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    John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success
    John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success
    John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success
    Ebook212 pages2 hours

    John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success

    By John Adair

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    About this ebook

    Everything You Need to Succeed in Business…in an Instant.

    John Adair’s 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success is your definitive code to getting it right at work, covering personal effectiveness and self-management, right through to profile-building and strategic thinking. Inside you will find:

    • 15 Greatest Ideas for Effective Thinking Skills
    • 7 Greatest Ideas for Getting on with People
    • 6 Greatest Ideas for Effective Daily Work
    • 7 Greatest Ideas for Better Communication
    • 15 Greatest Ideas for Finding the Work you Love

    …and 50 other fantastic ideas, tips and tricks that will give you the confidence, answers, and inspiration you need to succeed. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWiley
    Release dateDec 5, 2011
    ISBN9780857081407
    John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success
    Author

    John Adair

    John Adair is an international leadership consultant to a wide variety of organizations in business, government, the voluntary sector, education and health, and has been named as one of the forty people worldwide who have contributed most to the development of management thought and practice. He has written over forty books on leadership, management and history, which have been translated into many languages.

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      Book preview

      John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Personal Success - John Adair

      PART ONE: Getting Your Act Together

      Part One offers you some ideas on the theme of finding the work you love to do, a necessary condition, I believe, for any real measure of personal success. For it is the key to excellence. As a Japanese proverb says,

      No man will find the best way to a thing unless he loves to do that thing.

      Common sense, isn’t it? But what is common sense isn’t always common practice, and what sounds simple is seldom easy.

      The quest for your true role in life has an important by-product. It evokes and develops some personal qualities that you are going to find useful later on. These qualities are generic, in the sense that most successful people have them in some degree. See if you can think of any exceptions. Part One concludes with an indicative list of eight such qualities. You will notice that all of them contribute to your ability to get the best out of other people.

      Within every occupational field of work there is a ‘human side of enterprise’. In other words, whatever your professional or technical expertise, you need to be able to get on with people. Part One introduces this theme, one that runs throughout the book.

      The greatest qualities are those which are useful to other persons.

      Aristotle

      Fifteen Greatest Ideas for Finding the Work You Love

      Idea 1: Finding Your Role

      I am persuaded that every being has their part to play in earth: to be exact, their own part which resembles no other.

      André Gide

      There is an overwhelming consensus of opinion among those who have thought deeply about personal success. It is this: If you want to have any real chance of success in your career, you have to find the work you love. That is a contemporary way of saying that you need to discover your vocation in life.

      Think of it as what philosophers call a necessary condition: it won’t guarantee you becoming a success, but you can’t be one without it. That is in contrast to what they call a sufficient condition, that which does lead directly to success.

      The world’s business is done by countless people in a great variety of different roles: judges, doctors, plumbers, architects, waiters and so on. Your first task is to find the role that is right for you and then – in the language of the theatre – to ‘audition’ for it. It may take you several years to identify the right part for yourself in life’s drama, but don’t give up!

      You should be on the lookout to find the highest thing you are capable of doing. This will be determined by the interrelation of your abilities with your environment. Once you have found that highest thing, equip yourself for it and then do it. What could be more simple than that?

      cmp01uf002 Have I found my niche in life, the work I love to do?

      Idea 2: Don’t Settle

      Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do.

      Where there is love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.

      Ella Fitzgerald

      ‘Love and inspiration’ – if you do find them in your work – are powerful antidotes against what Shakespeare called ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. Moreover, they are the two keys that unlock the gate that leads to personal excellence in your working life.

      You may at present be finding it difficult to discover your vocation, the work you love to do. But don’t throw in the towel too soon. Life is long and it’s a quest that often takes time. Don’t settle for anything less than the best road for you.

      ‘If it’s any consolation’, writes bestselling author Wilbur Smith, ‘I wandered around like a lost soul for ten years before getting myself on track.’ Discouraged by his father from becoming a journalist, Smith qualified as an accountant in his native Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, before trying his hand at writing. ‘Don’t despair’, he continues, ‘there’s a role out there for everyone. It just sometimes takes an awful lot of searching for.’

      Vocations which we wanted to pursue but did not, bleed like colours in the whole of our experience.

      Honoré de Balzac

      cmp01uf002 Am I wasting my time and energy on pursuits for which I am not fitted?

      Idea 3: Three Useful Indicators

      No two of us are born exactly alike. We have different aptitudes which fit us for different jobs.

      Plato, The Republic

      There are three useful practical questions to ask yourself in order to ensure that you are moving in the right direction. They are easy to ask, but you may find that learning the true answers may take you several years. It is not easy to be truthful or realistic about oneself and you need to work with the grain of your nature, not against it.

      1 What Are Your Interests?

      An interest is a state of feeling in which you wish to pay particular attention to something. Long-standing interests – those activities or pursuits that you naturally like – make it much easier to acquire knowledge and skills in certain fields rather than others.

      2 What Are Your Aptitudes?

      Aptitudes are your natural abilities, what you are fitted for by disposition. An aptitude is a capacity that may range from being a rare gift or a marked talent to simply being a strength that is slightly above the average or normal.

      3 What Are the Relevant Factors in Your Temperament?

      Temperament is an important factor. Some people, for example, need to work outdoors; others prefer an office environment. Some love travel; others do not.

      Exercise

      Make a list of the following:

      My Three Strongest Work-Related interests:

      1

      2

      3

      My Three Most Commented-on aptitudes:

      1

      2

      3

      Three Elements in My temperament that Influence My Career Choice:

      1

      2

      3

      Idea 4: How to Find the Right Road

      Skills vary with the man. We must tread a straight path and strive by that which is born in us.

      Pindar, Odes, Nemea, 1

      Finding that ‘straight path’ that Pindar talks about can be a challenge, but it is very rarely completely impossible. It’s worth the time and effort, although you do have to work at it. As the proverb says,

      God gives every bird a worm, but He does not throw it in the nest.

      As you acquire a fuller working knowledge of yourself – we never know ourselves completely – it does get a lot easier. You soon know without thinking what would not be the right occupation for you, given your unique set – as unique as your DNA – of aptitudes, interests and traits.

      Correspondingly, the positive options or feasible career choices open to you seem to reduce themselves in number of their own accord. Therefore they become that much easier to explore. May be after one or two accidental false starts, it dawns on you – suddenly or gradually – that there is really only one road that is open to you. And if you have found the right road you don’t need to look for

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