We are born with the makings of success. The desire and ability to focus the whole of our being on something is basic human impulse that is at the heart of all success. Remember what it was like to focus heart and soul on what you were doing? That's the state of mind you must recapture if you want to be a big success in the adult world. Few people attain real success because over the years most fall victim to distractions that rob them of the strength and purity needed to focus 100% on what they're doing. To get on the success track, we must relearn how to focus. We must develop the ability to spot distractions and build the strength to banish them from our minds.
Distraction #1
FATIGUE: A healthy, vital mind naturally focuses itself on the problem or challenge at hand. That state of relaxed concentration takes a brain that's supplied with the sugar, oxygen and other nutrients and hormones needed for optimal levels of brain activity. When you're learning or problem solving, your brain uses 70% of your body's blood supply. If your body can't supply the fuel needed to maintain this high energy level, you become distracted and descend to non-productive activities at lower energy levels.
We depend too much on coffee to stimulate our metabolism each morning. Problem is, the nervous energy coffee produces lowers your metabolic efficiency and accelerates the onset of nervous fatigue. By mid-afternoon you're too strung out to concentrate.
Daily physical exercise is the only way to keep your mental energy level high throughout the day. Exercise tunes your metabolism to function at a high enough level of efficiency to supply your brain with optimal flow of energy-packed, well-oxygenated blood. When you're out of shape, the blood flow to your brain provides only a fraction of the sugar and oxygen. You find yourself getting distracted after only two or three hours of intense mental activity. A half hour of exercise each day gives you two, three or four more hours of peak mental efficiency each day. That can double or even treble your productivity and turn you into an entirely different person in both outlook and the capacity for work.
The kinds of exercise that works best are those that can be performed daily come hail or high water and that can be sustained without interruption at a pleasant level of exertion for at least 30 minutes. Sports like tennis and racquetball are prone to scheduling conflicts and can rarely be maintained on a regular basis for more than a few weeks. What's more, unless both you and your partner are expert players who play without breaks, they don't provide the sustained cardiovascular workout needed to raise your metabolic efficiency. Also, if you're the competitive type, you can overtax or even injure yourself, thereby lowering your energy level and cutting into productivity.
The best workouts are solitary endurance sports like jogging, swimming and cycling that can be done any time. The best times are mornings, before your workday starts. Evening sessions are far more likely to fall victim to the demands of social or business entertainment.
Distraction #2
PEER PRESSURE: Your career is stalled. You're stuck in a nothing job with no prospects for the future, and no ideas on how you're going to improve them. As you start complaining about the miserable conditions you're forced to endure at work, your colleague tells you sunnily that she's going to become the company's top executive by focusing her energies in ways that will multiply her productivity and effectiveness.
You are :
(a) filled with good wishes for her success;
(b) filled with envy, resentment and concern lest she actually accomplish even a small part of what she's setting out to do and leave you lying bitterly in the dust;
(c) scornful of the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Pollyanna who thinks she can do better escape being reduced to a bitter old wreck along with everyone else.
If you have an honest bone in your body, you'll admit your actual reaction is likely to be closer to b or c than a. That's human nature. Knowing that, you can see why it would be foolhardy to depend on your peers to support your plans for success. That isn't to say you should alienate yourself from them, just to expect their initial reactions to be less than supportive or encouraging. Be prepared for the worst and be pleasantly surprised if they turn out to be better people than the human mean.
The need for approval is conditioned in all of us. Like addiction to drugs, alcohol or junk food, this need can be a major distraction. A decision to be a success takes willingness to forego your daily fix of peer approval and acceptance. You will need to keep your own counsel and provide your own support system while meeting the negativity of your peers with a constructive, optimistic outlook. Remember, if you do succeed, you may be managing your former peers. Your continued success will depend on your ability to inspire them to work at their most productive.
Inevitably, once your focus on success becomes known, your peers will come to resent and distrust you to varying degrees. This is the one hurdle that trips up many otherwise talented, ambitious and highly effective people. The prospect of becoming the target of constant sniping, gossip and free-floating resentment is too scary and distracting for most people. They just don't have the stomach for success.
If you're determined to rise above mediocrity, know that the envy, resentment and distrust of former peers is inevitable and, what's more, isn't caused by anything peculiar to your own personality or character.
Remember, too, that diverting your energies to try to diffuse the negativity is counterproductive. It would merely encourage your former peers to step up the pressure in the hope of bringing you back down to their level.
The notions of brotherhood/ sisterhood and equality that fill books and movies simply don't govern the workings of the business world. A successful company simply isn't a democracy. Workers aren't equal. If we were, communism wouldn't have failed so miserably and capitalism wouldn't work so well. Some people learn to be more effective at focusing their energies on creating value for their organizations and clients. If you are one, peer resentment will simply have to be a fixture of your career. The key to keeping it from becoming a fatal distraction is to expect it and accept it as an indispensible part of success, not something inspired uniquely by you. John Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln seem like gods to Americans. While they lived, they were hated and reviled by more people than loved them. Their greatest successes were achieved only to the extent they had the strength and good sense to avoid being distracted by public opinion.
Distraction #3
MISCONCEPTIONS: Unrealistic expectations of what success entails is another deadly source of distraction. Even genuinely successful people become confused and distracted when their experiences don't jive with their expectations of what success should be like. They begin second-guessing themselves in the hope of realizing an idealized state that has never existed on earth.
A common misconception involves the regard they expect to enjoy from others. Even those who could handle the hostility of peers as they built their early successes have trouble accepting the fact that no matter how successful they become, the hostility will remain, never to be replaced by universal respect and acclaim until the day they die or are otherwise rendered non-threatening.
There's good reason for that-your success simply isn't very important to anyone but you. Those who love you will rejoice in it as long as you don't forget who you are and who they are. Strangers will accord you a measure of respect and admiration for your achievement. These feelings, however, aren't nearly as deep or constant as the expectations that will have become fixed in your own mind.
No matter how successful you become, your success will never be what others judge you by. You will continue to be judged first and foremost on the human level. What's more, your success will make others expect of you even more honesty, courtesy, kindness and generosity. Noblesse oblige, as they say.
Your success will simply multiply the demands on you to be a warm, courteous and considerate human being. Fail to meet them and the superficial respect and admiration quickly sour into scorn and hatred. Since few people are saints, even among the super-successful, you're likely to alienate as much as win over those who come in contact with you. This fact baffles some successful people, making them question the genuineness of their success.
Money is the basis for another distracting misconception. Many people mistakenly assume that success provides access to unlimited amounts of money and unlimited time and freedom with which to spend it. Truth is, only a miniscule fraction of all successful people enjoy incomes that provide unlimited material rewards.
Take Bill Gates, commonly reckoned the world's richest person, with a fortune valued at over $8 billion. Putting aside for the moment Gate's well-known stinginess-which helped immeasurably in his quest for success, neven he isn't free to spend recklessly. If he tried to cash in his Microsoft stock, share prices would plummet instantaneously, costing him and his company billions in lost wealth. The annual income he draws from the company is measured in millions, not billions. As head of a company that prides itself in its ability to control waste, Gates would severely damage his credibility and leadership position if he were to become a profligate spender in his personal life. More importantly, Gates is severely constrained by the need to focus his energies on running his company. He simply can't afford the time for shopping sprees, even if he were so inclined. His chief pleasure is growing his company, not in dissipating what he's built up.
There are many other examples. Warren Buffet, the world's most successful investor, denied his only daughter's request for a $30,000 loan for a down payment on a house on the ground that he owed a duty to invest his money wisely. The late Walmart founder Sam Walton, who once headed up the Forbes 400, drove a beat up pickup truck and lived out his life in the same modest home he bought 30 years earlier.Successes who become distracted by the myth that success means profligate spending and start pushing the limits of their successes with their burgeoning insecurities provide the world with dozens of juicy morality plays every year . Who hasn't heard of the music star who had his estate auctioned off, the real estate tycoon put on a tight allowances, the former rock star who lives on the streets. Success takes a decade or more to build but mere months to send into the bankruptcy courts.
Successful people who lose their focus on creating value and distract themselves with the supposed rewards of success soon find themselves on the slippery slope to a humbling disaster.
Distraction #4
FEAR OF FAILURE: The fatal distraction is fear of failure. For most even the remote possibility of public humiliation and financial ruin is so terrifying that they never entertain the risk. For them success is never more than a pipedream, something to gawk at and gossip about from a safe distance.
Even after you muster the focus, faith and fortitude to get on the success track, sooner or later fear of failure can start to distract you. It can keep you from trying what ought to be tried, taking the countless calculated risks that are the building blocks of success. It whittles down your grand success adventure into a struggle for survival.
That's when you need to remind yourself what success is about-giving yourself the opportunity to fail. Success and failure are two sides of the freedom to take full responsibility for your actions. That's the only way we humans build worthwhile things. Making a thousand light bulbs that didn't work taught Thomas Edison how to make the one that changed life on earth. From internal combustion engines to computer chips, from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Microsoft, the story of success is the story of perseverance in the face of repeated failure.
When the prospect of failure looms so large it distracts you from your focus on success, remember that the faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn how to become successful. If you aren't failing, you aren't succeeding.
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