Blog: William McKnight

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Top Performance, Part 2

Last week, I focused on...
1. Time Management
2. Desire to succeed
3. Goal Setting

I fill out that list out further with these...
4. Brual honesty with oneself
5. Willingness to do the things nobody else wants to do
6. Paranoia

Being brutally honest with yourself means getting past ego talk and ego demands and setting progressive goals towards your bigger goals. As you hit these interim targets (or not), you know exactly where you stand.

Being willing to do the things nobody else wants to do might mean physical demands like traveling or it might mean doing the extras like writing or documenting. This might mean the development of new skills which don't necessarily come naturally, but are valued at your employer or in the market. The first article I ever wrote took me every evening of my week of vacation - in Hawaii. I didn't exactly bang that one out!

Personally, I count paranoia as a quality that sets truly top performers apart. Andrew Grove titled his book "Only the Paranoid Survive". If you're paranoid, you expect the worst and prepare for it. You expect to not get that promotion or for your company to have a setback or for the ETL jobs to fail tonight. In the process of expecting, if you don't automatically create a way to prevent the worst, you will be better prepared to react to it.

Keep striving. Top performers, by definition, are elite. I've tried to put some meat on that definition here in these posts.

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