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When Faster-Harder-Smarter is Not Enough: Six Steps for Achieving What You Want in a Rapid Fire World

All around us are successful people drowning in their obligations. Day after day they keep treading water, getting more and more tired but not getting any closer to completing their to-do list. A recent survey of 1,200 workers from receptionists to chief executives at top companies found that employees handle on average of 204 messages a day, including emails, voicemails, snail mail and memos. This astonishing number doesn’t include the demands we feel from our friends and family, either.

If you ask people living like this what they would like most to have more of, they often say time. But they'd be wrong. What they really need is ingenuity. Instead of being tired, overwhelmed and uncertain of how to get it all done, they could have been enthusiastic about creating ways of capitalizing on the demands, challenges and debacles each day brings.

Most of us are reactors. Faster turns into harried, hurried, frazzled and busy beyond belief. Harder gives way to frustration, exhaustion, and even resentment over time. Smarter spawns overload, confusion and even guilt over not “knowing it all.  Unfortunately, it usually takes a crisis say, divorce, sudden illness or getting fired to get us to change our ways. But most people are in a silent crisis right now without even knowing it.

You don't have to live like this any longer. What we need most is to enlarge our capacity to be creative under fire. This requires that we engage pressure as if it were worthy of respect and not domination. When Faster-Harder-Smarter is Not Enough: Six Steps for Achieving What You want in a Rapid-Fire World is a book written for successful executives, professionals and individuals who want to be energized instead of drained by the pressures of life. People who want to radiate and not react. This book is a practical guide to staying fully engaged in life today and using pressure to our advantage instead of running away from it. This insightful and practical tool will enable you to shape a creative agenda that does not force you to sacrifice long-term goals to meet short-term obligations.

Now, you can be a creator instead of a reactor. Being a creator offers you power and influence and a strong sense of direction, which can be impossible to derive from the reactor position. Being a creator enables you to thrive on the excitement of new beginnings, of enlightenment, of what's just over the horizon. Creating enables you to rescue victory from defeat and give you that adrenalin rush that makes you feel invincible in the short term while staying true to what's important to you in the long-term.

This book is your wake-up call. A reminder that life, as they say, is not a dress rehearsal. Now, you can use the six steps in this book to shape a rewarding and exciting life that is imbued with meaning on every level.

Stop moving from crisis to crisis and generate the lasting sense of passion and purpose that responding creatively provides. Moreover, you may still be working hard, but instead of being drained be energized and excited by your life's pursuits.