Personal discipline. This is a daily challenge for me. We live in a world full of distractions, unhealthy choices, and pressure to do a myriad of things that are not in our true self-interest. Modern culture has created an increasingly noisy, busy, artificial, short-term focused, pleasure-seeking world. The human temptation to slip into the path of least resistance, to seek out safety and comfort, and to avoid risk and hard work is ever present.

I’m writing about this subject in relation to success in the search profession, as I believe that the ability to be incredibly self-disciplined is one of the most important requirements for success in this business. We all know that without doing “the work,” sustainable success as a recruiter will not happen. For the great majority of us, our work is done alone, either as solo practitioners, or in offices or cubicles, as part of a search firm. We each decide, in the “privacy of our own privacy,” what we will do with the hours we are blessed with each day.

Recruiting success, simply put, requires excellent productivity. Since our work as recruiters is primarily made up of our personal actions (phone calls, emails, meetings, letters, research, writing, listening, etc.), the productivity that I am talking about is “personal productivity,” as opposed to equipment, office, or other measures. Sustained personal productivity, or the amount of value-added work done per personal unit of time, over the long run, is one of the most significant indicators or predictors of success in this great business.