“A man to carry on a successful business must have imagination. He must see things in a vision, a dream of the whole thing. “ – Charles M. Schwab (1862-1959)American capitalist

Many of us have been taught that effort is the key to success. “Work hard and everything will turn out okay,” we were told. Many of us have taken that wisdom and applied it to every facet of our lives. Many of us expect our employees to take the same “just work harder” approach to sales, customer service and leadership. Yet effort is really NOT the best predictor of success. According to a study at State University in Albany, New York, effort is the single-most over-rated trait in producing success. According to the study, effort, by itself, is a terrible predictor of outcomes, because inefficient effort is a tremendous source of discouragement. People then conclude erroneously that they can never succeed, since expending maximum effort did not produce the results they hoped for.

If effort is not the key to success, what is? The key to success simply lies in how we feel about ourselves at the deepest level of our being, our personal beliefs. Over the course of our lives, we have developed many beliefs about:

-What is wrong or right
-How success should be defined
-What is possible or impossible
-Failure and risks
-What we deserve
-Who we are and who we can become
-What we have now and what we could have

These beliefs dictate how we think and how we feel. They determine the choices and decisions we make in our life, personally and professionally. They determine how long we are willing to sustain our efforts. And ultimately, they determine the results we obtain, and the quality of our life.

For many people, this “just work harder” mentality has become their primary life strategy. When a task comes up, their belief says, “Work hard and everything will turn out okay.” The reality is that things do not always work out just because you’re willing to work hard. This “No pain, no gain” approach to life is really a prescription for frustration and disappointment. Creative imagination is far superior to willpower. We know now that, while hard work, determination, willpower and effort are necessary to create success, what we believe about ourselves (our abilities and our feeling of worthiness), how we think (positively or negatively), has a least as much to do with our outcomes as does “hard work.”

We each have enormous untapped resources within us, resources that we habitually fail to use. We know that in terms of goal-setting, planning for the future, our aspirations, income and things we want to accomplish, we can never have today simply by sweating harder. The old days where the basic rule was that you work harder and harder and hammered away, and if you weren’t getting the results you wanted, you worked harder still, are long gone. Today we know that we live in a totally creative world. Everything we have today is the result of the efficiency with which we use our minds – our imagination. Everything that we have tomorrow will be the result of our creative capacity, our ability to formulate and stamp indelibly on our mind a clear mental image of what we want. To see it, believe in it and begin to build upon it.

Paul Huff
http://www.paulhuff.com