The Key to Long-Term Success

Successful people have been studied in depth for more than 100 years. They have been interviewed extensively to determine what it is they do and how they think that enables them to accomplish so much more than the average person.

In this Newsletter, you learn the most important single factor of long-term success and how you can build it into your personality and your attitude. You learn how to virtually guarantee yourself a great future.

The Harvard Discovery on Success

In 1970, sociologist Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University wrote a book entitled The Un-Heavenly City. He described one of the most profound studies on success and priority setting ever conducted.

Banfield's goal was to find out how and why some people became financially independent during the course of their working lifetimes. He started off convinced that the answer to this question would be found in factors such as family background, education, intelligence, influential contacts, or some other concrete factor. What he finally discovered was that the major reason for success in life was a particular attitude of mind.

Develop Long Time Perspective

Banfield called this attitude "long time perspective." He said that men and women who were the most successful in life and the most likely to move up economically were those who took the future into consideration with every decision they made in the present. He found that the longer the period of time a person took into consideration while planning and acting, the more likely it was that he would achieve greatly during his career.

For example, one of the reasons your family doctor is among the most respected people in America is because he or she has invested many years of hard work and study to finally earn the right to practice medicine. After university courses, internship, residency and practical training, a doctor may be more than 30 years old before he or she is capable of earning a good living. But from that point onward, these men and women are some of the most respected and most successful professional people in any society. They had long time perspectives.

Measure the Potential Future Impact

The key to success in setting priorities is having a long time perspective. You can tell how important something is today by measuring its potential future impact on your life.

For example, if you come home from work at night and choose to play with your children or spend time with your spouse, rather than watch TV or read the paper, you have a long time perspective. You know that investing time in the health and happiness of your children and your spouse is a very valuable, high-priority use of time. The potential future impact of quality time with your family is very high.

If you take additional courses in the evening to upgrade your skills and make yourself more valuable to your employer, you're acting with a long time perspective. Learning something practical and useful can have a long-term effect on your career.

Practice Delayed Gratification

Economists say that the inability to delay gratification-that is, the natural tendency of individuals to spend everything they earn plus a little bit more, and the mind-set of doing what is fun, easy and enjoyable-is the primary cause of economic and personal failure in life. On the other hand, disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction.

The long term comes soon enough, and every sacrifice that you make today will be rewarded with compound interest in the great future that lies ahead for you.

Action Exercises

Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, think long-term. Sit down today and write out a description of your ideal life ten and twenty years into the future. This automatically develops longer-time perspective.

Second, look at everything you do in terms of its long-term potential impact on your life. Do more things that have greater long-term value to you.

Third, develop the habit of delaying gratification in small things, small expenditures, small pleasures, so that you can enjoy greater rewards and greater satisfaction in the future.

- Shared by Haroon Baig

How to become a good programmer/developer?

Working towards becoming good programmer is very important in the life of programmer since they chose their career as a Software Engineer. To become a good programmer, need to follow some basic important points which I would like to convey through this blog.

Programming is a skill which is improved by practice and experience. True, people are born with different programming capabilities, still many techniques can be learned only with experience.

What is that distinguishes a good programmer from others? Here is a list.

1. He thinks – A good coder never jumps straight away into coding when he gets a work. He first *thinks* about the problem and decides on how to approach the solution. He may try out some code snippets and write something which typically thrown out later. But once he starts the actual coding he proceeds at lightning speed.

2. He never duplicates code – A good programmer never repeats/duplicates code. Code duplication is one of the worst sins for a programmer. In the initial coding some duplication may be there, but an expert removes them gradually.

3. He writes extensible code – Writing extensible code requires considerable experience. This is what makes coding a creative activity. You need to be aware of the full impact of what you are writing in the code’s future life cycle. Design patterns are a collection of techniques which helps in writing extensible code. A good programmer may not know the names of all patterns but he is aware of them nonetheless.

4. He is not afraid to re-factor – It means "disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior" No one can write software in a perfect way at the first try. You write a good amount of code, analyze it and then re-factor it. This is a continuous process during coding. I have seen that re-factoring requires considerable amount prior experience.

5. He comments for a purpose – A good programmer comments what is relevant. If he has spent some time thinking about a portion of code, he will comment his thoughts in the code. This helps another programmer to understand the thoughts and design decisions behind the code he is reading.

Obviously there are other qualities (such as code optimization) which can be seen in a good programmer. But the above 5 items are the most important.

Let's inculcate these to our code writing skill and other qualities will come automatically.

-Shahnawaz

Record your FISHES

I am back with you my friends and yes please don't be misled with the title, I am not discussing seafood with you (you can better discover that for yourselves with a trip to Mahesh Lunch Home or Only Fish) neither am I talking about any visit to the aquarium or not even census count of the fishes in the deep seas and oceans.

This my friend was a learning from the soft-skills training program conducted at our organization Octaware Technologies in the Mumbai Development Center title "Get Set Goal".

As a part of its regular Training & Development program for its employees through knowledge sharing sessions Octaware Technologies arranged a program on Goal Setting through MyCareerMate a part of Burooj Realization which is into Corporate & Management Training Programs. This session was held on the 10th of September, 2011.

The program was aimed at instilling the importance of Goals and how to set SMART Goals in life in whatever field we endeavor.

It is said about goals that:

- Goals give you direction in all areas of life - Personal, Career, Spiritual, Material and Contribution.

- Goals give you a reason to get up early in the morning and go to bed late at night.

Goals will put drive and passion into your life.

As it is said that,” Not having goals is similar to sailing a ship across the Atlantic without a map. Goals, like maps, help you get to your destination much faster than sailing through life aimlessly."

You need to divide goals as 'Long Term', 'Intermediate' & amp; 'Short Term'.

The participants were asked to imagine Octaware as a person and define what characteristics come to their mind. Some of the characteristic which flew around from them were in people described it as a Male, Young, energetic, one who keeps his Commitment, A good Strategic Thinker, etc.

And it was then said that each one of the employee represents Octaware and as such needs to inculcate these characteristics as well.

Further, you may identify various areas of life wherein you need to set a goal for a more wholesome life.

F- Family;

I - Intellectual;

S - Social;

H - Health/ Fitness;

E - Economic;

S - Spiritual.

And this is what Re-coding your FISHES is all about :)