The Attributes of People Who Have Personal Power

When you have personal power, you inspire great work. You do so by finding and nurturing extraordinary talent, setting substantial goals, making those goals seem exciting, and then focusing the entire team on the necessary tasks required to achieve them.

Great leaders are willing to do hard thinking, make tough decisions, and get the job done. They have the vision, knowledge, skills, and good ideas. But, more importantly, they’ve developed the power to persuade people to embrace those ideas and work to achieve them, even in the face of adversity and criticism.

When I think about my experience in business – what I actually did that worked – I see that much of it runs contrary to the advice you’re likely to read in the popular business press. That’s the reason I wrote my new book, Power and Persuasion. My goal was to help people like you take advantage of what I have learned about achieving and using personal power – what I personally know to be true … and false.

Starting tomorrow and continuing for the next couple of weeks, we are going to be excerpting highlights from the book. It will help you discover the ideas that renew your own vision and inspire you to become the great leader you want to be. I’ll share some little-known secrets about what it means to become a great leader. And I’ll talk about the attributes of personal power – contrarian ideas about leadership that I deal with in detail in the book (and that you’ll also learn more about in the pages of ETR).

Meanwhile, if you would like to learn all of my no-B.S. secrets for commanding success in your personal and business life, based on my 40 years of down-in-the-trenches business experience, you can pick up a copy of the book here.] [Ed. Note: Mark Morgan Ford was the creator of Early To Rise. In 2011, Mark retired from ETR and now writes the Palm Beach Letter. His advice, in our opinion, continues to get better and better with every essay, particularly in the controversial ones we have shared today. We encourage you to read everything you can that has been written by Mark.]