In all of my life, from a child until now, I have always noticed that there are two types of successful people. There are those people who get successful to the success of everyone around them, and those that get successful to the detriment of everyone around them. The question therein lies, do you climb over the bodies to get to where you want to go, or do you try and build everyone up around you and hope that someone notices…

I believe strongly in the latter – in my opinion, what’s the point of being successful if you don’t get to share it with anyone. You need people to high five on the way up because they’re the people that will help you when things aren’t going so well. When you’ve climbed over bodies to get to the top, the way down is usually not so friendly – people will welcome your demise.

The fact of the matter is, if you do something great and don’t tell people, quite often someone else will take credit for it. If credit is available, it will get taken. This is how people can get up to the detriment of those around them. I am very vocal about my wins, and I am very vocal about the wins of the people in my team. It gives me as much satisfaction to brag about a colleague’s success as it does to brag about my own. That’s the whole idea of a team, isn’t it?

I guess the point of this entry was that you should always celebrate successes, and create a culture of celebrating them. This should help stir on more wins. People who climb over the bodies on the path to success are often known for it within an organisation or a university – I reckon this is where the saying ‘it gets pretty lonely at the top’ must come from. When I get to the top I want all of my colleagues there with me… Then we can have an awesome party!

Well it’s been a big year, our economy is on the rebound and it seems that everyone I speak to says that they’ve never worked as hard as they have in 2009. For me, sleep became a privilege not a right and holidays seem to have forgotten about me… But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Give me more than a day of free time and I start to go crazy – it’s probably something that’s built into my generationally high levels of impatience.

What keeps me enjoying life is constantly feeling like I’m going somewhere. There were a lot of new things that I got to do this year, both in business and life – What is extremely important to me however is that the energy that I am investing needs to be taking me where I want to go.

I am in control of my future and I would much prefer to live life to its fullest potential rather than float through it expecting things to happen to me.

The end of a year is a good time to reflect on what you have achieved throughout the year and whether you are still heading in the direction that you want to go. If you are, that’s great! If you are not, maybe you need to consider if you are happy doing what you are doing. It seems to be so easy to get stuck in the rat race and come out 20 years later saying ‘I wish I…’.

The moral of the story is live life in the now and year by year reflect and analyse that it is what you want and you are who you want to be – the only person in control of your life is you.

I won’t post next week as I will be too busy surfing what the Gold Coast has to offer.

I will however leave you with this very relevant quote from Thomas Jefferson.

“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”

Happy Christmas, Merry New Year! Have a great break, see you in 2010!

Most people who know me know that I am a guitarist/singer and perform ‘the circuit’ as a soloist and in a duo – this is something I have done for a long time now and playing in bars and clubs is something that I am completely familiar with. Last Friday night however it went up a few notches and I played a corporate function to about 300 people in a grand ball room of one of Brisbane’s most prestige hotels. We started at 9:30, finished at 12 and the aim was to keep everyone dancing. This was by far the biggest performance that I had ever done.

Because I burn the candle at both ends, this was an experience that seemingly approached quite quickly. It was different to what I was used to and took me far outside my comfort (or familiarity) zone.

The lead up to Friday night’s performance was pretty chaotic and I didn’t get the time that I needed to invest to be as I confident as I wanted to be. These weren’t regular pub folk out to see a band; they were at a staff Christmas party. Experiencing nerves of which I hadn’t felt for a long time (if ever) I got up and sung my heart out – before I went on I was visualizing it being over – as I was playing I wanted it to keep going.

The higher the risk, the greater the reward; and often before it all begins, you sit there thinking, ‘why am I doing this?!?’.

I’ve never had a ’run-away’ attitude; I’ve never called in sick because of a big night; I’ve never bailed on an uncomfortable situation due to fear. My motto in life has and always will be Persevere. As I expected on Saturday I woke up completely relaxed, like I had achieved something big the previous night and now I could get on with my life. So the moral of the story…

Achieving big things makes smaller things easier. As we attempt bigger challenges what was once big becomes smaller.

To relate this life philosophy to my corporate side, making a $10,000.00 sale can be stressful when you are used to selling $1,000.00. However when you make a $100,000.00 sale it makes the $10,000.00 (once scary) seem less difficult. Then you achieve a $500,000.00 and so on so forth down the line. Constantly striving for something more, makes your smaller challenges become easier. It also keeps life very interesting.

I am a self confessed challenge junkie and if I am not being challenged I am getting bored. This seems to a trait in Generation Y’s and it would appear that the best way to hold on to us in the workplace is to keep those challenges coming.

It’s a fact of life – You can’t reach new highs doing the same thing everyday – What have you done recently to challenge yourself? How did it make you feel and would doing it a second time seem easier?