If you are not making the progress that you would like to make and are capable of making, it is simply because your goals are not clearly defined.

Our choices are often shaped by our culture and upbringing. They can be so entwined in our routine behaviors and habits that they seem beyond our control.

If we want to succeed, we need to recover our grandparents’ work ethic.

I have a serious challenge for you if you’re up for it. Want real feedback? Find people who care enough about you to be brutally honest with you. Ask them these questions: “How do I show up to you? What do you think my strengths are? In what areas do you think I can improve? Where do you think I sabotage myself? What’s one thing I can stop doing that would benefit me the most? What’s the one thing I should start doing?

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, says that if we gave lottery losers each thirty seconds on TV to announce not, “I won!” but “I lost,” it would take almost nine years to get through the losers of a single drawing!

As Jim Collins said in our April 2010 SUCCESS feature, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.

Most people never live up to the potential they have been given. The results they produce and the life they experience are only a tiny fraction of what they are truly capable of. Why? What stops us? Only one thing: fear.

New or more information is not what you need – a new plan of action is. It’s time to create new behaviors and habits that are oriented away from sabotage and toward success.

According to research, it takes three hundred instances of positive reinforcement to turn a new habit into an unconscious practice – that’s almost a year of daily practice!

Are you willing to make the difficult choices? To do what’s unpopular? It’s not easy, but remember this: When people are calling you out and calling you names, they’re really just calling you a leader.