Just do it

I would just modify Nike's famous slogan to "Just do what you're supposed to do."

In fact, this is the key to success according to the late sage Peter Drucker. He wrote that one should:

1. Determine what is the main task in one's job (or business)
2. Spend as much time as possible doing precisely THAT task (delegate or outsource everything else)
3. Create a way to measure one's performance of that task and outcome from that task

If you're a full-time student, study. If you're a writer, write. If you're a singer, sing.

All this sounds fairly simple and perhaps even the most common of common sense.

But in real life, it's really hard to do just one thing, in the same way that it's hard to invest your money in only one company.

How do you know if THAT company is a real winner and will yield a high payoff in the long term?

As a result, we prefer to invest in mutual funds or a diversified portfolio in order to mitigate the risks.

Similarly, in our own careers, we prefer to do many things because we can never be sure exactly what is the ONE THING that we should be doing.

Often, the result is that we may do moderately well many things, but we don't really shine in doing any particular thing.

And because we never become truly excellent at ONE THING, we never earn the kind of income and prestige that greatly successful professionals do.

I mentioned before that one should perhaps "just do what you're supposed to do," but how does a person get to know exactly what he/she is supposed to do in this life?

Because the process of finding one's talent and purpose is so mysterious (not to mention soul-wrenching!), we usually prefer Nike's advice: "Just do it." Just graduate and get a job already. Everything will fall into place once you have a job.

Every month, in the U.S., 2.6 million people quit their job perhaps because they realize that "just doing it" is not worth it anymore. They want something more out of their work life than just a paycheck. They want passion, they want meaning, they want reward and recognition, they want to use their talent, and they want everything to happen before 5 PM so they can get home in time for supper.

I think the success secret, when it comes to one's work life, is to break down "just do it" into distinct phases:

1. Explore
2. Decide
3. Commit
4. Perform

In fact, the Career Brainstorming workshop I developed in 2005 encourages people to fully explore all their options before they decide. We also show people how to create "commitment mechanisms" so that after you decide on a career, you can't easily reverse your decision (this is needed because, whether we like to admit it or not, most of us lack self-discipline). Finally, we teach people how to design performance-tracking systems for ensuring that they stay at the top of their game.

More details in the next posting.