shape-up
Be obsessed with being better every day By Ian McGriff When you lie down at the end of a long day knowing you gave everything you could to make yourself 1 percent better, you know it was a great day, filled with achievement toward your objectives. That’s a great feeling. It makes it easier to fall asleep, easier to recover from the long day, and it encourages you to keep working to become better every day. My parents drilled into me that no one should work harder than you because only you can control how hard you work. I’ve taken that notion and flipped it a little. No one can control your success because no one can create it but you. Success, like it or not, is a choice. You always have the opportunity to choose to succeed at a given task each day because success is self-determined and relative to your circumstance. You have to pre-measure success before you can say you were or were not successful. How do you measure success? I’ll give you some advice: Don’t set your bar in comparison to someone else’s. Run your own race. Who cares what others are doing? Only question is, “Am I progressing?” It’s about getting better every day. I have a wristband with the saying “Better Every Day” on it, and I work toward that each day — a better husband, friend, son, leader and man. I work to meet that goal by following what I call the Top Five Obsessions of Successful People, a road map that can lead you to success if you are brave enough to follow it. Inspired by professional leadership speaker Robin Sharma, I added my own twist and came up with the following list. Remember a fear is nothing more than a doubt that you have fed. • Be inspired by change, not resistant to it. Change is life-giving, so we should treat it as such. When we experience a change, we must look at the benefits of the change rather than the negatives. The negatives can consume you. They can force you to dwell only on those things that upset you about that change.
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she magazine • september 2011