Thread: Learning from Great Leaders

Being successful in life entails also being a great leader. While on the fastlane you need to be a leader to recognize your talents, locate talent around you and make the right decisions. I pulled a couple key excerpts from a post on yahoo. If you care to read the entire version it can be found here: http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/arti...dership/155008

Tom

Here are six leadership strategies and tactics to sum it all up:
1. Don't be afraid to set ambitious goals for your work and life, as long as you can build a specific, credible, multidimensional plan to achieve them.

2. The more your goals are directed at benefiting people beyond yourself, the more likely you'll be to achieve success by inspiring others to support you along the way.

3. Good questions make a good leader. Focus on the quality of your questions to stimulate the most compelling feedback and answers. Experiment, collect questions from people such as colleagues or newscasters, and see what works.

4. To lead people in uncertain times, project a sense of continuity, of having managed through similarly difficult predicaments. Just as panic is contagious, so too is a feeling of calm, which, when it kicks in, can settle the frayed nerves of those around you.

5. Beyond market-leading performance, the greatest source of long-term job security isn't a pre-negotiated employment contract with a golden parachute and rich severance package. Rather, it is to maintain your reputation and integrity at all costs, and be able to articulate what you've done, why you did it, and what the outcomes and lessons learned were.

6. The two most important characteristics of world-class performance are the ability to develop mental toughness and the power of deliberate practice. Mental toughness -- the ability to come through and deliver in the moment of truth -- is the key characteristic that distinguishes the greatest performers from everyone else. And, contrary to what most people believe, this is actually a learnable skill.
The very best performers are distinguished less by talents that they inherited than by their ability to continue improving for years, even decades, until they become great. Expert performance is the end result of prolonged effort to improve through a regimen of deliberate, targeted activities specifically designed to optimize improvement in carefully selected areas. The top performers in the world not only work harder than everyone else in their field -- they also work smarter.

To sum it up:

1. Think Big!
2. Set goals.
3. Ask questions - seriously that's why your part of this site, to learn. Right?
4. If you want to be on the fastlane you can't just sit back and watch everyone take off in their new lambo. I'm sure you want one too.
5. Your honesty will take you far and establish connections when you need them.
6. If you fail, try again.

Tom

#6 speaks the truth especially. mental toughness is crucial...often confused with being an a-hole also, decisiveness comes along with this; the ability to make fast decisions without hesitation is key. I don't know how many people I've talked to who had plenty of time to make changes to their portfolio or sell their problem real estate, but they didn't. They hesitated. That is a defining difference between those who are doing OK now and those who have been hit the hardest.