CE#569: Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed (Forbes)

Keld Jensen

Albert Einstein’s was estimated at 160, Madonna’s is 140, and John F. Kennedy’s was only 119, but as it turns out, your IQ score pales in comparison with your EQ, MQ, and BQ scores when it comes to predicting your success and professional achievement.

IQ tests are used as an indicator of logical reasoning ability and technical intelligence. A high IQ is often a prerequisite for rising to the top ranks of business today. It is necessary, but it is not adequate to predict executive competence and corporate success. By itself, a high IQ does not guarantee that you will stand out and rise above everyone else.

Research carried out by the Carnegie Institute of Technology shows that 85 percent of your financial success is due to skills in “human engineering,” your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge. Additionally, Nobel Prize winning Israeli-American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, found that people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don’t, even if the likeable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price.

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CE#401: Jetman flight at Grand Canyon

CE#364: 12 Rules For Business Success (The Corner Office / BNET)

1. Play to win. Coming in second means the other guy won. There really is no consolation prize in business. Business is war, a zero-sum game. Only one company can win the deal just as only one person can get the job, the promotion, whatever.
2. Build game-changing strategy that solves a big hairy problem. If it’s not going to make a real dent in something important, you have no business doing it. Build a bold, game changing strategy to win big. Slow and steady does not win the race. Niche is fine, as long as it’s a strategy to gain a foothold.
3. Surround yourself with confident, competent people that tell the truth … and listen to them. Most mistakes stem from subjective sources, limited information, and inaccurate assumptions. Surround yourself with confident, competent people – no yes-men, sugar-coaters, or BSers – and get the unbiased truth from enough sources to make objective decisions.
4. Success builds confidence, but life-lessons come from failure. That means real personal and professional growth comes primarily from failure and losing. Moreover, you’ll never truly understand that until you’ve been on the receiving end of a few knockout punches.
5. Bounce back fast. When you get knocked down – and you will, over and over again – the sooner you get up, brush yourself off, learn what you can, get your chin up, and get back to business, the better. Not just for you, but for everyone to see, including your competitors.
6. Challenge conventional wisdom. Things change. That means challenge the status quo, authority, sacred cows, “the way it’s done,” anything that sounds even remotely like a generalization that your gut tells you may not apply in the current situation.
7. Results count, intentions and excuses don’t. It’s shocking how many experienced leaders and managers waste time explaining why things didn’t work out and making excuses or placing blame for failure. Nobody cares, except that you own up to it, get over it, and move on.
8. Know when to quit. Killing projects, quitting jobs, pulling the plug on investments, terminating partnerships, firing people, even shooting customers – they’re all things nobody likes to do, and yet, they’re just as critical as starting something new. If you’re not good at stopping things, they’ll drain your resources, kill your productivity, and limit your opportunity.
9. There are times to be focused and times to be flexible; the key is to know when to switch from one to the other.
10. Trust your gut and do the right thing. Whatever compass you use, moral, or otherwise, trust your instincts and everything you’ve learned along the way, and do what you think is right, not what anyone else tells you to do.
11. Do what you’re great at or passionate about, whatever makes you happy. Otherwise you won’t be successful and whatever you manage to achieve won’t be worth it.
12. Set some goals, come up with a plan, execute, see how you did, learn from it, repeat. That’s how everything is done.

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CE#301: Reaching Life Goals: Which Strategies Work (PsyBlog)

Have a look at this list of 10 common ways you might go about achieving your goals. Most of these should be familiar, but which ones do you think work? More to the point: which ones do or don’t you use?

1. Make a step-by-step plan.
2. Motivate yourself by focusing on someone who has achieved a similar goal.
3. Tell other people about your goal.
4. Think about bad things that will happen if you do not achieve your goal.
5. Think about the good things that will happen if you achieve your goal.
6. Try to suppress unhelpful or negative thoughts about your goal and how to achieve it.
7. Reward yourself for making progress in your goal.
8. Rely on willpower.
9. Record your progress.
10. Fantasize or visualize how great your life will be when you achieve your goal.

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CE#277: 9 Strategies to Make Selling Your Ideas More Successful (Lifehack)

 

A frequent question from people in all career phases is what a person can do to better sell a new idea, whether to a customer or inside an organization. As much as it would be nice to have a standard formula that always works, success really depends on the particulars of your situation.

There are, however, a number of common strategies you can consider. Your best course of action is to be adept at using a variety of approaches to make your ideas more powerful and compelling. These nine strategies are a strong start to include in your idea-selling toolkit:

1. Get the Facts in Place behind Your Idea

Make sure you build fact-based, logical support as the underpinning for your idea. If the facts aren’t readily available, look for new or nontraditional information sources. Assemble the information you need to develop a fact-based case for why your idea will deliver results the organization needs.

2. Link Emotions to the Facts Supporting Your Idea

Think about the world’s great stories. Very few are made up solely of facts. They all are strongly rooted in characters and emotions. Develop the most compelling storyline which makes sense with your idea and creates emotional connections to it among potential supporters.

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CE#258: John Sculley: The Secrets of Steve Jobs’ Success

1. Beautiful design – “We both believed in beautiful design and Steve in particular felt that you had to begin design from the vantage point of the experience of the user… We used to study Italian designers… We were looking at Italian car designers. We really did study the designs of cars that they had done and looking at the fit and finish and the materials and the colors and all of that. At that time, nobody was doing this in Silicon Valley. It was the furthest thing on the planet from Silicon Valley back then in the 80′s. Again, this is not my idea. I could relate to it because of my interest and background in design, but it was totally driven by Steve… What a lot of people didn’t realize was that Apple wasn’t just about computers. It was about designing products and designing marketing and it was about positioning.”

2. Customer experience – “He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the user’s experience going to be? … The user experience has to go through the whole end-to-end system, whether it’s desktop publishing or iTunes. It is all part of the end-to-end system. It is also the manufacturing. The supply chain. The marketing. The stores.”

3. No focus groups — “Steve said: ‘How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’ He believed that showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go because it was just too big a leap. ”

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