Organize Tomorrow Today: 8 Ways to Retrain Your Mind to Optimize Performance at Work and in Life

There is no magic success pill. Success requires strong and consistent effort, and the act of evaluating yourself on that effort. Most people believe that it takes their best effort on everything, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Highly successful people give tremendous attention to the most important activities daily and then do fairly

The highest performers learn to devote much more focus—85 percent, at least—to process goals, and they evaluate themselves on how they do on that scale. The product goal—making a certain number or getting a certain title—is the destination. The process goal is how you get there.

Identifying daily priorities might seem like an obvious or insignificant step to take, but writing your most important tasks down the previous night turns your subconscious mind loose while you sleep and frees you from worrying about being unprepared.

Once we start thinking about more than a handful of things at a time, our ability to execute any of those things at a high level becomes compromised. And the problem is compounded by the fact that very few of the things we’re asking our minds to do are simple or one-dimensional, like remembering the digit of a phone number.

Saturating people with information actually paralyzes action. Think about it: when people are overwhelmed, they typically freeze. Self-doubt slows action.

One of Tom’s favorite stories about the time he spent with his friend and mentor John Wooden is about how Wooden would evaluate his players during a game. It had nothing to do with the eventual score of the game, or the individual statistics any single player put up. Coach Wooden would watch to see how each player made his cuts from position to pos

When you define success by your effort, anything is truly achievable. And when you consistently work toward your goals—and honestly evaluate that effort—you will begin to deserve the success that comes. When it does, you will feel a tremendous sense of validation that doesn’t just come when you make your numbers or achieve certain statistics. You w

Instead of burying yourself in negative thoughts and emotions, you will learn how to make effort and improvement (not perfection) your main priority, which in turn gives you the greatest possible potential for impacting results.

“Busy” isn’t what gets rewarded long-term in the marketplace. “Productive” is.