My hunch is that you aspire to be an ever more successful person. Not success as determined by some outsider, but increased success as determined by yourself. But what does it mean to become more successful? How will you know it if you achieve it? How can you consciously increase your success rate? The purpose of this article is to remove the vagueness and emotion from the topic of increased success and make the process practical and reasonable.

Your rate of success is the amount of positive results you achieve in your highest priority outcomes per day. Your success rate is dependent on three key components: work ethic, efficiency and effectiveness. Work ethic is the amount of concentrated effort that you pour into a given day. Efficiency is the ratio of units of output to units of input. Effectiveness is the ratio of improved output in your highest priority outcomes per unit of total outcomes.

As an equation, these ideas can be stated this way:

Here's a bit more explanation on each of these four terms:

An effective person is one who continually achieves better results in their highest priority outcomes. Ultimately, an effective person makes progress every day in getting better results in their highest priority outcomes. Of course, no one makes progress everyday on every desired outcome (unless they are a really, really narrow person). The key is to make progress everyday toward one or more desired outcome.

For the sake of argument, assume that a given individual has the following HPOs (Highest Priority Outcomes):

• Improved family and friend relationships
• Improved personal health (including spiritual, mental, physical, social and financial)
• Improved business results in revenues and profits

This individual is highly successful when they make significant progress each day in one or more of these highest priority outcome areas.

However, no one makes progress and becomes more successful just by wanting to become more successful. The keys are to maintain a strong work ethic and constantly enhance both efficiency and effectiveness.

Your work ethic is the amount of concentrated effort you pour into each day. While many people "work" eight to twelve hours a day, almost no one pours in eight to twelve hours of concentrated effort each day. My experience has been that many people who say they work twelve to fifteen hours a day are really using up a lot of hours not concentrated on anything. Chatting with colleagues over coffee or listening to music while driving does not constitute concentrated effort.

There is no magic number that makes a good or poor work ethic. That is a personal choice. Having said that, here are a few things to keep in mind. If you are only going to really "work" an hour each day, you will have a very hard time increasing your rate of success. On the other hand, if you try to pour in too many hours of concentrated effort each day, you will eventually burn out. This also leads to very low success rates. The key is to clarify what you believe is a reasonable number of concentrated hours of effort each day toward any given priority outcome and then investing that much time. In terms of running my own business, I have found that about five to six hours of concentrated effort a day five days a week is about my capacity. Less than that my success rate becomes too slow and more than that I tend to get very crabby. Another key is to avoid pouring in one hour a day for a week and then trying to make it up the next week. Remember: car engines blow up when they work too hard!

Efficiency is the ratio of units of output to units of input. By "output" I mean results, and by "input" I mean time invested. A very efficient person generates several units of output per unit of input. A very inefficient person generates one unit of output per several units of input. The efficient person sits down to write an article and produces it in 45 minutes. The inefficient person sits down to write an article and spends 45 minutes clearing off their desk and organizing their paperwork. Then they spend the next four days writing and stopping and thinking about other things. This same phenomenon plays out in other areas of their life.

Here are a few tips to increase your efficiency:

First, decide what output you want to produce. Write that down on your "to do" list. For example, put down "finished article", not "writing." In other words, put down the desired output, not the input.

Second, decide what you need in order to produce the desired output. This example might include a clear block of time and a clear desk.

Third, stay focused on generating one desired output at a time. Don't let anything interrupt your focus on producing that one output. Move as quickly as you can to generate just that one desired output.

Tremendous efficiency is the great multiplier of success. For example, say a highly efficient person produces four units of output per hour and a highly inefficient person produces one unit of output every four hours. If they each work for 20 hours a week, then the efficient person produces 80 units of output while the inefficient person produces five units of output. Both individuals work hard, but in the course of one week they generate dramatically different amounts of results.

Of course, a person can work hard and produce results while still not being successful. The third component of success, effectiveness, is just as important as the first two. To become effective is to continually achieve better results in your highest priority outcomes. In order to do that you have to do two things:

• determine your highest priority outcomes
• determine what to do to improve those outcomes and what to stop doing

This is just as much work as executing a given project. Far too many executives that I have worked with never took any time to determine these two key areas. Instead they simply kept executing tactics that were given to them by other people. While they may have become more efficient at doing these activities and maintained a healthy work ethic, they never became very effective. The key moment for many of them in becoming more successful was to stop doing things, sit down with a piece of paper and to write down these two critical determinations. Once they did that their rate of success increased dramatically.

In summary, I encourage you to decide on four things to dramatically increase your rate of success:

1. Decide your highest priority outcomes.
2. Decide what to do to improve results in these areas and what to stop doing that is wasting your time and energy.
3. Decide how many hours of concentrated effort you are going to pour into any given day toward any desired outcome.
4. Decide how you are going to make each hour as efficient as possible.

Once you make these decisions, then move into sustained action as fast as you can!

As a professional speaker, Dan Coughlin speaks on RESULTS-FOCUSED LEADERSHIP, OUTCOME-BASED TEAMWORK, CUSTOMER-CENTERED MANAGEMENT, MASTERING THE THREE PHASES OF STRATEGIC PLANNING AND HOW TO BE AN INNOVATIVE EXECUTIVE.

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