Can You Remain Focused Even When Things Are Not Working as Expected?

Whether you are an employee or an entrepreneur, you should remain focused. Otherwise, success may keep eluding you. But when things are going differently than expected, you may find focusing difficult or inconceivable. According to success science, it is not impossible but it may be difficult for most folks. This post gives a few tips to remain focused throughout your career, entrepreneurial, or life journey so you can take long and positive strides. To put it differently, focus can bolster the chances of your success by several notches.

Of course, failure is not a bugaboo; it is an experience that can teach several lessons. But you cannot afford to remain unfocused on your tasks just because you need not fear failure. Never forget that being unfocused is the grotesque root of failure. It can lead to burnout as well. So, please reprogram your mind suitably, learn from your failures, and practice focusing. Remember that consistent practice will help you master the process. In addition, aiming to succeed without learning to focus is akin to trying to reach a destination by a leaking boat.

The following are a few tips to aid you in this learning process.

1. Only insane people will trade their focus for a useless barrage of distractions. Of course, by this definition, almost 75% of the folks are insane. Just to let you know the intention is not to offend anyone. But the fact remains that if you allow distractions to eat away your focus or time, you will never be able to achieve your goal  So, whenever you find yourself succumbing to the temptations induced by distractions, unplug your mind from them and bring it back to the task you have undertaken. You'll need to take this step carefully and consciously. Another point that is of paramount importance is that you must do this consistently. In due course of time, this will become an automated habit.

2. Develop an interest in what you do. Whether you are a career aspirant or an entrepreneur, you must develop a passion to achieve the goals you have set. Passion will drive you to acquire the required skills. Skill and focus intertwine and help you win big. Importantly, passion will become so great a trigger that you will never allow distractions to mar your journey. 

But how can you develop an interest in what you do? Even if you do not like the tasks involved, keep telling yourself that you like them. Imagine as though you are enjoying doing them. As you keep taking these steps, you will very soon start liking the tasks. Even neuroscience corroborates this. To put it differently, you are waving a wand which is neurological in nature, to develop an interest in your tasks. 

Another method is to create challenges such as increasing the speed of execution of the tasks, perfecting the outcomes, and so on. Even small wins in these challenges will help create interest in the tasks involved in your career or entrepreneurial journey.

3. Do a reality check periodically. This includes jotting down the number of times you get distracted and how you win over such situations. Be brutally honest while taking this step. But why this exercise? This will help you in your efforts to bring down the number of occasions when you succumb to temptations. Importantly, rewiring the thought patterns in your mind and having a positive mindset will become easier. 

In summary, make all-out efforts to detox your mind from distractions and remain focused even when you find that things are not working out as expected. Never forget that focus and focus alone coupled with purposeful action will get you the extraordinary rewards and results you desire to have.

What Should You Do If the Workplace Ambiance Is Misleading.

You have attended a job interview and are waiting for the result. When the HR manager tells you you have been appointed, your tone is undiluted cordiality while expressing your thanks. You want to enjoy every moment lest should you feel later that you have wasted such an ebullient and celebration-worthy occasion. But you detect just one flaw. The ambiance in that workplace is singularly excellent, beautiful, posh, and sophisticated, too good to believe. The reason is that the turnover of the company pales in comparison with the competing entities in the field. You scent a mystery. So, you are in a quandary about whether to accept the job believing that all is well with the company, or decline the offer politely. Stepping over some grim precipice is the last thing you may want in life and particularly, in your career. In this context, you don't need to be dejected or indecisive. The following points may help.

1. Don't be overwhelmed by your success in the interview. Only then, you can think with a cool head, weigh things with the proper perspective, and make your decision. At the same time, you need not be cynical as well. Pre-conceived notions and vague or nebulous suspicions may lead to biased and injudicious choices.

2. Do an in-depth study of the history of the company, both recent and the past. This will help you assess the financial health of the company. You can go through the company's financial results as well.

3. Try to get maximum insider information. You may have acquaintances, friends, or relatives who may be working for the company or may be dealing with the company as clients or service providers. If you use smooth tact to get maximum information about the company's health and prospects, nobody will cavil. Even if they are evasive or if their descriptions are nothing but verbal ambiguities, it need not dampen your buoyant spirit. Of course, it may cause a pang but it is momentary because the next step may shove you toward some positive information to help you make your decision. 

4. You get into this fourth and final step with a curious and oxymoron-like blend of apprehension, hope, and elation. This step involves two checks. Firstly, you should check if the company is registering steady growth consistently. Secondly, you should delve deep and find out if the company is managing its debt levels judiciously. These two checks can pierce through the data and provide you with a near-perfect assessment. If the company is achieving steady and consistent growth and is managing its debts wisely, you can go ahead and accept the job offer. Otherwise, you can continue with your job search.

In a nutshell, you need not get lured by the ambiance that prevails in the workplace of a company. You can adopt the above approach and make your decision.

Employee and Employer: A Bitter-Sweet Love Story

You are a job aspirant. Having come across a suitable opening, you apply for the job. Your C.V. is so impressive that you immediately get a call for an interview. You attend the interview and are appointed as well. You undergo an orientation training that cements your bonding with the company. After that, you start working for the company. In other words, you get cozy with the company.

You complete all the tasks entrusted to you perfectly. You give suggestions as well to improve the output of the company. So, your employer develops a liking for you. This is a sweet love story.

Familiarity breeds contempt.

Very soon, people on your team and other employees find fault with you. This may be due to jealousy. Or you may be going overboard and in your enthusiasm to improve your reputation further, committing a few mistakes. In your eagerness and obsession to prove your mettle and to beat others in the race, you may commit the solecism of prioritizing wrongly or omitting a few vital aspects while carrying out your tasks. This may prove to be expensive for the company. Now, your employer may start disliking you or may even begin hating you. The love story, which was originally sweet, has now turned into a bitter one. 

Another scenario.

Noticing your efficiency, your employer may start dumping more work on your platter. You have all along been enjoying the appreciation showered upon you. Now when you have to do more work, you find that your work-life balance is in jeopardy. You start hating your employer. Thus begins the bitter chapter of the love story.

Should an employer-employee relationship always be a bitter-sweet love story?

To this question, the answer is: It need not be. The question now is: As an employee, what should you do to maintain a consistently cordial relationship with your employer? A few tips may help.

1. Never nurture an obsession to impress your employer. As an employee, you have to work to your optimum potential and there should not be any compromise on this. But while carrying out your tasks, you should have the company's good in your mind. Earning the employer's appreciation is secondary and you will get it automatically if you carry out your tasks sincerely and with the utmost focus.

2. Do not always be expecting appreciation. Some of the employers are stingy and they do not appreciate even those who perform well. According to them, employees get their remuneration and it compensates much more than their output. So, don't get addicted to appreciative remarks. This means that when you don't get an appreciation for your good work, you must not allow your buoyancy to diminish. Remember that the appreciative words of such stingy employers are just formal proclamations and are devoid of hearty effusiveness. 

At the same time, these employers will always take advantage of every opportunity to find faults. Expecting appreciation from these employers is akin to expecting inanimate things to show gratitude.

3. Don't try to monopolize appreciation. You want to climb the career ladder quickly. This does not mean that you and you alone should get appreciation. There may be a few other employees like you who may be nurturing similar aspirations. They may also be performing as good as you, if not better. They also deserve appreciation, so you should not be envious of them. The only advice experts give is that you should carry out your tasks with the utmost sincerity and focus without worrying about the appreciation of your employer. It is better if you continue to be companionable with those employees because their eagerness to perform well will help in keeping your motivation level high.

4. Keep your enthusiasm alive. Regardless of whether you get appreciation from your employer or not, you should not allow your enthusiasm to come down. Enthusiasm is like a nasty precipice. If you do not motivate yourself regularly, you may slip and it may result in troubles in your workplace. Of course, your relationship with your employer will get strained also. So, employ all your resources and keep your enthusiasm intact.

If you use the above tips, you will find that the relationship between you and your employer need not be a bitter-sweet love story. It will always be a sweet love story.

Are You an Employee? Understand This Career Math

Quick career growth may be the aspiration of almost every employee and you may not be an exception. Of course, this is not a solipsistic attitude and there is nothing unethical about it. But to achieve this aim, you must first understand what is popularly known as "Career Math." You may like to discover what this means and how to go about it.

What is career math?

We all know that mathematics involves the four main operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. So, when you try to understand career math, you should know the items you should add, those you should subtract, the ones you should multiply, and those you should divide. Let us look at these in the same order.

Things you should add:

You may strictly abide by the instructions and carry out the tasks assigned to you. But this is not enough to have quick career growth. You must always ensure to do something more than the tasks assigned. For example, after completing your tasks, you can assist other team members in their tasks. Further, you can use your creative juices and come out with innovative suggestions to improve the output of your team or the whole organization. Doing so will certainly give you the reputation of being a valuable employee. This will increase your chances of getting quick elevations to higher positions.

Things you should shun.

This forms the subtraction part of the career math. Topping this list is stopping to be rebellious. This does not mean that you should not point out the mistakes or errors in the systems or processes. You must be polite and at the same time, analytical in your approach. Of course, a large dose of diplomacy will do a world of good in enhancing the value of your handling. 

Secondly, you must never, never resort to unethical ways to promote your cause or improve your reputation. Never forget the fact that the reputation you may earn by back-biting, gossiping, or talking ill of others may not be permanent. Those who hold high positions may have several eyes and ears and they will soon find out your true intentions.

Thirdly, you should not drift even an inch from your loyalty to your company. Instances of people's lives getting ruined due to disloyalty to their companies abound in corporate history. So, you must be very careful because there may be alluring situations that may tempt you.

Multiplication in the career math.

The multiplication process happens when you can slash the number of hours you take to complete tasks so that the value of your output increases in geometric proportions. How can you do this? An example will explain this clearly. There may be several routine tasks. Unfortunately, they may be so important that you cannot dispense with them. You may have to do them daily and consistently. If you develop well-structured templates, you can complete the tasks in a jiffy. This is one of the major steps with the help of which you can drastically reduce the number of hours you spend on these routine tasks. This will amazingly bring about a "multiplier effect" on your output. 

The role of division in your career math.

Division in the career math is nothing but the popular concept of "Division of Labor." Every management may want to leverage the optimum potential of their employees. They may accomplish this aim by assessing the capabilities and skills of the employees. There may be one or more employees in your company who may be good at sifting data and presenting them in a concise and comprehensible form. A few other employees may excel in project management and yet a few others may have good knowledge of accounting, administration, or marketing. 

Being a member of your team, you should ensure that there is complete coordination between your output and those of other team members. Similarly, the output of your team should gel with those of other teams. For example, the team that does development-related tasks should coordinate with the operations team. Of course, there are tools such as DevOps to handle such coordination efforts.

So, how does division fit into career math? Dividing and assigning tasks according to the capabilities and skills of the teams or employees is how division fits into the career math. Regardless of your position in the hierarchy of the company, you should ensure that your output is in tandem and in synergy with the team's or company's goals. 

To conclude, understanding the above career math is important to succeed in your aim of accelerating the pace of your growth in your career.

How to Leverage Your Productivity to Climb up the Career Ladder?

Like all employees, you should climb the career ladder quickly. You are aware that the management of your company expects you to achieve optimum productivity. But whether you know how to leverage your productivity to the fullest extent is a big question.

Before knowing how to leverage your productivity, you should understand what productivity is. "Productivity is a measure of output relative to input." You are wrong if you think you can improve your productivity by working more hours. Productivity is not related to the time you spend on your tasks. Then, how do you improve your productivity?

Try this way.

Before you begin any task, please suspend your activities for a while. Remember that there are multiple ways to carry out any task. If you apply your mind, you can easily find and zero in on the smartest way to do the task. Experts like James Altucher suggest: "Think of 10 new ideas daily," You should practice this consistently and improve your creativity. Enhanced creativity will help improve productivity, say experts.

What is the main benefit you will get by embracing the above suggestion?

The best benefit you will get by following this suggestion meticulously is that by choosing the most appropriate way to carry out your tasks, you will start working smartly instead of sweating and toiling for hours and hours. So, the measure of your output related to your input will increase by several notches. When your productivity improves significantly, your company's management will certainly notice it. So, whatever career growth you have mapped out in your mind will fructify.

Continue To Be Mr. Lazy But Be An Asset To Your Company

You are Mr. Lazy but you have big dreams on your career front. When you discuss these dreams with your colleagues or others, you face ridicules because the general conception is that those who are lazy and are not ready to put in hard work can never succeed. Are they right? Or can you achieve your career goals despite being lazy? The answer is: You can achieve success even if you are lazy. This answer may surprise everyone. But there are a few strategies by which you can ensure fructification of your big dreams. Now, what are the strategies? This post provides you with the details.

You can help your company grow by leaps and bounds.

The above statement may surprise you. You may think "I am lazy and I hate doing any work. How can I help my company grow? The answer to your doubts is: You can become a hacker. You may again think that hacking is a dirty word. True. Everyone considers hacking as unethical. And rightly so. What we are talking about is growth hacking. 

How can you do hacking and help your company grow?

You can create more and more demand for the products or services your companiy offers. This statement may not surprise you but may shock you. You may start thinking "Should I do door-to-door campaigning or become a sales person and create demand for what my company has to offer?" No. You need not become a sales person or do door-to-door marketing. On the contrary, you can create more and more demand by providing great ideas for advertising the products or services your company has to offer.

What is the purpose of advertising? It is to make more and more people, and especially potential customers know about your products or services. This is what marketers also do. So, in conclusion, advertising is also marketing. Andrew Chen, one of the top tech essayists, says in an article “Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?.”

If you come out with innovative ideas for advertising the products or services your company has to offer, your company need not spend heavily on traditional marketing methods. But chances of getting spectacular results are high.

So, please continue to be Mr. Lazy but come out with great ideas for advertising a.k.a. marketing your company's products or services. This means without doing any actual or visible work, you can be a great asset to your company.

Definite Ways To Power Your Job Search Or Career Growth

If you are anxious that you are not able to career growth is not to the expected levels, you should find out the ways that will help in moving your career graph northwards. True, there are as many ways or even more, than the number of experts out there. But there are a few definite steps that can certainly help you in such a situation. Let us find out more about these steps.

1. Re-visit your planning.

You may have made out a profile and according to you, the profile is great and will certainly appeal to potential employers. But remember the dictum that the scope for improving your profile always remains. This means that getting complacent about your profile or your plans will prove to be detrimental to your career growth. So, try to improve your profile and do better planning for your job search. Acquiring or developing complementary skills is a great way to expand the scope of your job search or career growth.

2. Your career as well as career growth is your responsibility.

You cannot expect any one else to shoulder the burden of achieving your career goals. You cannot expect a Messiah or Angel to descend from the Heavens to hand over an employment letter. Or the CEO of your company will not knock your doors during midnight to congratulate you with the message that you have been elevated to the next level. Of course, these things can happen only if you are an extraordinary candidate or employee. In short, it is your sole responsibility to put forth the best efforts whole-heartedly. 

3. Equip Yourself suitably so that you can dictate terms in the job market or in your organization.

Honing your skills and learning new ones are very important for landing a great job or climbing the rungs of the career ladder fast. Learning to articulate your thoughts and ideas clearly and impressively is one of the best ways to outshine competition. You should become a voracious reader to develop this skill. In fact, you should read books and materials on a wide range of topics including poetry, literature, bookkeeping, marketing, philosophy, theology, human resource development, politics, and what not. Remember that reading superficially is not enough. You should gain in-depth knowledge in the topics you study. Only then, you can take part in conversations confidently. 

Remember the golden words of Andrew Carnegie who said, “Nothing will bring promotion—and better still, usefulness and happiness–than culture giving you general knowledge beyond the depths of those whom you may have to deal (with). Knowledge of the gems of literature at call find a ready and profitable market in the industrial world.” So, equip yourself with abundant knowledge in various subjects.

The above are definite steps that can certainly move your career graph northwards.