Which do you want to be known for? Good enough … or Excellence?

The point is to think an action through before committing.

What are you doing wrong that needs rethinking?

1. motivation
2. inspiration
3. dedication
4. fascination
5. preparation
6. execution
7. solicitation
8. anticipation
9. aggregation
10. expectation
11. gestation
12. orchestration
13. juxtaposition
14. predication
15. qualification
16. relaxation
17. supposition
18. maximization
19. simulation
20. exaltation
21. ramification
22. justification
23. direction
24. elation
25. restoration

What *ation would you add to the list? What makes for success at your work?

Now that we’re all back to reality, let’s look at why motivation is so hard and failure is so easy.

Why Do We Fail?

Ten reasons for failure

1. We procrastinate.
2. We make excuses.
3. We blame others.
4. We give into temptation.
5. We associate with people that drain us.
6. We refuse help from the right people.
7. We work hard at the wrong things.
8. We waste resources.
9. We don’t know what we want.
10. We keep doing the same thing, expecting different results.

Failure is easy because it requires no action on our part. It just happens. Before we can achieve success, we must identify our failure points. From the list above, which affects you the most? If you’re not sure, ask your co-workers or spouse. They know.

Once you’ve identified the root causes of your failures, it’s time to set the plan into motion. I don’t think it’s an accident that motion and motivate have the same root, moti.

Motivation requires action!

Don’t Procrastinate—Motivate

Motion is defined as to move, while motivate is to move to action. We can not get motivated passively. In fact, Motivation is the opposite of procrastination. Motivation is doing something … now! Procrastination is doing nothing … now! Something … Nothing …

We can not succeed if we spend our time dodging our responsibilities. We have to determine what has to get done, then do it … now!

How Can We Succeed?

Don’t make excuses

If we make excuses, we’re playing into the procrastinators hand. “I don’t have time” or “I don’t know how” are just excuses we use to do nothing. There are ways to resolve these problems, such as—make time and learn how. Easy to say, harder to execute.

Don’t Blame Others

Blaming other people for our short-comings or lack of preparation is one of the worst failings of man, in my opinion. It grows like a cancer and takes over the whole person until nothing is ever their fault. Blaming others is also as old as time. Even Adam blamed Eve when confronted by God about eating from the tree,

And Adam said, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”

“It’s not my fault” Adam said, “it’s your fault , God, for giving me this woman.” This is not the way to win friends and influence people.  It’s why we lost the game, why we wrecked the car, why we lost the promotion, why we were fired …

Blaming others is as counter-productive as arguing. If we learn to take responsibility for our actions, we can succeed.

Stand firm to Temptation

The temptation of time-wasters are everywhere and are the cause of a lot of procrastination. The television and YouTube are two of the biggest time-wasters. Hours evaporate into a mist of undone tasks before we know it.

These temptations are greatest when we have the most to do. The less time we have, the more reason to watch the latest episode of Monster Car Survivor from Detox.

People are Bad; People are Good

The people in our lives can be the absolute worst thing in our lives or the very best. You must discern which group your spend the most time with. If attitude is one of the most expressive indicators of success (and I believe it is), then those we associate with have the largest effect.

If they are verbal abusers, procrastinators, blamers or under-achievers, they will bring you down to their level. The phrase,

One bad apple spoils the whole barrel

is completely accurate. Many times I have witnessed a negative Nellie bring a whole room’s mood down into the dump in no time.

Spending time with funny, upbeat, positive, energetic, go-getters is infectious if you are seeking positive reinforcement for your attitude. Spending time with negative, spoiled, down-trodden people will not.

Choose wisely whom you spend time with … it’s that important.

Working Hard or Hardly Working?

I like to work hard! There, I’ve said it. However, I sometimes spend an inordinate amount of time on the wrong project. I can work up a sweat doing all the wrong things. Sometimes all it takes to do the right thing is planning, but I’d rather be doing something. Planning seems so non-active.

Plan your work … work your plan, is the true way to success. If you are going to work hard, you should spend the effort on the right project.

Take the time to think about what you should be working on.

Resources Anonymous

We never have enough resources that wasting is a good idea. Short supplies of time, money and friends should cause us to gain a new appreciation, rather than squander them. We throw our money away, we drop time into the bottomless pit, and we take advantage of our friends. Never a good plan for success.

Appreciation of these resources is vital to our success, not for keeping score, but for measuring success. Our attitude toward time and money, and how we treat people, is a good indicator of our character and without character, there can be no long-term success.

When I grow up …

Success if harder when we don’t know how to definition the word in our lives. If you don’t know what you want out of life, how will you know when you have it. If you don’t define success, you can never reach it. It really is that simple.

Sit down and work out what you want. Sure, you’ll have to figure out how to get there, but first discover where there is. And the most important part—don’t procrastinate.

Insanity

We are all guilty of this antithesis to success. We will do the same same over and over, being surprised when the results are the same. This definition for insanity is attributed to Albert Einstein, and he was smart enough to understand the implicit nature of insanity.

Oscar Levant said, “It’s a thin line between insanity and genius” and I think that same line runs between success and failure.

• Failure is never permanent, but success lingers on forever.
• Failures are forgotten, but successes live forever.
• Failures reach their peak early, successes lasts a lifetime.
• Failures lose, successes win

As with most things in life, it’s our choice. Which will you decide?

Call to Action

Do you want to succeed? Then stop procrastinating, making excuses, blaming others, giving into temptation, hanging with the wrong people, refusing help, working hard on the wrong things, wasting resources, wandering aimlessly, and acting out the definition of insanity.

There … I feel better, how ’bout you?

In the first, by Carmine Gallo, seven secrets are revealed to make you a better leader. Carmine is working on a new book titled Fire Them Up. For the book, he interviewed a lot of leaders on how they inspire and lead. Judging from the article, the book will become a must read.

The Seven Secrets of Inspiring Leaders
American business professionals are uninspired. Only 10% of employees look forward to going to work and most point to a lack of leadership as the reason why, according to a recent Maritz Research poll. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All business leaders have the power to inspire, motivate, and positively influence the people in their professional lives.

For the past year, I have been interviewing renowned leaders, entrepreneurs, and educators who have an extraordinary ability to sell their vision, values, and themselves. I was researching their communications secrets for my new book, Fire Them Up. What I found were seven techniques that you can easily adopt in your own professional communications with your employees, clients, and investors.

Liz Ryan’s article titled, 10 Tips for Networkers, is a keeper, too. She cuts to the chase without mincing words uses great analogies to illustrate her points. If you think you’re a good networker and don’t seem to have a great time at different events, don’t let Liz hurt your feelings. Listen and learn to get better.

10 Tips for Networkers
If you want to impress your friends with a fancy new word you’ve learned, here’s a good one: retronym.

Dictionary.com defines it as “a term, as acoustic guitar, coined in modification of the original referent that was used alone, as guitar, to distinguish it from a later contrastive development, as electric guitar.”

I bring this up in a workplace-advice column only because I’ve got a new retronym to add to our vocabulary, and it’s this: “non-disgusting networking.” Yes, back in the old days we could talk about plain old networking, referring to business events after hours and industry galas where businesspeople would mingle. We could use the word networking to refer to our LinkedIn activities and other kinds of outreach that happened among professional types online. Those days are pretty much gone. Now, if we don’t want to alarm people when we talk about our networking endeavors, we have to be quick to note that we’re talking about the non-disgusting kind.

Have you ever thought about the correlation between communication of company direction and its affect on motivation?

If employees aren’t part of the plan, they can’t be part of achievement. They must know what the goals and objectives of the company are before they can understand how they can help. Blind submission is a thing of the past—today’s worker wants to be a part of something bigger.

Compare it to a rowing team. The crew is going in the same direction (they’re in the same boat), but that doesn’t guarantee the team is pulling together. If each rower sets their own rhythm and tempo, they are out of sync with the other members. This causes misfires, incompatibilities, discontinuity, clashes, and loss of speed. In other words, they lose.

To overcome this, each boat has a communications officer, making sure each team member knows the direction and tempo ensuring the crew is working together. With the team working together, toward a common goal, the chances for victory are greatly improved.

Bringing employees into the discussion about company goals and objectives is critical to getting buy-in to accomplish those same goals and objectives. If they understand the bigger objectives, they see how they contribute to the solution, and ultimately, victory.

The opposite correlation is also true:

Communication of Direction = Motivation