Right Attitudes » Ideas for Impact
» by Nagesh Belludi

The ‘SMART’ technique (see this excellent introduction) is a popular framework for effective goal setting. Generally, the acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound requisites for goals. Some people use different denotations and variations; others use the expanded ‘SMARTER’ form or focus only on the measurable and time-bound (’MT’) characterization of goals.

Quite often, goals — even the SMART ones — fail to stimulate action beyond the initial burst of motivation. The simple reason is that goals tend to lack visibility for the “true ends.”

Make Your Goals Stick

A goal that lacks an underpinning of meaning and personal significance is likely to run out of steam. Therefore, a goal or resolution can be inspiring only when you can connect it to a larger purpose.

When you define any goal, identify its “true ends” — what benefits you expect to gain by successfully pursuing an idea or goal. For example,

• Instead of “Join a fitness center and workout every day,” try “Lose fifteen pounds by 6-June to drop a clothes-size and look and feel better at my best friend’s wedding.”
• Instead of “Reduce credit card debt,” try “Reduce expenses and pay off $12,000 in credit card debt in three months so that I can save $135 per month in interest fees.”
• Instead of “Attend fewer meetings,” try “Attend fewer meetings or delegate participation to reduce time at work and enjoy more quality time with family.”

Recognizing the true ends of your goals will sustain you through internal and external resistance to pursue your goals.

Recommended Reading

• Use the ‘10-Minute Dash’ to overcome procrastination
• Don’t Let ‘Perfect’ Be the Enemy of ‘Done’
• How hard you should work
• Think and perform like a CEO

***See other articles related to goals, aspirations, resolutions, ambition, dieting success, perspective

A friend is there before you know it, to lend a hand before you ask it, and give you love just when you need it most.
* Unknown

Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
* Isaac Bashevis Singer

When a man feels throbbing within him the power to do what he undertakes as well as it can possibly be done, this is happiness, this is success.
* Orison Swett Marden

To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something; to secure it in this world, we must do something.
* Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Toleration is the greatest gift of mind, it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.
* Helen Keller

The spirit of man communes with Heaven; the omnipotence of Heaven resides in man. Is the distance between Heaven and man very great?
* Hung Tzu-ch’eng

When I work fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, I get lucky.
* Armand Hammer

Eventually, we all need to be willing to face the deepest, darkest beliefs we have about ourselves. Only in this way can we come to know that they are only beliefs, and not the truth about who we are.
* Ezra Bayda

The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit for doing them.
* Benjamin Jowett

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

The term ‘fired’ is a colloquial expression for dismissing a person from employment. It became more popular owing to the NBC reality show ‘The Apprentice’ where the host, businessman Donald Trump, eliminates contestants for a high-level management job by “firing” them successively. Indeed, in 2004, Donald Trump filed a trademark application for the catchphrase “You’re fired!”

Some sources suggest that the term may have originated from the expression “fire a gun” as in “discharge a gun.” However, legend has it that the term originated in the 1910s at the National Cash Register (NCR) Company.

NCR founder John Henry Patterson (1844–1922) is widely recognized as the pioneer of sales management and for developing formal methods for training and assessing salespersons. Nevertheless, Patterson, for all his genius, was quirky. He was obsessed with total control of everything around him. He imposed his personal values on employees. As a food and fitness fanatic, he had employees weighed every six months. He often dismissed employees for trivial reasons just to break their self-confidence and recruited them back soon after.

John Patterson’s employees and customers branded him abusive and confrontational. Patterson once dismissed an executive by asking him to visit a customer. When the executive drove back to NCR headquarters, he observed his desk tossed out into the lawn. Right on time, his desk burst out into flames. He was “fired.”

Thomas Watson Sr. was “fired” by NCR

Famously, NCR’s star sales executive Thomas Watson Sr. met a similar fate. In 1914, Watson argued that NCR’s dominant product, mechanical cash registers, would soon go obsolete. He proposed that NCR develop electric cash registers. Peterson resisted the idea. He demanded that Watson focus on nothing but sales and not worry about innovation. Following an argument at a meeting, Patterson dismissed Watson. In a fit of anger, Patterson had workers carry Watson’s desk outside and had it lit on fire. Thomas Watson Sr. was thus “fired.” Thomas Watson Sr. then joined a smaller competitor, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R,) which soon grew into International Business Machines (IBM.) Thomas Watson Sr. led IBM for forty years and turned IBM into the world’s leading technology company.

Suggested Reading

• More Folklore: Mahatma Gandhi on being the change you wish to see
• Warren Buffett’s ‘Newspaper Test’ on Personal Integrity
• Are you ready for a promotion?
• Four telltale signs of an unhappy employee
• Jack Welch’s four types of managers

***See other articles related to business legends, folklore, anecdotes, employee termination, leaders and bosses, NCR, IBM

The essense of a warrior is to build an indomitable spirit
and an iron will; to believe you cannot fail in doing anything.
* Miyamoto Musashi

The problem is not that there are problems.
The problem is in expecting otherwise and
thinking that having problems is a problem.
* Theodore Rubin

Life is a pure flame, and
we live by an invisible sun within us.
* Thomas Browne

The more you think of yourself as shining immortal spirit,
the more eager you will be to be absolutely free of matter,
body, and senses. This is the intense desire to be free.
* Swami Vivekananda

The worst bankrupt is the man who has lost his enthusiasm.
Let a man lose everything in the world but
his enthusiasm and will come through again to success.
* H. W. Arnold

Leadership usually gravitates to person who can say what he thinks.
* Anonymous

If everything seems under control,
you’re just not going fast enough.
* Mario Gabriele Andretti

The place to improve the world is first
in one’s own heart and head and hands.
* Robert M. Pirsig

Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.
* Martin Farquhar Tupper

Carry on, no matter what happens.
Hide your sorrows under a smile and carry on.
* Anonymous

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*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Contemplate thy powers, contemplate thy wants and thy
connections; so shalt thou discover the duties of life,
and be directed in all thy ways.
* Akhenaton

As the kindled fire consumes the fuel, so in the flame of
wisdom the embers of action are burnt to ashes.
* Bhagavadgita

If we are to progress we must go forwards,
not backwards. We can look backwards,
we can learn from backwards, but we must not go backwards.
* Unknown

If there is anything that a man can do well,
I say let him do it. Give him a chance.
* Abraham Lincoln

We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
* Cynthia Ozick

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-
power of the understanding.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed.
We came to rule; we are being ruled.
We came to work; we are being worked.
All the time, we find that.
And this comes into every detail of our life.
* Swami Vivekananda

Don’t carry a grudge. While you’re carrying the grudge the other guy’s out dancing.
* Buddy Hackett

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
* Walter Bagehot

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live.
* Flora Whittemore

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

I’ve learned one thing during my time on the soccer fields:
It’s amazing how fast you can run
And the things you can do when you have a goal in mind.
It applies to the rest of my life, too.
* Jeremy Monnin

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
* Napoleon Bonaparte

Nothing in life is more exciting and rewarding than
the sudden flash of insight that leaves you
a changed person not only changed, but for the better.
* Arthur Gordon

We come to love not by finding a perfect person,
but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
* Sam Keen Christine

The price of the democratic way of life is
a growing appreciation of people’s differences,
not merely as tolerable, but as
the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience.
* Jerome Nathanson

The soul never thinks without a mental picture.
* Aristotle

I recommend you to take care of the minutes, for the hours will take
care of themselves.
* Lord Chesterfield

There’s no limit to what a man can achieve,
if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.
* J. Laing Burns, Jr.

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
* Edmund Hillary

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous
breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.
* Bertrand Russell

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe,
the mind can achieve.
* Napoleon Hill

Freedom from the desire for an answer
is essential to the understanding of a problem.
* Jiddu Krishnamurti

Through zeal knowledge is gotten, through lack of zeal
knowledge is lost; let a man who knows this double path of
gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow.
* Gouthama Buddha

Wealth consists not in having great possessions,
but in having few wants
* Epicurus

A good intention clothes itself with power.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson

To know a truth well,
one must have fought it out.
* Novalis

Many a man’s reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.
* Elbert Hubbard

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
* Alfred Tennyson

What ought one to say then as each hardship comes?
I was practicing for this, I was training for this.
* Epictetus

The wise learn from the experience of others,
and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.
* Eric Hoffer

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

“Walton Ten-Foot Rule”

Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s iconic founder and perhaps the most successful entrepreneur of his generation, showed considerable charisma, ambition, and drive from a very young age.

Sam was a committed student leader when he attended the University of Missouri, Columbia. One of the secrets to his reputation at college was that he would greet and speak to everybody he came across on the campus. And, he would address them by their name if he knew them. In a short time, he set off to make many friends and became well-liked. Small wonder, then, that Sam triumphed in nearly all the student elections he contested.

When Wal-Mart became sizeable enough, Sam realized that Wal-Mart could not just yet offer its customers lower prices than the other retail giants could. As part of his customer service strategy, he institutionalized the very trait that had helped him become popular when he was a student. He insisted on the “Walton Ten-Foot Rule.” According to the rule, when Wal-Mart associates (as Wal-Mart calls its employees) came within ten feet of customers, they were to smile, make eye contact, greet the customer, and offer assistance. As Wal-Mart grew, Sam added greeters who would greet customers at the door (and control ’shrinkage’/shoplifting.) Even today, the Ten-Foot Rule continues to be part of the Wal-Mart culture.

Likeability — A Predictor to Success

Likeability is an important predictor to success in life. Some people seem naturally endowed with appealing personalities. They tend to complement their aptitudes by being personable and graceful, by presenting themselves well, and by possessing the social skills for every occasion. They tend to win others over effortlessly. At school and college, they are their teachers’ favorites and get chosen by their peers to represent their classes. They get invited to the right kind of parties and gatherings, and live the life of these parties. At work, they are persuasive; they get noticed and quickly climb the corporate ladder.

From my observations of the traits of the talented and successful, I offer you a few reminders to help you become more personable, develop rapport, and thus maximize your chance of success.

• Look people in their eyes. Smile. Greet them by their names.
• Listen. Speak with a pleasant tone of voice. Speak in a positive manner. Show respect. Indeed, even your adversaries have some admirable characteristics.
• Show genuine interest in others. Try to build a rapport by sharing something about yourself with them.
• Say “Please,” “Sorry,” and “Thank you.” Offer a kind word. Compliment them. Do not flatter.
• Consider the other’s perspectives and perceive his/her circumstances before disagreeing.
• Practice compassion. Make a sincere effort to help others.
• Do not overdo any of the above. Try your best. Do not please others at the expense of your own sanity — stay true to your values, principles, and happiness.

Recommended Reading

• What the deaf can teach us about listening
• How to overcome shyness in initiating conversations
• Keeping good eye contact
• Overcoming the temptation to please
• The power of genuine interest in others

***See other articles related to customer service, likeability, charisma, popularity, personality development, self-confidence, inter-personal relationships

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.
* Robert Louis Stevenson

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.
* Theodore Roosevelt

It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.
* J. K. Rowling

The way of devotion is not different from
the way of knowledge, or Jnana. When intelligence matures and
lodges securely in the mind it becomes wisdom. When wisdom is
integrated with life and becomes action it becomes Bhakti.
Knowledge when it becomes fully mature is Bhakti.
To believe that Jnana and Bhakti, knowledge and
devotion, are different from each other is ignorance.
* Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari

Great work requires great and persistent effort for a long time.
Character has to be established through a thousand stumbles.
* Swami Vivekananda

People are okay,
it is their behavior that’s a problem sometimes.
* Ken Blanchard

Time is really the only capital that any human being has,
and the only thing he can’t afford to lose.
* Thomas Alva Edison

I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.
* Cicero

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people,
but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.
* John Buchan

A person in danger should not try to escape at one stroke.
He should first calmly hold his own, then be satisfied
with small gains, which will come by creative adaptations.
* I Ching

Visit www.Inspiration.RightAttitudes.com for my compilation of inspirational quotations by author and topic. You may also subscribe to the weekly newsletter of inspirational quotations by sending a blank email to iqml-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

*Keyword(s): Inspiration, Quotations

The turn of the year brings about a plethora of advice on the ritual of New Year’s resolutions. Articles in magazines and websites and features in the media might interest most of us in pursuing this advice. However, change is rarely as effortless as we assume it will be. Only those of us who are committed and consistent enough to maintain our regimens do actually stick to our resolutions.

I would like to reiterate one particular aspect of healthy eating and dieting. Many discussions on New Year’s resolutions tend to overlook this important consequence.

Deprivation, Guilt and Indulgence

An all too common mistake that people commit when dieting, especially in the first few weeks, is that they tend to be overambitious and force themselves to do everything right from the get go. At once, they drive themselves to cut out everything unhealthy, take up green vegetables, flaxseeds, and other wholesome foods they hitherto resisted and exercise aggressively.

Alas, their optimism subsides quickly. They relax and begin to compromise on their goals. They make excuses, revert to their former habits, crave for their guilty pleasures, and tend to overindulge on impulse. They lose sight of their New Year’s resolutions. Consequently, they feel sorry for themselves, renounce their goals, and assume they could never embrace lasting change.

Here are three suggestions for dieting success.

• Cut back, do not cut out. Food is one of the basic pleasures of life. Cutting out some guilty pleasure does not mean depriving yourself of something you like. Treat yourself on occasion, but limit yourself to smaller servings. This will help you resist the urge to splurge.
• Target small, incremental goals that can lead you to lasting change. Realizing your New Year’s resolutions is part of your long-term commitments. Therefore, in goal setting, less can be adequate. Be realistic in what you can expect of yourself. Adjust your expectations and try not to overwhelm yourself. Pace yourself for success over the long term.
• Do not feel guilty if you fall off your plan. Guilt is counterproductive to health and well-being. Get over your lapses and simply begin pursuing your goals again. Ask yourself, “What can I do differently? How can I improve?”

Personal Story

Over the years, chocolate milk had become an obsession of mine, thanks to ads of chocolate drinks featuring my favorite cricket sportsmen in India and a seemingly limitless supply of milk and Hershey’s chocolate syrup at my dorm during graduate school.

One of my goals for year 2009 was to cut down on chocolate and chocolate milk. During the course of the year, I have to admit, I often caught myself overindulging in Hershey’s Miniatures chocolate bars and such from candy jars at work.

Recommended Reading

• How to work exercise into a busy day
• Health and fitness for the sedentary professional
• How to renewing physical energy
• How Mahatma Gandhi kicked the habit of eating a lot of sugar (A fable)
• Meal manners: pace yourself to others

***See other articles related to dieting, eating healthy, health and well-being, food habits, wellness, fitness, goals