Pay Attention
Do not hope wholly to reason away your troubles; do not feed them with attention, and they will die imperceptibly away. Fix your thoughts upon your business, fill your intervals with company, and sunshine will again break in upon your mind.—Samuel Johnson
Anything you pay attention to expands. It grows. Pay attention to your house plants and they grow. Pay attention to your favorite cause, and your passion and knowledge will grow then success of that cause. Attention is like that. Anywhere you direct it, the object of that attention grows.
When you talk to members of your team, keep paying attention to the end results you want, not the effort to achieve them. When you praise your managers, pay attention to results they achieved that you wanted, not the trying, the effort, or the attempt to do it.
Most managers miss this vital point: they keep rewarding the “trying,” not realizing that doing so sends the subconscious message that “trying” is always enough. Their people soon think that if they can show they’re making efforts, if they can show activity, then there won’t be so much focus on end results.
Make sure you reward end results more than anything else. If you do so, you’ll get better end results. You have to be the one who keeps talking numbers if you want that one person to hit his numbers.
If, instead, you commiserate with how hard everything is, and you acknowledge how hard everyone is trying, then that’s what you’ll get: fewer results and more trying. Whatever you praise, grows. Always. It’s the law of the harvest.
Attention is powerful. Yet most people allow their attention to be pushed and pulled around all day long by outside forces. A chance phone call. Some annoying e-mail. Somebody walking by their desk and asking a loaded question. Attention gets spread too thinly this way. But your attention is like money. It is a precious treasure. It is paid in to things. We say pay attention for a reason. It is invested. It gets paid in to whatever you choose to pay it in to. If you pay it in to the things you want (measurable, numerical outcomes and specific results) you will get more and more of what you want.
*Thanks for reading my favorite motivational quotes of this year, I wish you a wonderful year and hope you can look to these inspirational words whenever you need a book so you may confidently crush any challenges or goals that you set for yourself.
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