wonderful thing is that the highest paid people worldwide, are often working at jobs that they enjoy so much that they hate to go home at night, and the lowest paid people are invariably found at jobs they dislike, in which they are just going through the motions.
Two Questions to Test Job Suitability
Here are two simple tests to determine whether you are in the right job for you.
1. Would you continue to work at that job if you won a million dollars in the lottery tomorrow?
If the first thing that you would do would be to quit your job if you had enough money, then this simply means that you are in the wrong position for you.
2. Use what I call the “clock test.” People who are in the wrong job watch the clock all the time. They are very aware of what time they start, and what time they quit. People who are in the right job are seldom aware of the clock, except to know how little time they have left to do the work they really enjoy.
However you measure it, choosing the right work for you is central to your enjoying high feelings of happiness, self-esteem and self-confidence, not only in your work, but in every other area of your life.
Commit to Excellence
Once you have chosen your ideal job or occupation for this stage of your career, your biggest responsibility is to make the decision to become very good, and then to become excellent, at what you do.
In a lengthy study on successful Americans, the Gallup organization discovered that “expertise,” or being recognized by your peers as one of the very best in your field, was one of the essential ingredients for success in American life.
Self-confidence comes from positive knowing, rather than positive thinking. It is only when you know that you are outstanding in your chosen field that you really feel terrific about yourself, and that you enjoy high levels of self-confidence and happiness.
Men and women who are good at what they do, and who know that they are good at what they do, are very different from those who are only average. They walk and talk and dress and behave differently. They have an attitude of assurance and certainty about themselves that causes them to stand out in any group. They have a deep-down sense of self-worth and self-confidence that is evident to everyone around them.
The Law of Accumulation
This brings us to a very important mental principle called the “law of accumulation.” The application of this law is a fundamental reason for success in every field, including yours. This law says that every great life or great career is an accumulation of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of efforts that nobody ever sees or appreciates. Great success is the result of countless hours, maybe even months and years, of preparation and hard work toward the goal of becoming very good at what you are doing.
This law of accumulation says that life is very much like a balance sheet, with both credits and debits. Every time you do something positive to enhance your abilities and to improve your life, you get a credit on the credit side of your ledger. Each time you waste your time, or neglect to take advantage of an opportunity to learn and grow, you get a debit on the debit side of your ledger.
Here’s the key: everything counts. Everything that you do or fail to do is written down and totalled up on your balance sheet. Everything that you do or fail to do, counts in some way. Nothing is neutral. Everything is either moving you toward a better life, or moving you away from it.
Everything counts.
A successful, happy, self-confident person is an individual who has consciously and deliberately built up a lot of credits on his or her balance sheet. An unhappy, negative, or insecure person is a person who has a lot of debits on his or her balance sheet. Because the only things that count are
your actions, it seems that every positive and constructive action you engage in adds up and increases your levels of happiness, self-confidence and self-esteem.
The Law of Incremental Improvement
Perhaps the most important corollary of the law of accumulation is what is called the law of incremental improvement. This is really the law that explains how you move from wherever you are to the top of your field. This is the law that explains all great success everywhere in the world. This law simply states that a person becomes good at his or her chosen field by improving incrementally, continuously, over a long period of time.
Darren Hardy, has written a book entitled, The Compound Effect (Vanguard Press, 2011), in which he explains how it is that everything positive you do in your life compounds and multiplies, growing with force and power over the months and years. As Einstein said, “Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe.”
Pattern Recognition
In a study on the subject of mastery, reported on in the magazine Psychology Today, the researchers concluded that mastery consisted of the ability to recognize a great variety of patterns in a given situation, based on what they called a “high level of integrative complexity.”
Integrative complexity is defined as the ability to recognize patterns in a situation and to accurately predict what is likely to happen and the best action to take, based on previous experiences with similar situations.
For example, a sales person would achieve a high level of confidence and capability in a sales situation by having both studied his or her profession and by having been in countless previous sales situations. He or she would have developed the ability to integrate knowledge and experience and to recognize a particular pattern in the sales situation based on previous sales situations that were similar to this one.
An excellent business person is one who has developed this same capability of recognizing a pattern when it occurs again, drawing on previous experiences, and, therefore, responding effectively by doing and saying the right things to complete the business transaction successfully or making the correct investment decision.
The Grand Masters
The researchers found that a grand master in chess, for example, was able to recognize as many as 100,000 different patterns or layouts on the chess board and had developed a strategy to deal with each one. A national chess champion was able to recognize perhaps 50,000 patterns. A tournament
chess player was able to recognize perhaps 10,000 patterns on the chessboard, and so on.
Their conclusion was that it takes several thousand hours of research and practice to achieve and perform at exceptional levels in any complex field or any difficult occupation or profession. Although there are prodigies, people who succeed in a short period of time, these are very rare.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book, Outliers (Back Bay Books, 2011), quotes the extensive research that shows that it takes several years, on average, for a person to become excellent in his or her chosen field. According to Gladwell, mastery in any field requires 10,000 hours, or seven years of hard work, or both.
Most people only become wealthy after the age of 40 or 50, if they achieve it at all. It takes them many years of hard work, continuous learning, and experience to develop an extensive enough repertoire of patterns so they can recognize and take advantages of opportunities that appear to them. Up to that time, they make many mistakes: “two steps forward and one step back.”
The Foundation of Happiness
The law of incremental improvement is your key to an unlimited future of success, prosperity, and happiness. It doesn’t matter where you are starting from; all that matters is where you are going. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
By applying the law of incremental improvement to yourself and your work, you can begin moving upward toward joining the great ones in your field. If you are doing what you love to do and you are doing it with all your heart, by engaging in continuous personal and professional improvement, you can begin to move forward at such a rapid rate that it will astonish you.
You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule, which says that 80 percent of the income goes to 20 percent of the people. Your goal, if you are not already there, should be to join the top 20 percent in your field.
If you’re in the top 20 percent, your job is to get into the top 10 percent, and then the top 5 percent, and then the top 4 percent, and so on.
Your goal should be to “be the best.” Your goal is to be recognized by those around you as outstanding in your field. Your goal must be to pay any price, overcome any obstacle, and make any effort necessary to become excellent in your chosen career. In just a moment, I’ll show you how.
Moving to the Top
There is one small problem that you need to deal with before you become one of the best in your field. Most of us grow up with feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Because of low self-esteem and selling ourselves short, many of us never even think about becoming excellent at our work. It never even occurs to us that we have the ability to learn anything we need to learn to be able to do an outstanding job at anything we put our minds to.
The fact is that, generally speaking, you have the capability to excel at anything that is really important to you. If anyone else has achieved a high level of competence in your field, then so can you. All you have to do is to do the same things, over and over, until sooner or later you get the same results that they have. This is the law of cause and effect in action. When you practice this law in conjunction with the law of incremental improvement, you can move from wherever you are to wherever you want to be.
Identify Your Key Skills
Just as choosing the right work or career for you requires self-analysis and self-awareness, moving to the top of your field requires that you take your existing position and break it down to what we call its key result areas (KRAs) or to its core competencies.
In every job, and in every organisation for that matter, there are a few key skills, seldom more than five to seven, that determine the success or failure of the person in that job.
Wherever an individual is having trouble in his or her career, it is usually because he or she is weak in one or more of these KRAs or core skills. Wherever a person is successful, it turns out that they are strong in all the key skills necessary for success in that job.
Here is a key discovery: Your weakest important skill determines the height of your success in your work.
You could be excellent at six out of seven of your key result areas, but your weakness in the seventh area can hold you back for years.
Analyze Your Skill Levels
Your first job is to break your work down into its component parts, its basic skills, and then honestly analyze your level of competence in each one, by giving yourself a grade on a scale from 1 to 10.
For example, if you are in sales, your KRAs or “core skills” might be prospecting, establishing rapport, identifying problems, presenting solutions, answering objection, closing the sale, and getting resales and referrals from satisfied customers. A weakness in any one of these areas could be fatal to your success and your income.
If you are in business, your KRAs could be leadership and management, strategic planning, marketing and sales, staffing and delegating, financial controls and administration, and production and quality controls. Each situation may be slightly different, but the same concept applies.
Success begins by analyzing the individual parts of your performance and then making a plan to become very good in each area.
Deliberate Practice
One of the most important breakthroughs in personal performance and career success is described in Geoffrey Colvin’s top-selling book, Talent Is Overrated (Portfolio Trade, 2010). Colvin shows that most people start their careers with limited marketable skills, and then develop from there.
It turns out that those executives who got to the top early in their careers developed the habit of identifying the most important skill they could develop at that stage of their career. They would then dedicate themselves to mastering that skill, one skill at a time.
Once they had developed a key skill, they would then identify the one skill that could help them to advance further. Their entire career ladder consisted of mastering each key skill, one at a time, until the “compound effect” took over, and they moved rapidly upward in their jobs.
Identify Your Key Skill
A good exercise is to ask yourself, “What is my limiting skill? What is it that I do, or don’t do, that is determining the speed at which I succeed and move ahead in my job?”
What is the performance bottleneck or choke point in your work? What limits you or holds you back from getting to where you want to go? Sometimes, taking the time to develop one limiting skill will put your entire career onto the fast track.
All Skills Are Learnable
Once you have defined your ideal job, and then broken that job down into its constituent parts or core skills, and then made a plan to become very good in each part of your job, then your final key to self-motivation and a feeling of growth is to commit yourself to continuous, never-ending self-improvement. Make a decision right now to dedicate yourself to a lifetime process of personal and professional development.
Here are three simple rules that will change your life:
1. Invest 3 percent of your income back into yourself. Spend 3 percent of what you earn on personal research and development, on upgrading your skills and abilities, and on becoming better at performing the most important tasks that are required of you. If you invest 3 percent of your income back into yourself, you will never have to worry about money again.
2. Read for one hour or more each day in your chosen field, underlining and taking careful
notes that you can review regularly.
A simple technique is to read and underline with a red pen and then go back and transfer all of those key points into a spiral notebook. You can dictate the key points and have them typed up for you or you can use dictation software that translates your voice and which allows you to then print
out the key points.
You will then have a synopsis of the most important ideas in any book. When you review them, which only takes about 10 minutes or so, five or six times, you memorize almost all the key points. This method is used by some of the most successful men and women in the world.
3. Listen to podcasts and audio programs in your car. Turn your automobile into a mobilebclassroom, a university on wheels. Never drive your car without your educational podcasts and audio programs playing.
If you turn this driving time into “learning time,” you can become one of the best educated people of your generation.
Your Most Valuable Financial Asset
Your ability to earn money by applying your knowledge and skill is the most important single source of money in your life. This is called your “earning power,” and is the sum total of all your knowledge and skill applied to doing a job.
Your “earning ability” is your ability to get results that someone will pay you for. This capacity represents as much as 80 to 90 percent of your total net worth.
Your earning ability is either an appreciating asset, becoming more valuable each month and year, or a depreciating asset, losing value each month and year because of a failure to continually upgrade your skills.
One of the smartest expenditures you can make is to invest in your “earning ability,” to become better at what pays you the most. This continuous investment in yourself will put you behind the wheel of your own life. It will assure you of greater success and happiness every day of your life, and by the law of indirect effort, a commitment to yourself will earn you the self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride that you desire.
You will eventually achieve the competence and mastery in your field that generate the feelings of happiness and self-confidence that make you irresistible.
There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you know the direction in which you are going and you are willing to make the efforts to become excellent at what you do.
Action Exercises
1. Make a decision today to become excellent at what you do. Set it as a goal, make a plan, and work on it every day.
2. Identify the jobs or parts of your job that you most enjoy, and then seek a way to more and more of those jobs.
3. Identify those jobs in your career that have been easy to learn and which are easy to do, and look for ways to do more of them, more of the time.
4. Identify the KRAs of your work and give yourself a grade of 1–10 in each one. Remember that your weakest key skill sets the height of your success.
5. Identify the one skill that, if you were excellent at it consistently, would have the greatest positive impact on your career.
6. Develop a continuous learning plan for yourself, and dedicate yourself toward getting better and better at what you do.
7. Identify the most important result, or results, for which you are paid, and resolve to get more and better of those results each day.