Success Habits

By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo

Part II

Moving along with Brian Tracy’s Success Habits that has been a hit in YouTube, the last five are as follows:

(5)  Sense of Urgency

This is a quality that is only possessed by 2% of the population.  It is a habit that is biased towards action.  In Tom Peter’s best-selling book “In Search of Excellence”, says all top companies have a bias for action and not just ordinary action but quick action.  Unsuccessful companies are slow pokes in terms of action.  If you have a product complaint with them it would take them weeks to solve your problem.  But top-notch companies reply to you in two to three minutes in answering your complaint.  Applying this habit to personal growth, be a person who has the reputation of someone who does things fast and dependable.  If somebody has a complaint concerning your business or department get back to them right away.  If someone needs something move on to it quickly, even to the extent of foregoing your coffee break for example.

(6)  Common Sense

Common sense here means making sound judgement by thinking things through before you act.  Action without thinking is the cause of many failures.  Take time to reflect before you act and listen to your intuition especially with important actions you will undertake.  Intuition is not just mental instinct but is something that is developed based on lessons from past failures.  Successful people sit down, reflect and dissect every time they commit a failure and try to squeeze out everything they can learn from it for future use.  They try to develop general principles from each setback and take note of it along with their other principles list.

(7)  Consideration

Consideration means the quality of your relationships with other people is a big factor to your success.  How well you get along with others, your quality of interaction with them, will determine your happiness, your success and your achievements.  Develop the people skills if necessary, take courses in communication, take courses in effective listening and speaking.  Your ability to express yourself is crucial to being an influential and successful person.  You can’t imagine a good leader or manager who does not know how to express his plans and visions for the company well and clearly.  Otherwise, no one would be enthusiastic to follow that leader.

(8)  Commitment

Commitment means devotion or loyalty to a person or job that in spite of setbacks or failures we don’t give up.  Commitment is one of the toughest virtues to practice especially in relationships and in marriage.  But no success is possible without commitment, in the case of personal growth, it is our commitment to our job or profession.  In the book of Alan Cox entitled “The Achievers” study shows that executives in the corporations who achieved the most and in the shortest time had found a niche job for themselves and lost (intense focus) themselves in that job.  In Dr. Blatt study of self-made millionaires, he found that one quality that they all had in common was that they picked the work they loved, they specialized in that work and became very good in it and eventually get paid well for it.

(9)  Courage

Courage is the quality of all leaders.  Courage is the ability to confront your fears or manage your fears.  The fear of failure is the single reason for failure in adult life.  The fear of making a mistake, of losing money, time or effort is what paralyses and holds us back.  Mark Twain said, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”  Always dare to go forward in life even if does not guarantee success all the time because it cements the habit of moving forward.  General MacArthur said, “There is no security in life, only opportunity.”  And life is perverse in a way because the more we seek security the less we have it.  But the more we seek opportunity the more we will have security.

(10)  Confidence

Confidence comes after competence.  It’s a virtuous cycle because once you have more confidence, it increases your enthusiasm to be more competent.  You can’t get confidence from food, or drinks or attending a seminar but only by doing things over and over again that builds a solid foundation in your mind that you can do whatever you need to do, that you have what it takes to be successful.  Self-doubt is the great paralyzer of all activity.  To remove that self-doubt is to do the things that we would normally back away from.  No successful person lacks self-confidence.