Wendy's Think Tank

More like areas of focus, and the short version would be: Entrepreneurial skills and Communication skills.

First of all, I would like to clarify that you really don’t have to be an entrepreneur in order to cultivate those capabilities that define the profession.

For any starters, the baby-step is to do your job well enough, so that you have extra free time to develop other core competencies. Keep in mind that successful people are successful anywhere even if that might not be the most optimal place to be.

For example, work efficiently and effectively.

It starts out as vague terms. But really personal organizational skills are exactly like running an entity such as a small business, except in this case, you are managing yourself.

Apart from the technical aspects, which you just have to practice, practice, practice (there is absolutely no shortcut of working as an apprentice to learn the fundamental skills of surviving the real world), the behavior patterns below would be quite helpful, so please think when you are in the mood and do a quick reality check:

• Do you review your historical performance critically and confront your own weaknesses?
• Do you lay out a short-term execution plan and start immediately?
• Do you keep yourself on track even with intermittent disruptions?
• Do you never lose the 5-year/ 10-year long-term vision?
• Do you connect with your role models, understanding communication and value-added need to go both ways?
• Do you have a reliable relationship network, not so much about the quantity, but more about the quality and diversity?

Speaking of which, my opinion on the people network: gender doesn’t matter, personality matters; age doesn't matter, maturity and value matter; profession doesn’t matter, ambition matters; wealth doesn’t matter, morality and honesty matter; being elite or not doesn’t matter, generous enough to share resources and understand exchange on a fair basis in the long-term matter.

I might have simplified many things, since it’s concerning the humanity topics. But please feel free to leave comments or email me for anything specific concerning productivity and people skills.

Meanwhile, a couple things that I jotted down to remind myself but also would like to share with you:

• You cannot go for perfection, but you can go for balance.
• The intricacy of human relationship could be hidden in those seemingly very trivial details in the daily life. Feel it, and acqurie a good sense of it. Consciously making better decisions will eventually lead to unconscious improvements.
• Look at yourself as an outsider once in a while, be honest and subjective, analyse your mistakes, ask questions what could have been done better.
• Listen to your body's need  (It's not always about the rules that you set)
• Leverage off the momentum and keep things going
• Keep track of the emotion ups and downs, before anything bad goes too out-of-the-way, which could harm you or leads to more negative thoughts, stop it at the earliest. Be able to rationalize rather than idealize, be a problem-solver and ask why, rather than finding excuses and getting trapped later.
• Life is very much path-dependent, every single footprint that you left matters. So be careful about each doing, knowing their impact could be more long-lasting, for better or worse.  
• Most things in life, if not meaningful actions, then are at some stage of incubation/immersion of ideas. Ideas are useless, if not translated into actions, in an obvious or not-so obvious way (eg, decide what's to-do versus a no-no)   

That's it for now.

So are you ready for 2013? What are your New Year Resolutions? Share it and make it happen!