1.  Do the work… practice, practice, practice your craft!

Sure you can be good with a little effort.  You can be really good with a little more effort.  But you can’t be great, at anything, unless you put in an incredible amount of focused effort for a set amount of time every day.  It’s as simple as that.  Scratch the surface of any successful person with incredible skills and you’ll find someone who has put thousands of hours of effort into developing those skills.  There are no shortcuts in life.  There are no overnight successes.  Almost everyone has heard about the 10,000 hours principle, which states that ittakes roughly 10,000 hours to completely master a complex skill, yet despite sound evidence, so few follow it… except extremely successful people of course.

Whatever you decide to do, do it well.  Do it so well that when others see you do it, they enjoy it so much that they want to come back and see you do it again… and they also want to bring their friends along so they can show them how incredible you are at doing what you do.

2.  Build trust by standing behind every one of your promises.

If you say you’re going to do something, DO IT!  If you say you’re going to be somewhere, BE THERE!  If you say you feel something, MEAN IT!  If you can’t, won’t, and don’t, then DON’T LIE.  It’s always better to tell people the truth up front.  Don’t play games with people’s heads and hearts.  Don’t tell half-truths and expect people to trust you when the full truth comes out; half-truths are no better than lies.

Regardless of the business you’re in – selling products to consumers, or selling hours for dollars – the only question you have to ask yourself is:  “Do they trust me enough to believe what I’m promising to deliver?”  Without this trust, you have zero, zilch, nada.  If your target market knows you and they’re still not buying what you’re offering, they simply don’t trust you as much as you would hope.  Earn their trust, and the rest of the puzzle pieces will be easy to arrange. (Read The Impact Equation.)

3.  Focus more on less.

Having too many choices interferes with decision-making.  Here in the 21st century, where information moves at the speed of light and opportunities for innovation seem endless, we have an abundant array of choices when it comes to designing our lives and careers.  But sadly, an abundance of choice often leads to indecision, confusion, and inaction.

Several business and marketing studies have shown that the more product choices a consumer is faced with, the less products they typically buy.  After all, narrowing down the best product from a pool of three choices is certainly a lot easier than narrowing down the best product from a pool of three hundred.  If the purchasing decision is tough to make, most people will just give up.

So if you’re selling a product line, keep it simple.  And if you’re trying to make a decision about something in your life, don’t waste all your time evaluating every last detail of every possible option.  Choose something you think will work and give it a shot.  If it doesn’t work out, choose something else and keep pressing forward.  Focus more on less, and do your very best.