The Art of Achieving Success in Your Job

If you thought that a guide to getting your boss's job would itemize devious methods of undermining and taking over, I must apologize for disappointing you. Larceny is an approach, but not one that I recommend. The speed with which the results are attained through this method is negated by the precariousness of the success. Larcenous techniques tend also to invite others to use them on you. The best way to get your boss's job is to be better than he is.

To begin with, you have carefully and unemotionally examined your potential. You have faced the fact that leadership is a specialty and that there is nothing wrong with you if you are qualified for some other specialty. You have avoided dead ends by careful planning. You have made certain that you are in the right field and company for you.

To get ahead you have learned to think positively. You have learned to find many ways to be inspired. Develop your imagination by doing. Broaden your knowledge in all fields. Develop the ability to think and plan in outline form. Learn to take calculated gambles; study your mistakes and learn from them.



We have studied the principles of analyzing and deciding. If you and your company have a strong program, decisions will be easier. Learn to look for problems; don't wait for them to appear. Balance the details against the overall plans and needs, but don't procrastinate. Learn to decide quickly and imaginatively.

Tersh Gentry offers the infallible mark of success for a small businessman: "That's when he gets enough paper clips from incoming mail so he won't have to go out and buy any." - Kelly Fordyce

1. Be yourself. Cultivate desirable qualities.
   
2. Be alert. Look for opportunities to express yourself.
   
3. Be positive. Determine your goal and the route to it.
   
4. Be systematic. Take one step at a time.
   
5. Be persistent. Hold to your course.
   
6. Be a worker. Work your brain more than your body.
   
7. Be a student. Know your job.
   
8. Be fair. Treat the other man as you would be treated.
   
9. Be temperate. Avoid excess in anything.
   
10. Be confident. Have faith that cannot be weakened. - Everett W. Lord
    

The poets and philosophers have admonished us for centuries to set our sights high, to hitch our wagons to a star, to let the reach exceed the grasp. That is all well and good, but too much emphasis on "stars" gives us all too often the feeling that to miss is to fail, when the fact is that failure lies only in complacent contentment. For it is not the re ward that supplies the satisfaction, it is the good hard try-win, loose, or draw. - Crawford H. Greenewalt

The six laws of work are:

1. A man must drive his energy, not be driven by it.
   
2. A man must be master of his hours and days, not their servant.
   
3. The way to push things through to a finish effectively must be learned.
   
4. A man must earnestly want.
   
5. Never permit failure to become a habit.
   
6. Learn to adjust yourself to the conditions you have to endure, but make a point of trying to alter or correct conditions so that they are most favorable to you. William Frederick Book
   

There is more genuine joy in climbing the hill of success, even though sweat may be spent and toes may be stubbed, than in aimlessly sliding down the path to failure. If a straight, honorable path has been chosen, the gaining of the summit yields lasting satisfaction. The morass of failure if reached through laziness, indifference or other avoidable fault, yields nothing but ignominy and sorrow for self and family and friends. - B. C. Forbes

. . . Business, as I see it, can put you into the thick of the struggle. It can give you a sense of connection with your times. It can reward you-as nothing else can-with the satisfaction that comes from being a citizen needed in your country and a part of the great test of human will. This, I believe, makes a life worth living and a career in business fully worth-while. - Thomas J. Watson, Jr.

Success in business does not depend upon genius. Any young man of ordinary intelligence who is morally sound and not afraid to work should succeed in spite of obstacles and handicaps if he plays the game fairly and keeps ever lastingly at it. When I see a youngster identify himself so closely with his work that the closing hour passes unheeded I recognize the beginnings of success. He is doing more than his employer requires of him, but not more than his own conscience requires. - J. C. Penney

Leadership is not for weaklings, and nobody stays up front for long unless he's got the stuff to stay there. . . . Leadership is less genius than sweat, and if you want to stay at the end of the line, you've got to make sure you do all your sweating where it won't do any good. - Roy Pearson

Other things being equal, it is the person who can lift his work up to the plane of the intuitional and inspirational who achieves greatness, both in his work and in his career. - Stanwood Cobb

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat. - Longfellow

The greatest single motivating factor which drives a man on to success is a high inherent need to achieve, and it is my firm belief that financial reward is vastly overestimated in business today. Financial rewards will spur a man who has a low achievement level, but they are not enough to make the drive equal to the drive toward achievement itself. - William Wilson

The toughest thing about success is that you've got to keep on being a success. Talent is only a starting point in business. You've got to keep working that talent. - Irving Berlin

In all things, success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation there is sure to be failure. - Confucius

Measure me not by the heights to which I have climbed but the depths from which I have come. - Frederick Douglass