I need to be more demanding of myself

To succeed, you need to be demanding-- there is no doubt of that in my mind. A few days ago I was watching some old reruns of Steve Jobs presenting at the Mac World 1998. This was when he made his return to Apple, lopped out useless products and decided to focus on 4 produced and decided to make them the best in their class. The result of his efforts and vision resulted in the birth of the iMac, the G3 Mac and the powerbook after killing the other branded lines of Apple computers.

It was fascinating to see Jobs in his presentation outlining how his products were the best in their class and how they would not settle for any second best position-- to come this far in the product development cycle to make such compelling products it was obvious at they had a demanding goals and pushed to have them accomplished. After that, they just kept on going, leading to some of the best designed computers and portable electronics devices today, leading to windfalls in profits. They were well respected in their early years because they were humble and demanding... times may have chanced since their climb to the top, however I'll leave that as a different issue to tackle at a later date, because you need to get there first in order to have those kinds of problems.

The first thing about becoming more demanding is to not get too used to anything, because when you get used to something things start to get easy and as a result you get lazy. When that happens, game over. I've found that the most productive times in my life was when I've been out of my natural element, while dealing with interesting and new challenges and I was picking up the skills and knowledge I needed to succeed. There was an element of excitement of doing something new that brought the enthusiasm and the need to push myself to succeed. In order to have the desire to be demanding, I believe that it is necessary to have an element of risk in one's life, where things can either succeed or fail, but the strong desire to succeed is what puts the demands on the person to do what it takes to succeed.

On an interesting aside, I believe that men, in particular, that can succeed in risky situations are considered sexy from the perspective of a female. Sure you could say that "success is sexy," but I would add "consistently succeeding through risky situations is even sexier." And me, being a guy, would have to say that that is plenty enough motivation for me. Now that I've survived my financial fiasco of last year, it's time to start taking some calculated risks and winning at them.