“You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no results.” Mahatma Gandhi.

The best way I can develop a good attitude about my job is just to do my job.   Putting things off because I feel negative or afraid only increases my negativity and fear.

If I have to deal with a person I do not like or who makes me nervous, I can make my entire day better by speaking with that person first thing in the morning.

Fearing failure is a waste of time.

I am not responsible for results.  I am only responsible for doing the right thing to the best of my ability.  When I do the right thing, which is usually simple, I get the right results.  If have to tell someone something they do not like to hear, I am not responsible for how they feel about what I say.  I am only responsible for giving that person accurate information in a way that shows I respect them and perhaps their situation.

There is no value in a great idea that I do not put into action.

Some ideas are things I can just do.  For more complex ideas, I write a series of actions.  Then I can do each action one at a time with total focus and to the best of my ability.

The hours I work is not what makes me successful.

The amount of real work that I do during the hours that I work is what makes me successful.  If I allow myself to act on daily distractions instead of focusing on my work, I can have some very long, unproductive work days. If I do a lot of busy work unrelated to completing my tasks for the day, I can have some very long, unproductive days.

When I sit around analyzing everything I have to do, I am not working.

I am procrastinating.  Not even analysts sit around thinking about how to do things.  They do analysis.  They take bags of numbers, sort through the contents of those bags, and turn those numbers into information people can use for making decisions.

I can paralyze myself with analysis.

In Aesop’s fable, “The Cat and the Fox,” the cat has one way to escape danger.  The fox has many ways to escape danger.  When a pack of hounds attacks, the cat climbs up a tree.  Analyzing the best way to escape danger, the fox delays.  As the fox analyzes the situation, the hounds kill the fox.  The more I can simplify my workday into taking action, the more productive I am each day.

Inventors do not sit around analyzing how to create things.

They take the ingredients they need to create a new product and start mixing those ingredients until they get the product they had envisioned.  They act on their ideas.