3 Things Hard-Working and Successful People Do Differently

Successful people maintain good habits that go hand in hand with success in every area of endeavor. There is nothing that will bring you to the attention of your superiors faster than developing a reputation for being a hard-working and dependable worker. How you work determines the quality and quantity of your rewards.

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Developing Good Habits for a Successful Career

Your ability to develop good habits for work determines how much you earn, how effective you are, how much you are respected in your organization, and how much real satisfaction you get out of your job.

Unfortunately, most people are poor workers. They are unorganized, unfocused, and easily distracted. They work at about 50 percent of capacity. Sadly enough, they don’t even seem to know how to work any differently. Even if they wanted to, it is like speaking a foreign language; they wouldn’t know how to do it without first being taught.

To achieve success in every area of your life, develop the habits of highly successful and hard-working people. To begin with, the foundations of good work habits can be summarized in two words: focus and concentration.

Hard-working People Focus on the Most Important Goal

Focus requires clarity concerning the desired results and the relative priority of each step that you need to take to achieve those results. When you think of focus, think of a photographer adjusting his lens to keep the key subject sharp in the center of the picture.

To become a truly, hardworking individual at work, you must be continually adjusting your lens to be sure that what you are working on is the most important thing you could be doing at the moment to achieve your most important goal. Successful people understand that the worst waste of time is doing something very well that need not be done at all.

Successful People Concentrate Your Energies

Concentration requires the ability to stay with a task until it is 100 percent complete. Successful people understand that they must work in a straight line to get from where they are to where they want to go without diversion or distraction.

If you want to accomplish your goals, you must be sure that everything you do is taking you in that direction and develop good habits to get you there. This decision alone will dramatically increase the quality and quantity of what you get done each day and soon enough, you will become one of the most successful people you know.

The Benefits of Concentration

There are several benefits from learning how to concentrate. First, important task completion is a source of energy, enthusiasm, and self-esteem. On the other hand, failure to complete important tasks, or to complete them only partially, is not only a major source of stress, but it depletes your enthusiasm and self-esteem.

When you complete an important task, you experience a surge of energy and well-being. But when you work on an unimportant task, even if you complete it in a timely fashion, you get no feeling of satisfaction or personal reward at all.

Disciplining yourself to concentrate on a job until it is finished gives you a feeling of confidence, competence, and mastery. It develops you into a hard-working person and gives you an experience of self-control, so you feel that you are in charge of your own destiny.

The Habit of Task Completion

Developing good habits for a successful career includes the habit of task completion. Being able to complete your tasks and finish what you start, is an essential part of character building.

You cannot imagine a fully mature, fully functioning person who is unable to finish what she begins. The development of this habit is the key to long-term success.

You can accelerate the process of becoming a highly productive person by regularly visualizing yourself as focused and channeled toward high achievement. See yourself as one of the most highly efficient and hard-working, successful people you know. Feed your subconscious mind with this picture until it is accepted as a command. Remember, the person you ‘‘see’’ is the person you will ‘‘be.’’

Your subconscious cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that you vividly imagine. If you create an imaginary picture of yourself performing as a hard-working individual, your subconscious mind reacts exactly as if that is what you were actually doing at the moment. Each time you replay this image of yourself performing at your best, your subconscious mind records it exactly as if it were happening again. It then adjusts your words, actions, and behavior so that your actions on the outside are consistent with the picture you have created on the inside.

Each time you remember an occasion when you were performing at your best with confidence, your mind imprints it into your self-concept. The more often you see yourself as the very best that you can possibly be, the more rapidly this becomes your automatic behavior. You program yourself for success by feeding your mind with positive pictures, either images that you create, or repeat pictures of previous peak-performance experiences.

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About Brian Tracy — Brian is recognized as the top sales training and personal success authority in the world today. He has authored more than 60 books and has produced more than 500 audio and video learning programs on sales, management, business success and personal development, including worldwide bestseller The Psychology of Achievement. Brian's goal is to help you achieve your personal and business goals faster and easier than you ever imagined. You can follow him on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin and Youtube.

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