The other day, I attended a seminar where the speaker, multimillionaire Blake Mallen, said:
“You are either politicking or producing, but you can’t be doing both.”
Gossip or politics doesn’t get you any closer to your goals. Most of the time it keeps you from taking action and doing any real work. If you look at most true producers and achievers, they simply don’t have time, nor the desire to be apart of it. They are to busy creating value and taking steps towards advancement to care about whose dating who, or “showing” everyone how successful they are.
There are a lot of organizations where people get so caught up in the water-cooler gossip that they never produce any results in the process. They may be “in the know” or part of the “in” crowd, but usually no real production occurs from it. If you want to go after your goals, you must produce and leave the gossiping to the others that don’t really want success. What kind of a return does the drama between Sue and Charles produce? How closer to your goals does running around keeping up appearances get you? What money is made from gossip or politics?
You can either be politicking or producing, but you can’t be doing both. Me… I’d rather have the results.
Most everyone has this vision for where they want to go in life. We all have dreams and aspirations. However, there is something that can hold you back from them. It’s your level of comfort. You have this comfort zone that you know and are familiar with. Perhaps it’s how you always have done things. Your personal level of comfort will determine what you do and how far you will go in life. How is your level of comfort working out for you? Are you getting everything you want? Or simply staying where you were last year and the year before that? 
Do you want to improve your life and success? One place to start is with your health. I am a firm believer that your health plays a huge part in your success. If you are unhealthy, how can you possibly succeed? You won’t have the energy you need to get what needs to be done, finished. You may be focused on other health issues rather than your goals. You won’t have as much determination and discipline to seek your wants and desires. You might get sick more often and have to take time away from your goals to get well. Healthy and fit people are seen as confident, determined and capable. Hate to say it but people that are unhealthy and overweight get treated far differently than those that are fit. Those that are fit are respected much more. When you are healthy you feel better, look better, can think faster and handle stress much better than when you aren’t. Your confidence level will soar. One trait of every successful person I know is that they are immensely confident in themselves. You cannot have true abundance in ANY area of your life without first feeling immensely confident in yourself. The main determining factor in your confidence is how you feel about your body. If you look at high achievers they all are immensely confident in themselves. A lot of this confidence comes with being happy with their bodies. You cannot have a healthy mind without a healthy body. 
I got a sad email today from a person who believed that I shouldn’t encourage everyone that they can achieve anything they want. They believed that some people simply don’t have it in them to be successful. They asked: “How are you going to believe that Tom that works in a factory, broke and without a good education is going to succeed?” My answer: I see it everyday. Most all of my entrepreneur friends came from nothing. No rich uncles to pass down wealth, they didn’t have the genius of Steve Jobs. Heck half of them never went to college! They are regular everyday people that went after their goals and succeeded. Pessimists are the great destroyer of our world. They see the bad side in everything. They view the world through grey colored glassed and never see a brighter future. They neglect to ever take chances or try new things because they are live in a world of fear. Pessimists are also some of the starkest critics and hate to see someone to succeed. When someone succeeds they have something to compare their own mediocre lives to. Have you ever met a successful pessimist? I doubt it. 
If you want to get where you want to go, you have to Dump Your Duds. Your duds are clients, people and friends that are going to hinder your success or keep you from moving forward. They might be close friends, family members or even your old fraternity or sorority members. It’s anyone that does not encourage you to become more. This was something I have had to learn the hard way. I held on to for a long time to my duds thinking they were my friends. Truth be told they really weren’t. They were encouraging me not to do something worthwhile and it took me along time to realize it. 
It seems a lot of people are looking for the easy button for their lives. They want to hit a button and have their lives instantly fulfilled overnight. I hate to break it to you but there is no easy button to achieve greatness in anything. To get where you want to go it’s going to take work. Serious hard work. I think Americans see musicians and actors all of the sudden pop up out of nowhere and become famous and wealthy. They think that it can be done instantly. What we don’t see is the years of hard work that got them to that tipping point that they broke over. All achievers put in hard work into getting there. There was some magical chant or potion that made them that way, they simply put in the time to get where they wanted to go. 
Time is one of our most precious assets. It’s a limited resource that no matter what we do, you can never get lost time back. Once a minute has passed, it’s gone forever. Time is what can determine your success or failure. Just about everyone I know claims they don’t have enough time in the day. Yet how is it that high achievers with ten thousand times more stress and responsibilities are able to get more accomplished in a single hour with the same amount of time as a homeless person with no responsibility? We all have the same amount of time. We each get 24 hours in a day. No more. No less. Your results in life are dependent on what you do with your time. Do you spend your time watching countless hours of television? Or do you read a book that can better yourself? Do you spend all of your time going out on the town and being hungover the next day, or do you put in the time to accomplish a step towards your dreams? One of my mentors, Dan Kennedy has a great quote: 
