Likeable people are:
I don’t know about you, but I get really annoyed when I speak to someone and they, instead of listening to me, type a text message or do something else that might be deemed as multi-tasking but actually is doing both things half-heartedly.
I also see parents out with their kids and instead of giving them their full attention they are on Facebook or Twitter. Or teens who seem to never look up from their devices. And I think it’s undeniably rude when someone at work is engrossed in his or her phone when you’re trying to have a conversation. I think kids, friends and colleagues deserve our full attention.
But it’s not just me; science backs this up to. Some of the dangers of multitasking:
How do you give up this bad habit? Simple. Do one thing at a time.
Ok, maybe that’s easier said than done for a chronic multitasker. So consider these suggestions:
I have collected some examples that should be an inspiration to anyone who aspires to be successful. They show that if you want to succeed you should expect failure along the way. I actually believe that failure can spur you on and make you try even harder. You could argue that every experience of failure increases the hunger for success. The truly successful won't be beaten, they take responsibility for failure, learn from it and start all over from a stronger position.
Henry Ford - the pioneer of modern business entrepreneurs and the founder of the Ford Motor Company failed a number of times on his route to success. His first venture to build a motor car got dissolved a year and a half after it was started because the stockholders lost confidence in Henry Ford. Ford was able to gather enough capital to start again but a year later pressure from the financiers forced him out of the company again. Despite the fact that the entire motor industry had lost faith in him he managed to find another investor to start the Ford Motor Company - and the rest is history.
Walt Disney - one of the greatest business leaders who created the global Disney empire of film studios, theme parks and consumer products didn't start off successful. Before the great success came a number of failures. Believe it or not, Walt was fired from an early job at the Kansas City Star Newspaper because he was not creative enough! In 1922 he started his first company called Laugh-O-Gram. The Kansas based business would produce cartoons and short advertising films. In 1923, the business went bankrupt. Walt didn't give up, he packed up, went to Hollywood and started The Walt Disney Company.
Richard Branson - He is undoubtedly a successful entrepreneur with many successful ventures to his name including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Music and Virgin Active. However, when he was 16 he dropped out of school to start a student magazine that didn't do as well as he hoped. He then set up a mail-order record business which did so well that he opened his own record shop called Virgin. Along the way to success came many other failed ventures including Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Vie, Virgin cards, etc.
Oprah Winfrey - who ranks No 1 in the Forbes celebrity list and is recognised as the queen of entertainment based on an amazing career as iconic talk show host, media proprietor, actress and producer. In her earlier career she had numerous set-backs, which included getting fired from her job as a reporter because she was 'unfit for television', getting fired as co-anchor for the 6 O'clock weekday news on WJZ-TV and being demoted to morning TV.
J.K. Rowling - who wrote the Harry Potter books selling over 400 million copies and making it one of the most successful and lucrative book and film series ever. However, like so many writers she received endless rejections from publishers. Many rejected her manuscript outright for reasons like 'it was far too long for a children's book' or because 'children books never make any money'. J.K. Rowling's story is even more inspiring because when she started she was a divorced single mum on welfare.
Bill Gates -co-founder and chairman of Microsoft set up a business called Traf-O-Data. The partnership between him, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert was based on a good idea (to read data from roadway traffic counters and create automated reports on traffic flows) but a flawed business model that left the company with few customers. The company ran up losses between 1974 and 1980 before it was closed. However, Bill Gates and Paul Allen took what they learned and avoided those mistakes when they created the Microsoft empire.
History is littered with many more similar examples:
You need to believe that there isn’t some fundamental difference between the type of person who becomes a successful entrepreneur, and the type of person who doesn’t.
Turning Belief Into Reality
No one in my family until me had ever graduated college with a bachelor’s degree. No one had ever started a successful business. Growing up I assumed there was a certain type of person that did those things, and it wasn’t me.
People with a degree existed on one side of the wall, and I existed on the other. People who owned businesses also existed on one of side of a different wall, and I existed on the other.
Then I learned that there wasn’t a magical quality that people with college educations had that I didn’t. They either grew up with the belief that they could do it, or acquired it somewhere along the line, and then they put their head down and did the work.
The same is true for any successful entrepreneur I’ve ever known. They weren’t necessarily geniuses and they didn’t have some unique third eye when it came to the market. They weren’t crazy risk takers, either. Many of them are some of the most steady, conservative (in the business sense, not necessarily the political one) people I’ve ever known.
They just believed they could be successful and then went about doing the work it takes to turn belief into reality.
On Risk…
While you don’t have to be a crazy risk taker to be an entrepreneur, being an entrepreneur does involve taking risks. There is a big difference between collecting a paycheck and creating a paycheck.
However, that doesn’t mean that you have to be the type of person who BASE jumps off of bridges in your spare time to be an entrepreneur. I don’t enjoy putting my life at risk. I’ve always been the type of person who didn’t want to look down (or up) on my grieving family after I died and think, “Huh. You know, there really wasn’t a reason to be swimming with those sharks.”
At some point though, we’ve all taken a big leap into the unknown. When I was 22 I married my wife and became a father to her 4 year-old daughter two months after I met them. I went from surviving on Taco Bell and ill-gotten Costco samples to having someone’s survival depend, at least partially, on me.
That’s a risk. That’s a leap into the unknown that makes any career decision pale in comparison.
At some point, you’ve told someone “I love you” with no idea whether or not they would say it back. Some of us have created a life, with little to no evidence that we were capable of managing our own life, let alone another’s. You might have committed to paying for a house or a degree for the next 30 years, with no idea what will happen a year from now.
You have it in you to take a risk.
You just need to believe that you aren’t fundamentally different from someone who saw his or her risk payoff.
You need to believe.
Not everyone will celebrate your success, in business or in life. Not everyone will pop open the champagne as you move toward your goals.
It's scary to take leaps, and you need all the mojo you can get to keep stepping forward.
You don't have any extra emotional fuel to waste on people who make it clear that your successes are personal affronts to them.
You need every ounce of energy and courage you've got. There will be people around you telling you to give up, pipe down, stop trying and come back into the nice cozy warm pot with the other lobsters. If you try to climb out of the pot, they'll try to pull you back in.
People get spooked very easily. If you start making changes, what does that say about the fearful people who know you? Maybe your growth means they could change, too. If your forward motion makes them uncomfortable, maybe they need to look in the mirror, and maybe they can't do that.
They might even become hostile and accuse you of trying to get above your raising.
"You're not all that!" is the battle cry of a person who desperately wants you to stop changing. It's the wail of a person who wants you to go back in time and become the person you were when they felt equal or superior to you -- before you found your voice and started your evolution.
Limit your contact with them and don't expose yourself emotionally once you've learned that a co-worker,a friend or even a family member is not someone who can cheer you on.
If you lower your guard a time or two and forget who your friends and your foes are, don't worry -- Mother Nature will remind you!
It only takes a few hard jabs to the solar plexus for you to remember "Oh yeah, that's right -- I can't share my fears and plans with my sister, because when I do that she says something nasty about how I never follow through on anything."
God bless the doubters and haters -- they teach us to stay on our path.
As a wise person said, if you stop on your journey to yell at every barking dog along the way, you'll never get where you're going.
- Positive
A positive outlook is a choice. Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s a sign of naivete, either. A person can be equally rational and positive. It’s about choosing to find the positive side of a situation without becoming irrational about it. And people simply enjoy being around other people who aren’t negative downers all the time. - Confident
Likeable people tend not to have anything to prove. If someone is constantly trying to prove their worth — or even their likeability — they aren’t going to be very fun to be around. The most likeable people don’t need to put others down to feel better about themselves. - Non-judgemental
So long as no one is getting hurt, likeable people refrain from passing judgement on another’s morality. They may have strong beliefs of their own, but they rarely try to foster them on others or judge others according to their own code. Going back to number one, they tend to try to maintain a positive opinion of people as much as possible. - Extraverted
We like people who make the effort to talk to us, get to know us, stay in touch, and initiate interactions. Even if you’re naturally introverted, you can train yourself to make the effort to connect with people. In this day and age, there are lots of ways to communicate that aren’t as intimidating. Likeable people make the effort to stay engaged with others. - Valuable
What I mean by this is that they add value to any situation. They’re the ones who keep the conversation lively at the lunch table. They ask the important questions in meetings. They pay attention when you speak and offer encouragement or advice. They go above and beyond to solve a problem. - Responsible
People like other people they know they can count on. Likeable people do what they say they’re going to do, when they say they will do it. They always come through. Even the seemingly small act of being punctual is really about responsibility, and it makes a person more likeable. - Non-Competitive
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and felt like you were being one-upped at every turn? If you caught a big fish, he caught a much bigger one. The most likeable people aren’t competitive. They may be ambitious, but they’re only in competition with themselves, not everyone around them. They’re much more likely to go bake another pie than worry about who got the biggest slice.
I don’t know about you, but I get really annoyed when I speak to someone and they, instead of listening to me, type a text message or do something else that might be deemed as multi-tasking but actually is doing both things half-heartedly.
I also see parents out with their kids and instead of giving them their full attention they are on Facebook or Twitter. Or teens who seem to never look up from their devices. And I think it’s undeniably rude when someone at work is engrossed in his or her phone when you’re trying to have a conversation. I think kids, friends and colleagues deserve our full attention.
But it’s not just me; science backs this up to. Some of the dangers of multitasking:
- It decreases your ability to think creatively. Being creative is a higher function task, and if your attention is divided among many tasks, you literally won’t have the brainpower to see and identify creative solutions to problems.
- It lowers your ability to filter out irrelevant information. Studies have shown that if a news program shows crawling text at the bottom with other headlines or sport scores, viewers have a more difficult time remembering what the newscaster was saying. The same is obviously true if you’re listening to your boss while checking your Twitter feed.
- It makes you a worse manager. Because you’re less adept at telling relevant information from irrelevant, you’re less adept at filtering out the important from the unimportant and making appropriate decisions when managing a team.
- It stunts your emotional intelligence. Research shows that if you’re a constant multitasker you’re more likely to want to engage with a text message than with the person in front of you — terrible for personal and work relationships.
- It causes increased mental stress. And countless studies have shown that chronic stress isn’t good for the brain — or your overall health.
- You can lose up to 40 percent of your productivity. This is called switching loss. Your brain takes a moment to reset whenever you switch tasks, and even if that reset takes only a few tenths of a second, when you’re constantly switching tasks all day long, you lose nearly half of your productive time.
How do you give up this bad habit? Simple. Do one thing at a time.
Ok, maybe that’s easier said than done for a chronic multitasker. So consider these suggestions:
- Turn off all the alerts on your devices. This includes email and text alerts. (Most phones have settings that allow text alerts only from certain people during certain hours if you’re worried about missing a panicked message from your teen or spouse.)
- Schedule time for your activities. It’s actually a great productivity exercise to estimate how long a task will take and actually put that hour or two hours or whatever into your calendar as an appointment — and then stick to it.
- Process email only at certain times. Email is a huge focus suck if you let it be. Instead, try processing your email only a few times a day, maybe in between bigger projects. If necessary, insert a line in your signature that lets people know you do this, to train them not to expect an immediate response.
- Start small. If uni-tasking seems daunting, try it for just 10 or 15 minutes at a time to start.
- Clear your desk. It’s easier to focus in a visually uncluttered space.
- Download an app that doesn’t allow you to browse certain time-wasting websites at certain times of the day — if the siren song of Facebook or Twitter is too much to avoid.
- If you need to focus on a phone call or need to clear your head, turn and face a blank wall. No distractions mean it’s easier to focus on the one thing you choose to be doing.
I have collected some examples that should be an inspiration to anyone who aspires to be successful. They show that if you want to succeed you should expect failure along the way. I actually believe that failure can spur you on and make you try even harder. You could argue that every experience of failure increases the hunger for success. The truly successful won't be beaten, they take responsibility for failure, learn from it and start all over from a stronger position.
Henry Ford - the pioneer of modern business entrepreneurs and the founder of the Ford Motor Company failed a number of times on his route to success. His first venture to build a motor car got dissolved a year and a half after it was started because the stockholders lost confidence in Henry Ford. Ford was able to gather enough capital to start again but a year later pressure from the financiers forced him out of the company again. Despite the fact that the entire motor industry had lost faith in him he managed to find another investor to start the Ford Motor Company - and the rest is history.
Walt Disney - one of the greatest business leaders who created the global Disney empire of film studios, theme parks and consumer products didn't start off successful. Before the great success came a number of failures. Believe it or not, Walt was fired from an early job at the Kansas City Star Newspaper because he was not creative enough! In 1922 he started his first company called Laugh-O-Gram. The Kansas based business would produce cartoons and short advertising films. In 1923, the business went bankrupt. Walt didn't give up, he packed up, went to Hollywood and started The Walt Disney Company.
Richard Branson - He is undoubtedly a successful entrepreneur with many successful ventures to his name including Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Music and Virgin Active. However, when he was 16 he dropped out of school to start a student magazine that didn't do as well as he hoped. He then set up a mail-order record business which did so well that he opened his own record shop called Virgin. Along the way to success came many other failed ventures including Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Vie, Virgin cards, etc.
Oprah Winfrey - who ranks No 1 in the Forbes celebrity list and is recognised as the queen of entertainment based on an amazing career as iconic talk show host, media proprietor, actress and producer. In her earlier career she had numerous set-backs, which included getting fired from her job as a reporter because she was 'unfit for television', getting fired as co-anchor for the 6 O'clock weekday news on WJZ-TV and being demoted to morning TV.
J.K. Rowling - who wrote the Harry Potter books selling over 400 million copies and making it one of the most successful and lucrative book and film series ever. However, like so many writers she received endless rejections from publishers. Many rejected her manuscript outright for reasons like 'it was far too long for a children's book' or because 'children books never make any money'. J.K. Rowling's story is even more inspiring because when she started she was a divorced single mum on welfare.
Bill Gates -co-founder and chairman of Microsoft set up a business called Traf-O-Data. The partnership between him, Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert was based on a good idea (to read data from roadway traffic counters and create automated reports on traffic flows) but a flawed business model that left the company with few customers. The company ran up losses between 1974 and 1980 before it was closed. However, Bill Gates and Paul Allen took what they learned and avoided those mistakes when they created the Microsoft empire.
History is littered with many more similar examples:
- Milton Hershey failed in his first two attempts to set up a confectionary business.
- H.J. Heinz set up a company that produced horseradish, which went bankrupt shortly after.
- Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, the company he founded. Only to return a few years later to turn it into one of the most successful companies ever.
You need to believe that there isn’t some fundamental difference between the type of person who becomes a successful entrepreneur, and the type of person who doesn’t.
Turning Belief Into Reality
No one in my family until me had ever graduated college with a bachelor’s degree. No one had ever started a successful business. Growing up I assumed there was a certain type of person that did those things, and it wasn’t me.
People with a degree existed on one side of the wall, and I existed on the other. People who owned businesses also existed on one of side of a different wall, and I existed on the other.
Then I learned that there wasn’t a magical quality that people with college educations had that I didn’t. They either grew up with the belief that they could do it, or acquired it somewhere along the line, and then they put their head down and did the work.
The same is true for any successful entrepreneur I’ve ever known. They weren’t necessarily geniuses and they didn’t have some unique third eye when it came to the market. They weren’t crazy risk takers, either. Many of them are some of the most steady, conservative (in the business sense, not necessarily the political one) people I’ve ever known.
They just believed they could be successful and then went about doing the work it takes to turn belief into reality.
On Risk…
While you don’t have to be a crazy risk taker to be an entrepreneur, being an entrepreneur does involve taking risks. There is a big difference between collecting a paycheck and creating a paycheck.
However, that doesn’t mean that you have to be the type of person who BASE jumps off of bridges in your spare time to be an entrepreneur. I don’t enjoy putting my life at risk. I’ve always been the type of person who didn’t want to look down (or up) on my grieving family after I died and think, “Huh. You know, there really wasn’t a reason to be swimming with those sharks.”
At some point though, we’ve all taken a big leap into the unknown. When I was 22 I married my wife and became a father to her 4 year-old daughter two months after I met them. I went from surviving on Taco Bell and ill-gotten Costco samples to having someone’s survival depend, at least partially, on me.
That’s a risk. That’s a leap into the unknown that makes any career decision pale in comparison.
At some point, you’ve told someone “I love you” with no idea whether or not they would say it back. Some of us have created a life, with little to no evidence that we were capable of managing our own life, let alone another’s. You might have committed to paying for a house or a degree for the next 30 years, with no idea what will happen a year from now.
You have it in you to take a risk.
You just need to believe that you aren’t fundamentally different from someone who saw his or her risk payoff.
You need to believe.
Not everyone will celebrate your success, in business or in life. Not everyone will pop open the champagne as you move toward your goals.
It's scary to take leaps, and you need all the mojo you can get to keep stepping forward.
You don't have any extra emotional fuel to waste on people who make it clear that your successes are personal affronts to them.
You need every ounce of energy and courage you've got. There will be people around you telling you to give up, pipe down, stop trying and come back into the nice cozy warm pot with the other lobsters. If you try to climb out of the pot, they'll try to pull you back in.
People get spooked very easily. If you start making changes, what does that say about the fearful people who know you? Maybe your growth means they could change, too. If your forward motion makes them uncomfortable, maybe they need to look in the mirror, and maybe they can't do that.
They might even become hostile and accuse you of trying to get above your raising.
"You're not all that!" is the battle cry of a person who desperately wants you to stop changing. It's the wail of a person who wants you to go back in time and become the person you were when they felt equal or superior to you -- before you found your voice and started your evolution.
Limit your contact with them and don't expose yourself emotionally once you've learned that a co-worker,a friend or even a family member is not someone who can cheer you on.
If you lower your guard a time or two and forget who your friends and your foes are, don't worry -- Mother Nature will remind you!
It only takes a few hard jabs to the solar plexus for you to remember "Oh yeah, that's right -- I can't share my fears and plans with my sister, because when I do that she says something nasty about how I never follow through on anything."
God bless the doubters and haters -- they teach us to stay on our path.
As a wise person said, if you stop on your journey to yell at every barking dog along the way, you'll never get where you're going.
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