Sustained Invidivual Success: the 20 Percenters
20 percent of people are able to continually do activities that are successful, time after time. They are able to transform the friction of life into a perpetual machine of success and fulfillment. This may be quite intimadating to the rest of us 80 percenters. Surrounding yourself with a few 20 percenters provides inspiration that life can be engaged in both a predictably positive and fulfilling way. Their Secret?
Discover what you don't like doing and stop doing it.
Your strengths are not only activities for which you have talent, but they are activities which strengthen you. When you use them you feel powerful, creative, and authentic, confident and challenged. Your weaknesses are activities that weaken you - drag the recovery out of you and leave you unsatisfied and depleted, maybe bored. They leave you struggling, unfulfilled, and empty.
The early contenders that lost out and did not correlate with sustained success are talent, interest, personality, extroversion, risk taking, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.
Sustained success means the greatest possible impact over the longest period of time.
You must apply your enthusiasm, energy and talent to something you enjoy. You must learn role specific skills enough to be labeled good at something. "Something special must leave the room when you leave the room." (Peter Drucker) The more of a commodity you are the less of an impact you will have over time. To be deemed good at something then, you must be better relative to others in the field. And over time, you must continue to get better over time through eras of progress, change and evolution. These demands that you be resilient, innovative, flexible, and sufficiently devoid of stress to maintain your energy for the long haul.
Three Contenders to keep you in the game
"Find the right tactics and employ them." Faster recovery between times of stress improves ones ability to rebound and increase performance for the next sprint. This applies to all forms of energy (mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual). The body works best in 90 minute increments, so taking a stretch, resting break in those intervals. Some other tactics - "go blue chip early" to avoid the permission paradox (can't get the job without experience, can't get experience without the job); "build your personal brand", manage your boss with loyalty, good advice, and an employee that will never make himself look good at his expense. Make friends in high places to avoid a self-serving boss taking credit for your work. "It's always showtime", no matter what is going on they are making a decision about you. "Find the right tactics" is good, but will not help you avoid becoming a commodity.
"Find your weaknesses and fix them." Helpful, but in the end not as fulfilling. Negative experiences do more than just give you a negative mood, but activate a negative view of oneself. If you really want to make it hard to get out of bed in the morning, ruminate on your past failings for awhile.
"Find your strengths and cultivate them." Positive experiences active positive views of oneself. If you want to energize yourself, ponder all the things that have gone well for you, and the successful times you've had.
What to do if . .
You're Bored
You're Unfulfilled
You're Frustrated
You're Drained
Try to rework your environment to capitalize on your strengths more, and stop doing the things that you don't like to do. :) Quit the role, tweak the role, find the right partner to strenghten you and do the things you don't like to do, or find aspects of the job that strengthen you. Act quickly, the longer you put up with things you don't like to do, the less likely to be successful you will be.
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