13 Underappreciated Traits You Absolutely Need to Succeed

Picture the most successful person you know. What is it about them that you admire the most? What characteristics do they have that you really respect? Is it their confidence? Their intelligence? Or maybe it’s their work ethic?
But what about the things you might not notice at first glance? Like an insatiable hunger, gratitude or patience? Often it’s the traits that fly under the radar that can have the biggest impact on your ability to achieve.
We asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council which of these underappreciated traits they value the most. Because even though they’re not as “loud,” they’re absolutely necessary to succeed.

1. Mindfulness

It’s easy to get lost in the grind and miss out on many things in the demanding environment that comes with entrepreneurship. I deliberately and regularly make time to reflect on past successes and failures, which opens my mind up to different possibilities. There’s a lesson in every outcome in our lives and discovering them makes us grow.

—Turgay Birand, EditionGuard

2. Solid Speaking Skills

I was an active member of my high school debate team for all four years. The extracurricular helped me become more articulate, logical and overall a better public speaker. These skills have played a critical role in my development into the business leader I am today.

—Paul Hager, Information Technology Professionals

3. Insatiability

I’m a naturally insatiable person when it comes to learning and growth. This leads to being open to new ideas, asking questions and ingesting endless amounts of new content. All of this leads toward success, as one new piece of knowledge builds on another and sparks of curiosity create new valuable relationships. It also results in a constant drive to dissect and improve my business.

—Darrah Brustein, Network Under 40

4. Decisiveness

The most successful leaders recognize they do not have time to get all of the facts for the dozens of decisions they make each day. Instead, they just need to gather enough information to make sound decisions so the company can move forward. Some of those decisions will be wrong, but it’s better to learn from those mistakes and try again than to be immobilized by indecisiveness.

—Doug Bend, Bend Law Group, PC

5. Consistency

I think my biggest key to success—and the thing I tell others who are starting businesses—is to be consistent. Growing a business is hard, but you have to keep at it week after week and month after month. I’ve blogged almost every single week for the past seven years, and I truly attribute the fact that I’ve approached my business that way as one of the reasons for my success.

—Sean Ogle, Location Rebel

6. Coachability

Pretty much anyone can take feedback at a surface level, but actually evaluating criticism and learning from it is a rare trait. After all, feedback is incredibly personal and it can cause severe damage to your ego. Rather than nodding to harsh feedback, I learned from the best by really taking their advice to heart and separating my self-worth from my ability to have valuable learning experiences.

—Elle Kaplan, LexION Capital

7. Honesty

People appreciate my emphasis on honesty. It’s surprising really, given all the people who don’t focus on it, but honesty is still highly valued among customers who are seeking that authentic experience. Even if it means telling a customer “I can’t do something,” I'd rather be honest and let them know. They appreciate that and come back when I can help them.

—Drew Hendricks, Buttercup

8. Calmness

I have always been a very laid-back person (sometimes to a fault). In my business, I often find myself in the middle of stressful and complex deals. By staying calm, I’m able to see things more objectively and not allow the stress of the deal to force a bad decision.

—Mark Daoust, Quiet Light Brokerage, Inc.

9. Patience

I see people rush things all the time because they have that need for immediate results. But I’ve learned that slow and steady can win the race because patience often leads to better results. You are not pushing people or situations, but letting them occur naturally, which also helps me determine in advance if the moves are smart and whether I’ve covered all my bases.

—Andrew O’Connor, American Addiction Centers

10. Gratitude

There are many successful people who aren’t happy. My perspective is that gratitude is the thing that keeps you centered. Every day, I begin by writing down things I’m grateful for, and I make it a point to give gifts to people I feel grateful to. It makes them feel good, makes me feel good and keeps life centered.

—Adam Steele, The Magistrate

11. Ability to Read People

An underrated trait that I can easily attribute my success to is being able to read people. Having the ability to pick up on different people’s personalities can be extremely beneficial when interacting with them. Everyone has a different style of communicating and being able to notice that and adjust to fit their style has been key for my developing strong, long-lasting relationships.

—Bryanne Lawless, BLND Public Relations

12. Hunger and Humility

When I started my company, I was in debt. I had nothing and it made me hungry. I realized I had to go after a client that had money. This is what helped me build a multimillion-dollar success from very little capital. Being hungry and humble allows us to focus on what truly matters.

—Diego Orjuela, Cables & Sensors, LLC

13. Vulnerability

My whole product line started from me building my own community. I built that community on YouTube, where I’m authentic, real, vulnerable and available to my followers. I read comments, connect with them, tell them my problems and give them an honest review. The only reason I was able to launch my product line is because I had a community of people who really trust me.

Source 13-underappreciated-traits-you-absolutely-need-to-succeed

14 Things Ridiculously Successful People Do Every Day

Having close access to ultra-successful people can yield some pretty incredible information about who they really are, what makes them tick, and, most importantly, what makes them so successful and productive.

“Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them.” –Vaibhav Shah

Kevin Kruse is one such person. He recently interviewed over 200 ultra-successful people, including 7 billionaires, 13 Olympians, and a host of accomplished entrepreneurs. One of his most revealing sources of information came from their answers to a simple open-ended question:

In analyzing their responses, Kruse coded the answers to yield some fascinating suggestions. What follows are some of my favorites from Kevin’s findings.

1. They focus on minutes, not hours. 

Most people default to hour and half-hour blocks on their calendar; highly successful people know that there are 1,440 minutes in every day and that there is nothing more valuable than time. Money can be lost and made again, but time spent can never be reclaimed. As legendary Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller told Kevin, “To this day, I keep a schedule that is almost minute by minute.” You must master your minutes to master your life.

2. They focus on only one thing. 

Ultra-productive people know what their “Most Important Task” is and work on it for one to two hours each morning, without interruptions. What task will have the biggest impact on reaching your goals? What accomplishment will get you promoted at work? That’s what you should dedicate your mornings to every day.

3. They don’t use to-do lists. 

Throw away your to-do list; instead schedule everything on your calendar. It turns out that only 41 percent of items on to-do lists ever get done. All those undone items lead to stress and insomnia because of the Zeigarnik effect, which, in essence, means that uncompleted tasks will stay on your mind until you finish them. Highly productive people put everything on their calendar and then work and live by that calendar.

4. They beat procrastination with time travel. 

Your future self can’t be trusted. That’s because we are time inconsistent. We buy veggies today because we think we’ll eat healthy salads all week; then we throw out green rotting mush in the future. Successful people figure out what they can do now to make certain their future selves will do the right thing. Anticipate how you will self-sabotage in the future, and come up with a solution today to defeat your future self.

5. They make it home for dinner. 

Kevin first learned this one from Intel’s Andy Grove, who said, “There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.” Highly successful people know what they value in life. Yes, work, but also what else they value. There is no right answer, but for many, these other values include family time, exercise, and giving back. They consciously allocate their 1,440 minutes a day to each area they value (i.e., they put them on their calendar), and then they stick to that schedule.

6. They use a notebook. 

Richard Branson has said on more than one occasion that he wouldn’t have been able to build Virgin without a simple notebook, which he takes with him wherever he goes. In one interview, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis said, “Always carry a notebook. Write everything down... That is a million dollar lesson they don’t teach you in business school!” Ultra-productive people free their minds by writing everything down as the thoughts come to them.

7. They process e-mails only a few times a day. 

Ultra-productive people don’t “check” their e-mail throughout the day. They don’t respond to each vibration or ding to see who has intruded into their inbox. Instead, like everything else, they schedule time to process their e-mails quickly and efficiently. For some, that’s only once a day; for others, it’s morning, noon, and night.

8. They avoid meetings at all costs. 

When Kevin asked Mark Cuban to give his best productivity advice, he quickly responded, “Never take meetings unless someone is writing a check.” Meetings are notorious time killers. They start late, have the wrong people in them, meander around their topics, and run long. You should get out of meetings whenever you can and hold fewer of them yourself. If you do run a meeting, keep it short and to the point.

9. They say “no” to almost everything. 

Billionaire Warren Buffet once said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” And James Altucher colorfully gave Kevin this tip: “If something is not a ‘Hell Yeah!’ then it’s a no.” Remember, you only have 1,440 minutes in a day. Don’t give them away easily.

10. They follow the 80/20 rule. 

Known as the Pareto Principle, in most cases, 80 percent of results come from only 20 percent of activities. Ultra-productive people know which activities drive the greatest results. Focus on those and ignore the rest.

11. They delegate almost everything. 

Ultra-productive people don’t ask, “How can I do this task?” Instead, they ask, “How can this task get done?” They take the I out of it as much as possible. Ultra-productive people don’t have control issues, and they are not micro-managers. In many cases, good enough is, well, good enough.

12. They touch things only once. 

How many times have you opened a piece of regular mail -- a bill perhaps -- and then put it down, only to deal with it again later? How often do you read an e-mail and then close it and leave it in your inbox to deal with later? Highly successful people try to “touch it once.” If it takes less than five or ten minutes -- whatever it is -- they deal with it right then and there. It reduces stress, since it won’t be in the back of their minds, and it is more efficient, since they won’t have to re-read or re-evaluate the item again in the future.

13. They practice a consistent morning routine. 

Kevin’s single greatest surprise while interviewing over 200 highly successful people was how many of them wanted to share their morning ritual with him. While he heard about a wide variety of habits, most nurtured their bodies in the morning with water, a healthy breakfast, and light exercise, and they nurtured their minds with meditation or prayer, inspirational reading, or journaling.

14. Energy is everything. 

You can’t make more minutes in the day, but you can increase your energy to increase your attention, focus, and productivity. Highly successful people don’t skip meals, sleep, or breaks in the pursuit of more, more, more. Instead, they view food as fuel, sleep as recovery, and breaks as opportunities to recharge in order to get even more done.

Bringing It All Together

You might not be an entrepreneur, an Olympian, or a billionaire (or even want to be), but their secrets just might help you to get more done in less time and assist you to stop feeling so overworked and overwhelmed.
A version of this article appeared on TalentSmart.

Travis Bradberry

Co-author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and President at TalentSmart

Award-winning co-author of the best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the co-founder of TalentSmart -- a consultancy that serves more than 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies and is a leading provider of emotional intelligence tests, training and certification.
His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Harvard Business Review.

Source

To Achieve Something Outrageously Extraordinary Requires Extreme Effort

To Achieve Something Outrageously Extraordinary Requires Extreme Effort

It’s your decision to be amazing. It’s an attitude. It’s how you live your life.   

Dan Waldschmidt

December 28, 2016   

    

We aren’t doing enough. Sometimes not even the bare minimum.
But it’s worse than that. This lack of effort is poor, lazy behavior. In every sense of the words.
I’m not even sure how we got to this point, but here is what I do know:

• We talk ourselves out of action before we even get started.
• We spend time, mental energy and emotion trying to look good rather than getting results.
• We debate the plan rather than working on it.
• We make excuses for our mediocrity.

If we want to be successful, it takes doing more. A lot more. To achieve something outrageously extraordinary requires extreme effort.

Effort is the great equalizer.
Seth Godin says ever so brilliantly the following about effort: “People really want to believe effort is a myth…. I think we’ve been tricked by the veneer of lucky people on the top of the heap. We see the folks who manage to skate by, or who get so much more than we think they deserve, and it’s easy to forget that these guys are the exceptions…. For everyone else, effort is directly related to success…. And that’s the key to the paradox of effort: While luck may be more appealing than effort, you don’t get to choose luck. Effort, on the other hand, is totally available, all the time.”
It’s inescapable. Effort makes the difference.
Effort is more than “If you pay me more, I’ll work harder.” It’s about not cheating yourself out of your own potential.
Think about that for a minute. Does anyone else really care if you are only putting in a half-ass effort?
No! You know deep down you are cheating yourself. And you are the only one who is really hurt by your actions.

No one cares about you like you. The least you can do for yourself is to put in the effort to give your dreams the chance to come true.
Think about what you want out of life right now. Perhaps you want:

• More self-assurance about your financial future;
• A better relationship with your spouse and children;
• A happier and/or more fulfilling lifestyle.

Are you willing to put in the effort to make these a reality? Not brains or money or manipulation. EFFORT!
If all that seems too overwhelming, if your dreams and goals seem too far off, let me offer the simplest of insights: Effort is simply you taking the next step. Again and again and again.
When you look closely at how ordinary people achieve amazing things, you begin to see it for what it is: one foot in front of the other. That’s all. A step is infinitely easier than a journey.
It’s your decision to be amazing. It’s a commitment to take the next step. It’s an attitude. It’s how you live your life. Relentlessly moving forward.
The world is full of good people doing good things in good ways. What will change the world is you putting in enough effort to do great things. One step at a time.
Be edgy. Put in extreme effort:

1. Avoid the need to blame others for anything.

Mean, small-minded people know they suck. That’s why they are so cranky and eager to point out others’ mistakes. They hope that by causing others to feel inadequate, everyone will forget about how woefully off the mark their own performance is. Don’t blame anyone, for any reason, ever. It’s a bad habit.

2. Stop working on the things that just don’t matter.

Not everything needs to be done in place of sleep. If you work for a boss, then you owe them solid time. You can’t cut that out. You can, however, cut out TV time, meetings and anything else that gets in the way of achieving your goals. Replace entertainment with activity toward your goal.

3. Refuse to let yourself wallow in self-doubt. You’re alive to succeed.

Stop comparing your current problems to your last 18 failures. They are not the same. You are not the same. Here’s something to remember: Your entire life has been a training ground for you to capture your destiny right now. Why would you doubt that? Stop whining. Go conquer.

4. Ask yourself, What can I do better next time? And then do it next time.

If you spend a decade or two earnestly trying to be better, that’s exactly what will happen. The next best thing to doing something amazing is not doing something stupid. So learn from your mistakes and use the lessons to dominate.

5. Proactively take time to do things that fuel your passion (for example, exercise).

Living in the moment requires you to live at peak performance. A huge part of mental fitness is physical fitness. So go fight someone. Or go running if fighting seems a bit extreme. Physical activity accelerates mental motivation.

6. Apologize to yourself and those around you for having a bad attitude.

Do this once or twice, and you’ll snap out of your funk pretty fast. When you start genuinely apologizing for being a bad influence on those around you, you learn to stop whining and start winning.

Excerpted with permission from EDGY Conversations: How Ordinary People Achieve Outrageous Success by Dan Waldschmidt

Source To Achieve Something Outrageously Extraordinary Requires Extreme Effort

The Poison Tendrils of Negative Emotions

How negative emotions lead to self-regulation failure

For readers looking to jump into the deep end of understanding procrastination, I highly recommend the recent volume edited by James Gross, Handbook of Emotion Regulation (link is external). This collection of chapters provides the most current and thorough review of the research literature in the area. Because I have put such emphasis in my own writing on the role of emotions in understanding procrastination, I thought I would summarize aspects of just one of the many chapters of this excellent book. The reference to the chapter written by Dylan Wagner and Todd Heatherton is below.

I was amused and delighted by the metaphor and image that these authors used to depict the role of negative emotions (also called negative affect) in the self-regulation process. In a very typical, academic-style diagram of a model of self-regulation, they first depict a high-level theoretical perspective.
The essential components conceptually look something like this:

TEMPTATIONS & DESIRES    GOALS & STANDARDS    Success
(food, drugs, media use, etc.)         Monitoring    Capacity         Failure

At the center of the model are our goals and standards. In other words, central to self-regulation is monitoring our progress towards our goals and our capacity to do this.  What they depict as directly influencing our goals and standards are temptations and desires. You know, other more fun stuff.  Finally, the model makes it clear that depending on how well we can ignore the temptations while maintaining our goal pursuit predicts whether we succeed or fail. In sum, it’s a common, simple model of self-regulation that is typical of a scholarly paper.
The amusing bit is how they chose to depict the effects of negative affect (negative emotions). They have the same diagram but with a giant black hole underneath the model out of which evil tendrils emerge. These tendrils, as tendrils will, grab on to every component of the model. This model now emphasizes a failure outcome, and the final piece of the model is how failure now feeds back down to the hole from which the tendrils emerge and feed the negative affect.
[Note: While I am tempted to add a photo of their diagram here, there are copyright laws that prevent usage in this way, so I hope that this description allowed you to imagine this quite vivid depiction of a psychological model.]
As they note in the caption to this figure, “Negative affect spreads poison tendrils into every aspect of self-regulation, amplifying desires, decreasing monitoring, depleting limited capacity, and encouraging misregulation strategies (e.g., mood repair and escape from aversive self-awareness), which can relieve negative affect in the short term but often lead to further negative affect upon failure to meet one’s goals” (emphasis added).
Well done!  That’s certainly the lived experience of the effects of negative emotions on our self-regulation. The tendrils pull us down.
These negative emotions seem to emerge from a dark place within us, grabbing on to every aspect of our self, and undermine our ability to self-regulate. And, of course, as we fail in our attempts to self-regulate, the self-blame begins, as does the downward spiral of self-esteem and self-efficacy.
In the bulk of the chapter, Wagner and Heatherton summarize numerous studies related to the different ways that negative emotions, emotion regulation and self-regulation interact. It’s important to remember that these are interactive effects, or as I like to say, it’s a sort of dance between these processes that undermine our success. As the authors summarize this interaction, we learn the following:

• Negative affect (emotions) leads to a desire to “feel good now,” escaping the negative state by engaging in pleasurable activities and reducing self-awareness (to lower any potential feelings of guilt; a process I have described previously);
• These choices related to mood repair serve to increase the pull or attractiveness of immediately available rewards and temptations grow;
• With a focus on pleasure and lower self-awareness, the ability to self-monitor is diminished; and at the same time,
• Negative affect, which is related to rumination, puts an increased load on working memory that further weakens the ability to self-monitor and further undermines goal pursuit, or any further attempt at self-regulation (i.e., no monitoring, no self-control).

It’s not a pretty picture, is it?  But it’s certainly one that I think every human being knows. It’s that downward spiral we experience when “we don’t feel like it” and negative emotions begin to “weave their tendrils” (as these authors depict) throughout our self-regulatory process.

Interestingly, Wagner and Heatherton paint this despairing picture even a little darker, writing:
“Throw in the fact that prior self-regulatory effort may leave the individual in a depleted state in which both resources for further self-control are lacking and the strength of impulses and temptations are increased, and it is a small miracle that people are not constantly acting out their fantasies, drinking, smoking, or indulging in every gastronomic desire” (emphasis added).
This is indeed a pretty dire picture, and it’s not helped by the fact that there is very little research documenting how positive emotions might reverse this. Although there is some evidence to suggest that positive emotions might buffer against ego-depletion and enhance self-regulation, positive emotions are not simply the antidote.  In fact, positive emotions might feed further off-task behaviors if this becomes the new focus of attention; a sort of carpe diem or even “what the hell” effect where we give in and decide it’s time to eat, drink and be merry.
The authors end with this sentence:
“Negative affect is thus a particularly potent threat to self-regulation, because it not only reduces the capacity for control (increased working memory load, reduced self-awareness and monitoring) but it may also lead to increases in the strength of experienced desires and emotions, rendering them all the more difficult to resist.”
So, you might ask as you join me in this dark place, “what are we to do?”  How do we manage to self-regulate?  Well, this has been the focus of most of my blog writing over the past years, with all sorts of strategies derived from a variety of different studies.
In my last blog post, I re-emphasized the importance of not paying attention to these emotions when they arise. Not a simple thing, I understand, as I noted above that negative emotions (affect) are related to and even seem to cause rumination. This rumination is the antithesis of “not paying attention.” But you get my point, right? The research summarized in this chapter makes it clear that negative emotions really do undermine self-regulation through processes like rumination that puts too much load on working memory (which derails monitoring our goal pursuit), or by provoking a hedonic response to feel good now.

Gross offers some potential points of intervention in his own process model of emotion. And, although it’s simply not possible to go much further in a single blog post, I will note that one effective strategy that is incorporated into many successful procrastination interventions is learning to modify appraisals of our situation to alter its emotional significance (I’ll come back to this at some other time, as this was part of the work we did in our recent book Procrastination, Health and Well-Being (link is external)). In any case, the focus here is on cognitive change, the kind emphasized in cognitive behavioral therapies, for example.
I hope that you can see that despite the “poison tendrils” of negative emotions depicted so vividly by Wagner and Heatherton, there are routes to self-regulatory success.  For some of us, this is certainly made more difficult by personality traits such as low emotional stability, as we are more chronically attuned to negative emotions. However, we can learn to act out of character as we learn new strategies to cope. Strategies that are much more effective than avoidance, self-blame and behavioral disengagement, each of which has been demonstrated to be risks not only to our success, but to our health.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/201607/the-poison-tendrils-negative-emotions?collection=1096682
References
Pychyl, T.A., & Sirois, F.M. (2016). Procrastination, emotion-regulation and well-being. In F.M. Sirois & T.A. Pychyl, (Eds.), Procrastination, health and well-being (pp. 163-188). New York: Elsevier.
Sirois, F.M. (2015). Is procrastination a vulnerability factor for hypertension and cardiovascular disease? Testing an extension of the procrastination-health model. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 38, 578-589.
Wagner, D.D. & Heatherton, T.F. (2014). Emotion and self-regulation failure. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 613-628). New York: The Guilford Press.

Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he specializes in the study of procrastination