Have you ever read one of those articles about the success habits of
rich and powerful people and felt like a miserable failure because
you don't have a three hour morning routine,
you'll never be a gagillionaire unless you wake up at 3am and
meditate for 20 hours a day.
I don't know about you, but I'm sick of it. So today I wanted to break down
five success habits that won't necessarily make you successful.
Let's start with the one that I personally have the biggest complex around:
joining the 5am Club. I did this for years,
I would hold myself at a bed at 4am to be at the 5am peloton class in studio
despite the fact that I am nowhere near a morning person.
I will say if I naturally was a morning person,
I do dig the quietness of the morning.
There's no emails, no pings, no meetings, no noise,
but I've got to tell you that after I read the Power of When
I ghosted my morning person ambitions.
The book explores chronotypes, which is when your body naturally wants to
sleep, wake up, exercise and focus on it aligns to three categories.
We've got the larks who love to jump out of bed first thing in the morning
and get shit done. Then we have the owls the night people,
I immediately think of my developer friends who are up coding at midnight.
And finally, the third bird which is more of a midday person.
And yes, there are many people who are successful who are morning people or larks,
Richard Branson, Oprah, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk just to name a few.
But there's also successful people who enjoy sleeping in such as
Aaron Levie. Alexa, Alexis Ohanian, I hope I'm saying these names correctly,
And Warren Buffett. The main takeaway that I got from the Power of When
and I've especially noticed is as I adapted to my own natural rhythms,
success is not determined by what time you wake up that it's about how
you optimize and manage your energy. Along with this one,
we need to talk about another success habit, it doesn't really work.
And we'll pick on Elon Musk some more. He's a multimillionaire,
he can handle it working hard does not get you ahead. I mean,
I'm all for working hard if we're talking about your determination,
your diligence, your actual work ethic, but what most people are talking about when
they say work hard is they mean work a lot of hours,
like our friend Elon, who is known for sleeping at the office or on the factory floor
in some cases, which sounds really uncomfortable.
Here's my question to you:
Do you actually get paid more money for working more hours if your salary
and the answer is probably not.
So working more is actually decreasing your hourly rate when you look at it that way,
but it's also going to hurt your career. I have a whole video on why
working hard is actually going to lead to a lot of career stagnation.
But right now we need to talk about another sub theme to this one,
which is to never say no to work, especially from your boss.
And I did do a little bit of research to see what success habits were being
advocated for along the internet's and this is one that I saw come up
multiple times your boss does not know your capacity,
I would go so far to say that your boss doesn't even know what your current workload is.
Therefore, when you say yes to everything, including when it's overwhelming
and overburdening you you can only blame yourself successful professionals
are great communicators and saying yes to all work is your boss dumps
more and more and more on your desk or in your inbox isn't serving you.
It's not preparing you for the next level in your career.
And it's not helping your boss. When you're the yes person,
you are also probably the person that everyone brings their questions,
their tasks, their groundwork to because everyone else will say no to it...
But not you!
Which means the work that is going to be brought to you isn't going to be
the career advancing high visibility work that you want.
It's going to be the busy work that no one else wants to.
Which brings me to the third habit that will not make you successful at work
doing everything to the best of your abilities.
That busy work reorganizing your team SharePoint
planning the happy hour for your team off site that you're having in q3
or even completing your expense reports are all things that I want you to ask yourself:
Does this help my career?
If you over invest your energy, your time and your effort to be the best
at tasks that people aren't going to notice?
You might find yourself overwhelmed, burnt out and unavailable for the
work that would actually advance your career attention recognition and
ultimately, opportunities from leadership come from you doing work that
they're paying attention to. If a task or assignment does not expand your skills,
your visibility or your relationships do you really need to bring your best to it.
You need to meet those expectations and move on you will advance in your
career by being the best at all of the things you are going to advance in
your career by being exceptional at very specific important things.
And if you're not sure where to begin with those really important things begin with
my UAQ Starter Kit so that you know where your highest potential path is,
which will guide you to the impact that you should be making by knowing
when to be exceptional and when to be mediocre.
You are going to find yourself less frustrated have more time to do high value work
and to get more rewards and recognition for the work that you do which
actually brings us directly to the fourth set.
Because habit that doesn't actually help you succeed at work putting the company first,
how many times have youread the psychobabble?
That is prioritizing the needs of the company first,
are there times where that is necessary?
Sure, when there's a massive outage, a deal with millions of dollars on the line,
or your team is working really hard to meet a deadline.
Sometimes it would literally hurt your career to not prioritize it.
And that's okay.
But what about when the needs of the business include you're not getting
salary increases despite their skyrocketing profitability and skyrocketing inflation,
not promoting you, because you're so good at your job,
they would have to hire two people to replace you
see how they're saving money.
They're, we're not respecting your work life boundaries,
and always expecting you to be on I am here for being a team player and
for being flexible when you need to be, but it should not constantly be at your expense.
And it should be reciprocal, especially when you can go get a new job,
make 20% more and have more career advancement opportunities,
or simply escape your toxic AF coworkers if they keep around for some reason.
Which brings me to the fifth success habit that does not work avoiding office politics.
This is one that I hear all the time, the idea that you can just come into work,
keep your head down and get promoted. It does not work like that. I mean,
it would be really cool if it did but meritocracy isn't a massive performance
actually has the smallest impact on your career success. I mean, ultimately,
you're dealing with humans at work, then humans do human things even
when a company pretends that they're a meritocracy,
and that promotions are only granted based on quantitative metrics.
Typically, it's not true.
Promotion decisions are made by people what they think of you
what relationship the two of you have, who advocates for you,
and who will create opportunities for you all matter.
That's why your professional reputation your personal brand,
and the relationships you form at work are so important because
your results won't be enough. And if you really want to have the highest
and fastest career trajectory possible, you really need to nail those
three R's go and watch this video right now so we can dig into them.