To Succeed, You Have To Hustle.

Are You A Pilot Or Passenger In Your Career?

If you hit a crisis or something goes wrong, it's someone else's fault. We are the victim. 

That isn't the case. Stop being the victim. Start taking control of your life and career. Turn off your career ‘cruise control’ and direct your life.

CHALLENGE #1:
I want you to do one thing today that scares you.

Pick up that phone right now and make that call you’ve been procrastinating on. Check out that company you've always dreamed to work for. Arrive at work extra-early and get more done in one day than you've ever done before. Push yourself farther and scare yourself in the process. You'll thank me.

If you're doing it the same way other people are doing it, you're doing it wrong. That’s usually the ‘safe’ or 'old’ way of doing it.

Be brave and do something completely different. Be creative and take a risk — reach out to people and try something new. Don't care about what other people think — that will just hold you back. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

CHALLENGE #2:
Take a moment and think of one simple, crazy change you can make.

Design a new business card, reach out to that senior VP or business owner who is doing cool stuff that amazes you. Ask them to lunch. Test a new way of running your project — put it on an express train and beat that deadline.

I hate the word inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. Don't wait for that bolt of lightning to hit your brain. Do it NOW.

The best ideas come from doing and working the process. It comes out of actually accomplishing the work. It’s time to get your hands really dirty.

CHALLENGE #3:
Stop waiting for that 'inspirational' idea to jump out and land on a blank sheet of paper.

If it hasn’t happen yet, it’s never going to happen. Dig into work this week and see where you can streamline a process, delegate a lame task, or discard an outmoded activity. Get rid of them.

Work smarter, not harder. You will suddenly see new ways of doing things better, stronger, faster (like the Six-Million Dollar Man). Stop meandering along doing the same old thing the same old way.

Hustle this week. You'll thank me.

Are You Frustrated? Good!

Work breeds frustration. It's a fact. You get frustrated when people or things knock you off balance, where you're out of control. It could be a late project, or a recalcitrant associate, or a vendor who never gets back to you.

Let's be honest — if everything worked perfectly, all the time, you would be quite bored at your job.

Did you know airplanes are off-course 95% of the time? The pilot or auto-pilot course-corrects to keep it headed in the right direction — it doesn't check once in awhile - it's an ongoing process.

Work needs course-corrections frequently. And the number and severity of the course-corrections are directly related to how much frustration you feel.

Now if everything starts to fail and you lose complete control, one of two things happen:

1. You get angry. You direct your frustration in an emotional manner towards the supposed perpetrator of the issue. You yell, you get mad, and you probably say things that are not found in the professional handbook.
2. You shut down. You lose energy and you become unmotivated. You move on to other projects and tasks and you probably procrastinate on this issue.

What would happen if you turned your frustration the other way? Instead of getting angry or shutting down, you use this situation to MOTIVATE yourself into action?

Turn your normal reactions to frustration into positive reactions.  

Next time, take a look at the more successful people at work or in your life. See how they handle frustration. The ones who are moving up quickly and are happy are the ones who figure out how to bypass their frustration and get motivated to solve the problem. They never let people and things get them down.

Let's go back to that pilot. If they got frustrated whenever their plane ventured off-course and god forbid, procrastinated on doing anything. What would happen?

Now put your career in that same situation. Is frustration, anger, or procrastination going to solve your problem and move you forward?

What techniques do you use to move you from frustration to motivation?

Many thanks to Zach Klein from Flickr for the image of Streeter Seidell.