Rusty Hardin, 70, was the Houston attorney for baseball great Roger Clemens for Clemens’ 2012 acquittal on perjury charges for purported drug use. Rusty’s secret: “He’s an absolute fiend for preparation. You can be the most charming and charismatic lawyer in the world—but if you are not prepared—you don’t know your case—you are going to get murdered. Rusty lives by that.”  — The Wall Street Journal, Ashby Jones and Devlin Barrett, June 20, 2012.

Too many people try to skate by on the grunt work, the detail work, with a nose in the spreadsheet, the read-the-contract end-to-end work. It’s not fun, and a fair percentage of the time you can you can get away with it. You won’t get caught or no one will know how much better you could have been if you’d truly done the proper spadework. BUT over time, those who learn the details and do their homework will blow by those who are either

1. Too lazy (yep, that is the word) to put in the extra time, or

2. Not disciplined or smart or committed or aware enough to carve out the time by walking away from the pleasant or familiar but nowhere near tasks as vital.

Which are you?

Work is NOT activity; work is that which consistently, effectively, efficiently produces the desired results. Work is performance, NOT just effort.

Do you review your activities at the end of every day? Were your activities effective? Did they produce the desired result?

Closing quotes:

“A man’s accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail.”  — John Foster Dulles; 1888-1959, Secretary of State under U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Caress the detail, the divine detail.”  — Vladimir Nabokov; 1899–1977, multilingual Russian novelist, author of “Lolita”

“Success in any endeavor requires single-minded attention to detail and total concentration.”  — Willie Sutton; 1901-1980, profligate bank robber