5 Skills That Create Success in the Marketplace

Learn to concentrate on these five abilities in your personal development quest. They will help you skillfully attack the marketplace.
1. ABSORB

Develop the ability to absorb, the ability to soak in, take in, be like a sponge. Sitting in class or at the workplace, sometimes it’s easy to daydream, to be preoccupied, to be somewhere else.

I read a good article once in Reader’s Digest. The title was, “Wherever You Are, Be There.” I thought that was excellent. Be there. Concentration. It’s also important in learning extra skills to really pay attention. Absorb, take in.

Most people are trying to get through the day. I’ve got a better objective for you: Learn to get from the day. Not just get through it; get from it. Soak it up. Each day is a piece of the mosaic of your life. Don’t waste any. Treat it with care. See how much you can get from a day—how much advice, how much information, how much color, how much sight and sound to add to your worth and your wealth and your equity of mind.
2. RESPOND

Develop the skill to respond, the ability to be affected by what you see and hear and sense. Success is not just knowledge. Success is response to knowledge. Success is not just experience. Success is emotion created from experience. It’s the emotional part that plays such a major part in our life and our future and our success.

Responding to life means to let sad things make you sad, to let happy things make you happy, to let puzzling things puzzle you. Let things that are difficult create difficulty for you. Respond.

I’m asking you to let it affect you, let it do things to you. This builds your emotional bank.
3. REFLECT

Learn to reflect. Reflecting is an extra way of getting more value from what you know and what you’ve been through. Reflecting is going back over.

Take just a few minutes at the end of the day, find a place, if you can, to be alone, and just go back and think through the day. Where have you been? What did you see? What did you hear? What did you feel? If you’ll just relive it, I’m telling you, it will add multiplied value to you. The day you’ve just been through will be more valuable for your future if you just go back through it.

Take a few hours at the end of the week and minutes at the end of the day, half a day at the end of the month and a weekend at the end of the year. Those are called times to reflect. Now, why go back over? Let me tell you why: to make the past more valuable. If you’ll take the time to review what’s going on, review the decision-making, review the people you’re with, review the actions you’re taking, the decisions you’re making, review all that stuff, go back through the feeling, you will make your life more valuable.

Now, why try to make your life valuable? Simple answer: to invest it in the future. We call that bright. We call that skillful, to make more out of your past, to have more value to invest in the future, instead of just trying to get through one more day, trying to get through one more week. It’s to get more out of your past and invest it in your future.
4. ACT

Develop the ability to act, the ability to take action on your feelings and your knowledge. Disciplined action is what gives birth to ideas, enterprise and values. Without activity, ideas and dreams have no life.

Disciplined activity is the most demanding of arts to take you where you want to go. Now, sometimes it doesn’t take much of a change of activity. Daily or weekly disciplines are those small changes of intelligent activity that take you in a better direction. Here’s a good way to look at it: Ten years from now, you will surely arrive. The question is, where? Now is the time to fix the next 10 years. Fix a better course.

Now, to unsophisticated people, what they do during the day doesn’t seem to matter. But to sophisticated people, it makes all the difference in the world. The books you read, the actions you take, the disciplines you engage in on a daily basis, those are the activities that are taking you somewhere, and all of us need to take a look at where our daily activities are taking us. The activity of learning, the activity of mind, health disciplines, wealth disciplines, culture disciplines—all values come from disciplines. Ideas put into disciplined activity create value.
5. SHARE

Sharing is a unique human capacity. Sharing is a phenomenon, especially in the human experience. It seems when we share, we are the bigger and better for it.

It seems like if you share something and give it away, you’d have less. But it’s a paradox. What you share creates more for you. That’s why we call it a paradox. You’re not diminished by sharing. You’re increased.

If you have a child and you love him dearly, and if a second child comes along, must you now cut your love in half? The answer is no. From some strange, mysterious source comes an increased capacity. From sharing with the first, capacity and an awareness and uniqueness are increased. So that is what I would ask you to do, become gifted in sharing.

There are many ways to share. One is by the gift of language. One of the most important studies for you is the study of communication, how to affect other people with words.




SOURCE:success.com