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The Presentation Mistake You Don't Know You're Making

by Heidi Grant Halvorson  |   8:00 AM October 23, 2012

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During an interview, your potential new boss asks you to briefly describe your qualifications. At this moment, you have a single objective: be impressive. So you begin to rattle off your list of accomplishments: your degrees from Harvard and Yale, your prestigious internships, your intimate knowledge of essential software and statistical analysis. "Oh," you add. "And I took two semesters of Spanish in college." Not technically an impressive accomplishment, but since the company does a lot of business in Latin America, you figure some Spanish is better than none at all.

Or is it?

Actually, it isn't. You've just fallen victim to a phenomenon that psychologists have recently discovered, called the "Presenter's Paradox." It's another fascinating example of how our instincts about selling — ourselves, our company, or our products — can be surprisingly bad.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: We assume when we present someone with a list of our accomplishments (or with a bundle of services or products), that they will see what we're offering additively. If going to Harvard, a prestigious internship, and mad statistical skills are all a "10" on the scale of impressiveness, and two semesters of Spanish is a "2," then we reason that added together, this is a 10 + 10 + 10 + 2, or a "32" in impressiveness. So it makes sense to mention your minimal Spanish skills — they add to the overall picture. More is better.

Only more is not in fact better to the interviewer (or the client or buyer), because this is not how other people see what we're offering. They don't add up the impressiveness, they average it. They see the Big Picture — looking at the package as a whole, rather than focusing on the individual parts.

To them, this is a (10+ 10+ 10+ 2)/4 package, or an "8" in impressiveness. And if you had left off the bit about Spanish, you would have had a (10 + 10+ 10)/3, or a "10" in impressiveness. So even though logically it seems like a little Spanish is better than none, mentioning it makes you a less attractive candidate than if you'd said nothing at all.

More is actually not better, if what you are adding is of lesser quality than the rest of your offerings. Highly favorable or positive things are diminished or diluted in the eye of the beholder when they are presented in the company of only moderately favorable or positive things.

Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter's Paradox in an elegant series of studies. For example, they showed that when buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65! Perhaps most troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more attractive to buyers, 92% of them chose the package with the free download.

More just seems like it must be better when you are on the presenter's end, even though it doesn't seem that way at all when you are on the consumer's end. And somehow, despite the fact that we are all both presenters and consumers in our everyday lives, we just don't make the connection.

The same pattern emergences when you are creating deterrents or negative consequences to discourage bad behavior. In another study, participants were asked to choose between two punishments to give for littering: a $750 fine plus two hours of community service, or a $750 fine. 86% of participants felt that the fine plus community service would be the stronger deterrent. But they were wrong — in fact, a separate set of participants rated the $750 with the two hours of community service as significantly less severe than the fine alone. Once again, they reasoned that the overall punishment was on average less awful because two hours of community service isn't so bad.

If the bias in presenter thinking is so pervasive, how can we stop ourselves from making this kind of mistake? The short answer is that we need to remind ourselves when making any kind of presentation to think of the big picture. What does the package I am presenting look like taken as a whole, and are there any components that are actually bringing down its overall value or impact?Three 10's and a 2 is not better than three 10's. A free carwash with the purchase of any new car is not going to make your cars seem more valuable. If your very expensive luxury hotel rooms offer ocean views, silk sheets, and a Jacuzzi, don't mention the ironing board in the closet or the coffeepot. And unless you speak Spanish well, keep your ability to count to ocho and ask where la biblioteca is to yourself.

More blog posts by Heidi Grant Halvorson

More on: Communication, Marketing, Sales

HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist and author of the HBR SingleNine Things Successful People Do Differently and the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Dr. Halvorson is available for speaking and training. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson.

Reid Hoffman

The 3 Puzzle Pieces That Shape Your Career Path

Reid Hoffman

 

October 10, 2012

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A billboard that sat along the 101 Highway in the Bay Area in 2009 put it bluntly: “1,000,000 people overseas can do your job. What makes you so special?” While one million might be an exaggeration, what’s not an exaggeration is that other people can and want to have your dream job. For anything desirable, there’s competition: the arm of an attractive man or woman, admission to a good college, a ticket to a championship game, and every solid professional opportunity.

In the career marketplace, you are selling your brainpower, your skills, your energy. And you are doing so in the face of massive competition. Possible employers, partners, investors, and other people with power choose between you and someone who looks like you. When a desirable opportunity arises, many people with similar job titles and educational backgrounds will be considered. When sifting through applications for almost any job, employers and hiring managers are quickly overcome by the sameness. It’s a blur.

If you want to chart a course that differentiates you from other professionals in the marketplace the first step is being able to complete the sentence, "A company hires me over other professionals because..." How are you first, only, faster, better, or cheaper than other people who want to do what you’re doing in the world? What are you offering that’s hard to come by? What are you offering that’s both rare and valuable?

As Ben Casnocha and I talk about in our book The Start-Up of You, you don’t need to be better or faster or cheaper than everyone. In life, there are multiple gold medals. If you try to be the best at everything and better than everyone (that is, if you believe success means ascending one global, mega leaderboard), you’ll be the best at nothing and better than no one. Instead, compete in local contests—local not just in terms of geography but also in terms of industry segment and skill set. In other words, don’t try to be the greatest marketing executive in the world; try to be the greatest marketing executive of small-to-midsize companies that compete in the health-care industry. Don't just try to be the highest-paid hospitality operations person in the world; try to be a top-notch hospitality operations person in a way that’s aligned with your values so that you can sustain your work over the long run.

Competitive advantage underpins all career strategy. It helps answer the classic question, "What should I be doing with my life?" It helps you decide which opportunities to pursue. It guides you in how you should be investing in yourself. Because all of these things change, assessing and evaluating your competitive advantage is a lifelong process, not something you do once.

Three Puzzle Pieces Inform Your Career Direction and Competitive Advantage

Your competitive advantage is formed by the interplay of three different, ever-changing forces: your assets, your aspirations/values, and the market realities, i.e., the supply and demand for what you as a professional have to offer the marketplace. The best life direction has you pursuing worthy aspirations, using your assets, while navigating the market realities.

Your Assets

Assets are what you have right now. Before dreaming about the future or making plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you.

You have two types of career assets to keep track of: soft and hard. Soft assets are things you can’t trade directly for money. They’re the intangible contributors to career success: the knowledge and information in your brain; professional connections and the trust you’ve built up with them; skills you’ve mastered; your reputation and personal brand; your strengths (things that come easily to you).

Hard assets are what you’d typically list on a balance sheet: the cash in your wallet; the stocks you own; physical possessions like your desk and laptop. These matter because when you have an economic cushion, you can more aggressively make moves that entail downside financial risk. For example, you could take six months off to learn the Ruby programming language with no pay, or shift to pursue a lower-paying, but more stimulating, job opportunity. During a career transition, someone who can go six to twelve months without earning money has different options--indeed, a meaningful advantage--over someone who can’t go more than a month or two without a paycheck.

Soft assets are more difficult to tally than cash in a bank account, but assuming your basic economic needs are taken care of, soft assets are ultimately more important. Dominating a professional project at work has little do with how much dough you’ve socked away in a savings account; what matters are skills, connections, experiences. Because soft assets may be abstract, there’s a tendency for people to underestimate them when pondering career strategy. People list impressive-sounding-yet-vague statements like “I have two years of experience working at a marketing firm . . . ” instead of specifying, explicitly and clearly, what they are able to do because of those two years of experience. One of the best ways to remember how rich you are in intangible wealth--that is, the value of your soft assets--is to go to a networking event and ask people about their professional problems or needs. You’ll be surprised how many times you have a helpful idea, know somebody relevant, or think to yourself, “I could solve that pretty easily.” Often it’s when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you’re in possession of a valuable soft asset.

Usually, however, single assets in isolation don’t have much value. A competitive edge emerges when you combine different skills, experiences, and connections. For example, Joi Ito, a friend and head of the MIT Media Lab, was born in Japan but raised in Michigan. In his mid-twenties he moved back to Japan and set up one of the first commercial Internet service providers there. He also kept developing connections in the United States, investing in Silicon Valley start-ups like Flickr and Twitter, establishing the Japanese subsidiary for the early American blogging company Six Apart, and more recently helping to establish LinkedIn Japan. Is Joi the only person with start-up experience who does angel investing in the Valley? No. Is he the only person with roots in both the United States and Japan? No. But combining these transpacific, bilingual, tech-industry assets gives him a competitive advantage over other investors and entrepreneurs.

Your Aspirations and Values

Aspirations and values are the second consideration. Aspirations include your deepest wishes, ideas, goals, and vision of the future, regardless of the state of the external world or your existing asset mix. This piece of the puzzle includes your core values, or what’s important to you in life, be it knowledge, autonomy, money, integrity, power, and so on. You may not be able to achieve all your aspirations or build a life that incorporates all your values. And they will certainly change over time. But you should at least orient yourself in the direction of a pole star, even if it changes.

Aspirations and values are equally important pieces of your career competitive advantage quite simply because when you’re doing work you care about, you are able to do it longer and better. The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely by making money. It can be easy to forget this when heading the start-up of you. In an effort to scrappily improve on who you are today you can lose track of who you aspire to be in the future. For example, if you’re currently an analyst at Morgan Stanley, the savviest way to leverage your existing assets may be to angle for a promotion within the firm. If the banking industry is in a slump, the savviest way to attend to the market realities may be to develop skills in a different but related industry, like accounting. But would these moves reflect what you really care about?

That said, and contrary to what many best-selling authors and motivational gurus would have you believe, there is not a “true self” deep within that you can uncover via introspection and that will point you in the right direction. Yes, your aspirations shape what you do. But your aspirations are themselves shaped by your actions and experiences. You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.

The Market Realities

The realities of the world you live in is the final piece of the puzzle. Your skills, experiences, and other soft assets--no matter how special you think they are--won’t give you an edge unless they meet the needs of a paying market. If Joi were bilingual in an obscure African dialect as opposed to the language of the world’s third-largest economy (Japan), it wouldn’t contribute to a compelling advantage. And keep in mind that the "market" is not an abstract thing. It consists of the people who make decisions that affect you and whose needs you must serve: your boss, your coworkers, your clients, your direct reports, and others. How badly do they need what you have to offer, and if they need it, do you offer value that’s better than the competition?

It’s often said that entrepreneurs are dreamers. True. But good entrepreneurs are also firmly grounded in what’s available and possible right now. Specifically, entrepreneurs spend vast amounts of energy trying to figure out what customers will pay for. Because ultimately, the success of all businesses depends on customers willing to sign on the line that is dotted. In turn, the success of all professionals--the start-up of you--depends on employers and clients and partners choosing to buy your time. It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in the career marketplace, it's going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to anything.

Studying the market realities doesn’t have to be a limiting, negative exercise. There are always industries, places, people, and companies with momentum. Put yourself in a position to ride these waves. The Chinese economy, the politician Cory Booker, environmentally-friendly consumer products: each is a big wave. Being in a position to ride them--making the market realities work for you as opposed to against you--is key to achieving breakout professional success. 

What's Next: How to Fit the Three Pieces Together

In my next post, I'll describe how to fit these three pieces together to build a career that's fulfilling and that also develops a real competitive advantage. Before I do, please share in the comments section: How do you conceive of your competitive advantage as a professional? 

Some text adapted from my book with Ben Casnocha: The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Crown Business, 2012).

11 Books Every Young Leader Must Read- HBR.org

Recently, I wrote that leaders should be readers. Reading has a host of benefits for those who wish to occupy positions of leadership and develop into more relaxed, empathetic, and well-rounded people. One of the most common follow-up questions was, "Ok, so what should I read?"
That's a tough question. There are a number of wonderful reading lists out there. For those interested in engaging classic literature, Wikipedia has a list of "The 100 Best Books of All Time," and Modern Library has picks for novels and nonfiction. Those interested in leadership might consult the syllabus for David Gergen's leadership course (PDF) at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government or the syllabus his colleague Ron Heifetz uses for his course on adaptive leadership (PDF).
But if I had to focus on a short list for young business leaders, I'd choose the 11 below. I've only included books I've actually read, and I tried to compile a list that includes history, literature, psychology, and how-to. Variety is important — novels can enhance empathy; social science and history can illuminate lessons from other times and fields that might be relevant to your own; and at the very least, reading broadly can make you a more interesting conversationalist. But I have tried to make all the choices directly relevant to young businesspeople interested in leadership.
Invariably, many people will think some of the choices are poor or that the list is incomplete, but I hope it can serve as a start for young business leaders looking for literature to help them chart their careers.

Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor's Handbook. Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 A.D., Marcus Aurelius is considered one of history's "philosopher kings," and his Meditations were perhaps his most lasting legacy. Never meant to be published, Marcus' writings on Stoicism, life, and leadership were the personal notes he used to make sense of the world. They remain a wonderful insight into the mind of a man who ruled history's most revered empire at the age of 40 and provide remarkably practical advice for everyday life. This is the translation I've found most accessible.

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived life in the Nazi concentration camps. Man's Search for Meaning is really two books — one dedicated to recounting his frightening ordeal in the camps (interpreted through his eyes as a psychiatrist) and the other a treatise on his theory, logotherapy. His story alone is worth the read — a reminder of the depths and heights of human nature — and the central contention of logotherapy — that life is primarily about the search for meaning — has inspired leaders for generations.

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full. Tom Wolfe founded the New Journalism school and was one of America's most brilliant writers of nonfiction (books and essays like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) before he became one of her most notable novelists. Often better known for his portrait of 1980s New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full is his novel about race, status, business, and a number of other topics in modern Atlanta. It was Wolfe's attempt, as Michael Lewis noted, at "stuffing of the whole of contemporary America into a single, great, sprawling comic work of art." It's sure to inspire reflection in burgeoning leaders.

Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker. One of the first books I read upon graduating college, Liar's Poker is acclaimed author Michael Lewis' first book — a captivating story about his short-lived postcollegiate career as a bond salesman in the 1980s. Lewis has become perhaps the most notable chronicler of modern business, and Liar's Poker is both a fascinating history of Wall Street (and the broader financial world) in the 1980s and a cautionary tale to ambitious young business leaders about the temptations, challenges, and disappointments (not to mention colorful characters) they may face in their careers.

Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't. What does it take to make a great company, and what traits will young businesspeople need to lead them? Jim Collins introduced new rigor to the evaluation of business leadership in his instant classic Good to Great, with a research team reviewing "6,000 articles and generating 2,000 pages of interview transcripts." The result is a systematic treatise on making a company great, with particularly interesting findings around what Collins calls "Level 5 Leadership" that have changed the face of modern business.

Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Persuasion is at the heart of business, where leaders must reach clients, customers, suppliers, and employees. Cialdini's classic on the core principals of persuasion is a sterling example of the cross application of psychological principles to business life. Based on his personal experiences and interviews — with everyone from expert car salesmen to real estate salespeople — Cialdini's book is riveting and, yes, persuasive. It serves as a great introduction to other works by modern writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Levitt, who translate theories from the social and physical sciences into everyday life.

Richard Tedlow, Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built. Richard Tedlow taught one of my favorite business school classes, The Coming of Managerial Capitalism, and this book is something like a distillation of a few of the high points of that class. Giants of Enterprise chronicles the lives of some of the businesspeople — Carnegie, Ford, Eastman, Walton — who shaped the world we live in today. It's a brief introduction to the figures and companies who built modern business for the young business leader seeking to shape the future.

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. Financial capital is at the heart of capitalism. Any young person aspiring to business leadership should understand the financial world we live in. Ferguson is one of our era's preeminent popular historians, and The Ascent of Money traces the evolution of money and financial markets from the ancient world to the modern era. It's an essential primer on the history and current state of finance.

Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Clay Christensen was recently ranked the world's greatest business thinker by Thinkers50, and his breakout book was a thoughtful tome on innovation and "disruption" called The Innovator's Dilemma. All of Christensen's books are essential reads, but this is perhaps the most foundational for any young leader wondering how to drive business innovation and fight competitors constantly threatening to disrupt his or her business model with new technology.

Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey's book represents the best in self-help. His advice — about prioritization, empathy, self-renewal, and other topics — is both insightful and practical. Seven Habits can be useful to the personal and professional development of anyone charting a career in business.

Bill George, True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership. A hallmark of next-generation business leaders is a focus on authenticity. Bill George has pioneered an approach to authentic leadership development articulated well in his second book, True North. George (who, full disclosure, I've coauthored with before) conducted more than 100 interviews with senior leaders in crafting the book, and offers advice for young leaders on knowing themselves and translating that knowledge into a personal set of principles for leadership.
So what are your picks? Aside from a list for "young business leaders," are there others you'd propose?

More blog posts by John Coleman

More on: Leadership, Personal effectiveness

John Coleman

John Coleman is a coauthor of the new HBR Press book, Passion & Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders. Follow him on Twitter at @johnwcoleman.

Facebook Grew 1 Million Percent. Why Can’t VC’s? by: Nick Petri

The venture capital industry is all about helping companies scale.

Peter Thiel and Clarium helped Facebook grow from a $5 million company in 2004 to a $44 billion company today. Forget doubling or tripling. That’s growth of nearly one million percent, and they did it in under a decade. Helping small companies become staggeringly, mind-bogglingly, impossibly big is the industry’s core competency.

Why, then, can’t VC’s achieve this type of scale, themselves?

That’s the observation Dave McClure made a few months back in his blog post Scaling Venture Capital? We Suck. We Can Do Better (I know, that was 6 months ago, but better late than never). As a VC in the midst of scaling, OpenView spends a lot of time thinking about how we can do more stuff – complete more consulting projects, hire more people for our portfolio, make more investments, generate more content – without compromising the quality of our work.

The truth is that it’s very difficult, and we’re not alone in choosing the easy way out by choosing to grow our own firm in a much more controlled manner than we attempt to grow our portfolio. We’re not alone. No VC, to the best of my knowledge, has cracked the code to achieve Facebook-style one-million-percent growth. There are many in the billions of AUM, but none in the hundred billions. Why not?

The answer lies in the limitations of modern technology. It’s allowed some actions to scale infinitely while others are left in the stone ages.

To demonstrate what I mean, consider some of the things Facebook needs to do in order to grow so rapidly, that are only possible because of modern technology:

• Deliver its product on a massive scale. With computing power and storage dirt cheap, how much does it cost to maintain someone’s Facebook profile?
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• Communicate instantaneously across the entire company. With a few key strokes, Mark Zuckerberg can let everyone at his company know exactly what he’s thinking and what they should be focusing on.
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• Analyze huge amounts of incoming quantitative data. With terabytes of behavioral data being generated by its users, real-time analysis requires both sophisticated back and front-end systems.
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Essentially, outgoing communications, technology, and quantitative analysis are incredibly easy to replicate. Since these are Facebook’s core functions, the company is able to scale at a positively ridonculous pace.

The problem is that venture capital’s core functions don’t really rely on those things.

Personal relationships and qualitatively-based decision making can’t be mass-produced by a computer. And while innovations like Twitter and Salesforce.com have certainly made a VC’s life easier, they haven’t been able to replace their core functions. Ironically, very few of the innovations that venture capital has fueled have actually made venture capital easier to do. That’s why no VC has yet succeeded at growing at a million percent.

Now there are business models that are threatening to disrupt the VC paradigm:

• Crowdfunding platforms are hailed by many as a more scalable alternative to VC. In my opinion, they’re liable to skimp on the main value proposition of a VC: qualitatively evaluating management teams (I’ve made my opinions on this topic very clear in the past, here and here).
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• A few VC’s have launched with an explicitly quantitative value prop, such as Correlation Ventures. Knowing how difficult it is to scrounge up quantitative data on the companies we’re looking into, I have my doubts about this model. I’d love to be proven wrong.

These models are ambitious, and maybe someday we will see a VC grow one million percent. But until the new models are proven out, VC will remain a craft industry. We do suck at scaling, and no, we can’t do better.

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/facebook/facebook-grew-1-million-percent-why-cant-vcs-0294519#vrbwcbu6uVOAtd3i.99 

9 Things Successful People Do Differently (Reread this one regularly!)

Nine Things Successful People Do Differently

by Heidi Grant Halvorson  |   8:58 AM February 25, 2011

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Learn more about the science of success with Heidi Grant Halvorson's HBR Single, based on this blog post.

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. "Lose 5 pounds" is a better goal than "lose some weight," because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you'll "eat less" or "sleep more" is too vague — be clear and precise. "I'll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights" leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you've actually done it.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Given how busy most of us are, and how many goals we are juggling at once, it's not surprising that we routinely miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice them. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., "If it's Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I'll work out for 30 minutes before work.") Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don't know how well you are doing, you can't adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don't underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won't improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren't particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don't have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking .... well, there's no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control "muscle" is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn't get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you'd honestly rather not do. Give up high-fat snacks, do 100 sit-ups a day, stand up straight when you catch yourself slouching, try to learn a new skill. When you find yourself wanting to give in, give up, or just not bother — don't. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur ("If I have a craving for a snack, I will eat one piece of fresh or three pieces of dried fruit.") It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier, and that's the whole point. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don't tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it's important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don't try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it (like quitting smoking and dieting at the same time). And don't put yourself in harm's way — many people are overly-confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as a result they put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do. Do you want to successfully lose weight, quit smoking, or put a lid on your bad temper? Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., "Don't think about white bears!") has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.

If you want to change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead? For example, if you are trying to gain control of your temper and stop flying off the handle, you might make a plan like "If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down." By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit will get worn away over time until it disappears completely.

It is my hope that, after reading about the nine things successful people do differently, you have gained some insight into all the things you have been doing right all along. Even more important, I hope are able to identify the mistakes that have derailed you, and use that knowledge to your advantage from now on. Remember, you don't need to become a different person to become a more successful one. It's never what you are, but what you do.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist, and author of the new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). She is also an expert blogger on motivation and leadership for Fast Company and Psychology Today. Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson

More blog posts by Heidi Grant Halvorson

More on: Career planning, Managing yourself

HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist and author of the HBR SingleNine Things Successful People Do Differently and the book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Dr. Halvorson is available for speaking and training. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson.