Although many people have the technical skills required to succeed in their professions, very few of them actually reach their full potential...
I was blessed with an innate curiosity about everything – particularly about human behaviour and what separates people who are successful from those who are incredibly successful.
Alongside my natural curiosity, I am a life-long student of what my dad called the School of Hard Knocks. A prerequisite to getting the most from this ‘school’ is the ability to experience failure, pick oneself back up and learn from it. I can attest to the fact that the curiosity to try almost anything, coupled with the ability to learn from the inevitable failures, is a powerful combination.
And finally, I freely admit I have benefitted from both luck and happenstance, as my career indicates.
I’ve had the good fortune and opportunity to have owned, managed or worked with scores of companies scattered across 6 continents. As a result, I’ve worked alongside, managed and observed hundreds of people – individually and in groups – and I learned through personal observation that although many people have the technical skills required to succeed in their professions, very few of them actually reach their full potential.
In fact, only 1% of people are visibly and consistently successful in the eyes of everyone with whom they come into contact. The 1% all have well rounded lives and are admired by those who know them as much for their career accomplishments as for the things they do outside of work. These are incredibly busy people, yet they seem to have an endless capacity to take on more without sacrificing things like attending their children’s school pageants or actually enjoying annual vacations.
Tellingly, the skills and techniques that set the top 1% apart from the rest are not random. I learned that they all use the same basic techniques to maximize not only their work productivity but to ensure their professional and personal lives stay in balance. Through personal trial and error, I have boiled those skills down to the basics that work for other highly demanding professions – lawyers in particular, as it turns out.
Lawyers coached in these techniques achieve their billable hour targets with less time and effort, learn how to set objectives that are personally significant and then, through repetition, replace their bad habits with new patterns that bring balanced meaning to their lives.