The 7 activities listed here are very common practices that may stand in the way of your success in 2011. Often times we are encouraged by our culture and outside pressures to pursue these actions….but great leaders manage to become great without them.
- Make it all about money and getting rich. Popular books and speakers provide you with tons of insights for how to make this your only focus. You can attend seminars or plan your own high-pressure sales meeting to show others how serious you are. Make it all about you and your personal bottom-line.
- Answer every email right away. After all isn’t email becoming the most popular way to communicate? He who communicates better and faster and more often wins…..right? She with the cleanest inbox gets the promotion! Do your email early and often.
- Don’t waste your time reading. Even Solomon, one of the wisest people of his time, said “There is nothing new under the sun!” You learned it all in school and paid a lot of money for that degree…what more could you possibly have to learn?
- Schedule more meetings! We all need to become better communicators, what better way than to have more meetings….the longer the better!
- Schedule every minute of every day. A full calendar reflects a productive executive. Schedule out 100 percent of your time, making it easy to say “NO” to new opportunities that might serve only to distract you from your email. Why leave things to chance? Schedule it all out.
- Make some new enemies. Life is full of people who may have done you wrong or would like to de-rail your career. Let them know that you know how to play the game! Get in there and create some distrust and suspicion. Throw in some resentment and create some paranoia for good measure.
- Worry about everything else. Start first thing in the morning and let worry build throughout your day. You may not be able to do anything about it, but you can surely worry about it. Spend meeting time with other worriers to ensure that you are worried about the lattest and greatest issues. Lose some sleep over things out of your control.
This all may sound a bit foolish, but if you look back at 2010 I wonder if you will see that you participated in these activities far more often than you remembered. Great Leaders manage to become great without them. I bet you can too.
We would love to be a resource for helping you make Visible Progress in 2011!