Climbing the Ladder

2 TIPS FOR CLIMBING AND 2 TIPS FOR LEANING YOUR LADDER AGAINST THE RIGHT WALL

In talking to some top performing college students today,  I realized that they have what it takes to climb the rungs:

1.  You don’t have to give them m&ms to motivate them.  They are self-motivated and conscientious.  This is a characteristic that employers want.  In fact, coupled with IQ, this is the greatest predictor of job performance across all jobs.  Here’s some more info on the analogy of the m&ms. 

2.  They can wait for another marshmallow.  They have the ability to delay gratification for something bigger.   They can delay income from a job to go to school, or they can delay partying to study or to be able to work to put themselves through school.  Here’s some more info on the analogy of the marshmallow.

But as one student asked me when I opened the discussion with “What characteristics do successful people have that others don’t?”  He responded, “Well what is your definition of success?”

Smart Kid.

Stephen Covey’s quote in  First Things First relates to this: 

“Some of us feel empty. We’ve defined happiness solely in terms of professional or financial achievement, and we find that our ‘success’ did not bring us the satisfaction we thought it would. We’ve painstakingly climbed the ‘ladder of success’ rung by rung only to discover as we reached the top rung that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”  

Here’s two tips for making sure your ladder is on the right wall.

1.   Know Yourself

2.   Be willing to take risks and learn from failure.

You can only truly get to where you want to be if you define where that is, and it is different for each individual.  You can only get to your definition of success if you’re willing to take the risks to get there and to be able to learn from failure along the way.