Procrastination is not only the thief of time; it is the thief of life. To outperform your competition, both inside and outside your organization, you must develop the habit of moving quickly when something needs to be done. You must develop a reputation for speed and dependability. Study after study shows that those individuals with best reputations for speed and dependability are the most valued in every organization. They are very quickly promoted onto the fast track in their careers.
The wonderful advantage of developing the habit of moving fast is that the faster you move, the better you get. This is because the faster you move, the more experience you get. The faster you move, the more you learn and more competent you become. The faster you move, the more energy and enthusiasm you have. People who move fast as a way of life soon develop a totally different temperament and personality than people who move slowly or who take a casual attitude toward their work.
SUCCESS COMES FROM GOOD HABITS
Fully 95 percent of everything you do throughout your day is based on habit. Successful people are those who have developed the habit of success. Success people form good habits and ensure that those habits govern their behaviors. Unsuccessful people allow their bad habits to form, and these bad habits then lead to frustration and failure.
Ed Foreman says, "Good habits are hard to form but easy to live with. Bad habits, on the other hand, are easy to form but hard to live with."
A habit is defined as "a conditioned response to stimuli." It is an automatic way of responding or reacting in a particular situation. You develop a habit by repeating a specific act or way of thinking and reacting. Once it becomes a habit, it becomes easier to do it that way than do it some other way. What kind of habits do you have?
Successful people are simply those who developed successful habits. They have trained themselves, like athletes, to do certain things in a certain way, over and over again, until they do them automatically, without even thinking about them.
You may have heard the old saying:
Sow a thought and you reap an action;
Sow an action and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit and you reap a character;
Sow a character and you reap a destiny.
