Self Discipline Equals Success

There's one special quality that you can develop that will guarantee you greater success, accomplishment and happiness in life. Of a thousand principles for success developed over the ages, this one quality or practice will do more to assure that you accomplish wonderful things with your life than anything else.  This quality is so important that, if you don’t develop it to a high degree, it is impossible for you to ever achieve what you are truly capable of achieving.

Personal Management and Self Discipline
The quality that I am talking about is the quality of self discipline.  It is a habit, a practice, a philosophy and a way of living.  All successful men and women are highly disciplined in the important work that they do.  All unsuccessful men and women are undisciplined and unable to control their behaviors and their appetites.  And when you develop the same levels of high, personal discipline possessed by the most successful people in our society, you will very soon begin to achieve the same results that they do.

All great success in life is preceded by long, sustained periods of focused effort on a single goal, the most important goal, with the determination to stay with it until it is complete.

The Qualities of Successful People
Unsuccessful men and women are those who waste their time by wasting the minutes and hours of each day on low value activities.

The key to this attitude toward time and personal management is always self discipline.

There are several disciplines that you need to develop if you want to achieve your full potential.  The first of these is the discipline of goals.  This means that you sit down with a pad of paper, a pen and ample time.  You think through and then make a written list of all the things you want to accomplish in the next one, two, three, four and five years.  You organize the list into the various areas of your life; your career, your money, your family, your health and the other parts that are important to you.  You set priorities among your goals and re-write your lists so that your most important goals are at the top.  You then take a separate sheet of paper and you make a list of all the things that you can think of doing, right now, to move you toward the attainment of your most important goals.

Fully 97% of adult Americans are trying to live their lives without clear, specific, written goals.  This is the same as setting off across an unknown country without a roadmap.  You may get somewhere eventually, but it will take you much longer, and it is far more likely that you will get lost, and waste an enormous amount of time, than if you planned your trip carefully, with a roadmap, and full information about the future terrain, before you started out.

Successful People Complete High Value Tasks First
The second discipline you need to develop for success is the discipline of planning.  Ten minutes in execution for every minute that you invest in planning will get a 1000% return on your time investment by taking the time to think through, in advance, what you are going to do in the hours and days ahead.

6 Ways to Improve Any Career

Here are 6 ways you might work with others to drive innovation, in the process creating stunning new opportunities for yourself:

1. Eliminate your industry’s persistent customer pain points.
Each industry has practices that drive customers crazy.
Think: can we turn our process or perspective around, to look through the customer’s eyes as though they were the company and we were the customers?
2. Dramatically reduce complexity.
3. Make stupid objects smart; add a sensor
The race is on to make everything smart, and the dumber your products were to begin with, the greater the opportunity to make them smart.
4. Teach your company to talk.
Apple's Siri personal assistant allows you to have a conversation with your phone. It's far from perfect, but the idea of having corporate databases talk directly to customers is here to stay.
5. Be utterly transparent.
Think: no spin. Social media and pervasive technology will make it increasingly difficult for companies to hide from dissatisfied customers, negative reviews, and faulty products.
6. Make loyalty dramatically easier than disloyalty.
By definition, when companies act smart they are personalizing the way they interact with and serve customers. Once you start delivering personalization, you create immense opportunities to make loyalty more convenient than disloyalty:

• You can store customer preferences, and act on them.
• You can save the customer time, money, or effort - especially by eliminating repetitive tasks.
• You can provide auto-replenishment of needed supplies.
• You can monitor products remotely, and service them before they break instead of afterwards.

Think about every major purchase decision customers face in your industry. How can you make it easier for customers to remain with your firm? Now, think even bigger. Can it be five or ten times easier?