Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2015, when the Zuckerberg T-shirt story was recent, Barack Obama was US president and Michael Dell was described as CEO of Dell Computers.
Without a good mentor, it never hurts to take advice from the very best and identify the areas of life that most directly affect people’s success, their productivity and their overall well-being. Whether we are talking about life in general, a career or business, there are certain questions that highly successful entrepreneurs have asked themselves at some point and consider important.
This list was put together by Will Mitchell for The Muse, and the questions are, at the very least, well worth thinking about applying.
1. Which decisions can you stop making?
Greater productivity, and therefore success, comes from focusing all our attention on a few important decisions. The problem is that every day we make hundreds of trivial decisions that end up wearing us down without our noticing. What should I wear? What will I have for breakfast, lunch, dinner?
The case of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) drew attention recently: he said he always wears the same T-shirt so he doesn’t have to think about what to put on. The idea didn’t originate with Zuckerberg; one of the first to talk about it was US President Barack Obama, who says he only wears two kinds of suit so he doesn’t have to rack his brains over which one to put on.
Decisions take energy, and our energy isn’t unlimited. Doing certain things more routinely can help us cut down on this kind of decision and focus on what really matters.
That is also why knowing how to delegate is so important for success in business. We can’t do everything or be everywhere, or we wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the most productive side of the company, the part that really does need our attention.
(Read: 25 habits of successful people)
2. What are you afraid of?
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know of to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.” – Steve Jobs
Fear is one of the biggest obstacles to success: there are many things we don’t do out of fear, above all fear of failure.
What are your fears? What are you afraid of? What is stopping you from doing what you know you should do? It’s time to start identifying those fears and facing them so you can really reach your full potential. As a rule, we hold back from doing something because we fear a bad outcome, but we will never know the outcome if we don’t do it.
Stop asking yourself what would happen if you fail, and start asking yourself what would happen if you succeed.
3. What is your most important goal today, this week…?
We always talk about long-term thinking, but the truth is that for things to work in the long run, we need to be very focused on the short term. In other words, you win an obstacle race by clearing one hurdle at a time.
You can’t achieve a year’s goals without setting daily, weekly or monthly ones. Even having ambitious long-term goals can lead to procrastination if we don’t set ourselves short-term targets.
Focus on what you have to do today, and do it as well as you can. All long-term success starts with doing things well today, tomorrow and next week.
4. What time do you wake up?
A day has only 24 hours, and whether you are rich or poor, nobody can buy a longer day, so the point is to make the most of the day you have.
A few days ago we published an article explaining that you don’t necessarily have to be an early riser to succeed, although most highly successful entrepreneurs agree that they get up before 6 a.m.
At that hour they get up, exercise, read the news, plan the day and have a relaxed breakfast. By the time they reach the office they are fully informed and awake, ready to tackle the things that really matter.
We are not going to try to turn everyone into an early bird, but it is worth asking whether our habit of sleeping in might be getting in the way of our success, keeping us from reaching the productivity we could achieve.
5. Which hard thing are you not doing enough of?
Most of us tend to throw ourselves into the easiest things, or the ones we most enjoy doing. Unfortunately, success comes from doing the things hardly anyone is willing to do.
“I don’t like doing only the things I like doing. I like doing the things that make the company succeed.” – Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computers
Dell thinks the message that “the secret of success is finding your passion” gets distorted. In reality, success comes from doing and learning many things that have nothing to do with your passion, but that have to be done; perhaps in time you’ll come to love them, perhaps not. Reaching success is a hard road, so you have to do hard things that not everyone is willing to do.
(Recommended: 16 hard things you’ll have to do to succeed)
6. Which easy thing are you doing too much of?
Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, used to say that we should do the hardest tasks first, and the easy ones would then take care of themselves.
In practice, he was saying that our attention should be on what is difficult and demanding, on what we really know how to do and have trained for. The easy things can be delegated.
For example, if you have to call 20 people to invite them to a dinner at your company, that is something anyone could do, but it can take more than an hour of your time and drain your energy, when you could be using that energy for something far more productive.
Identify the pointless tasks you spend too much time on and find a way to focus only on what matters: the hardest, most difficult work.
Finally, once you have gone through these questions and seen that you could change or improve some of these points, it’s a matter of finding a way to put them into practice.
I have certainly noticed that on some days I’ve ended up mentally exhausted without having done anything truly productive, while at other times I’ve been so busy with important things that, when I finished, the personal satisfaction meant I didn’t feel the exhaustion at all.
Further reading
- 7 things the world’s most successful people have in common
- 40 universal truths about success
- 5 keys to achieving excellence in everything you set out to do
Featured image: Jacek Halicki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
