Who was he?

He was a simple, uneducated, country boy who refused to allow his uncongenial circumstances stop him. He refused to be a victim. He refused to accept failure. He refused to listen to people who told him he was crazy. He refused to stay down when he felt like nothing was going his way.

Simply put, he picked himself up no matter what and kept on going after his dream.

He educated himself and did whatever it took to keep moving in direction of his passions.

Who was he? Abraham Lincoln.

If you reflect back on your life, you can find patterns of times you grew most. Many of those times were probably a result of some kind of previous 'failure,' maybe even a series of them.

Remember: children don't fail when they are learning to walk. They fall down over and over again. It is falling that teaches them and strengthens them.

Each failure is a learning experience. And faster people pick themselves up, reflect on past occurrence and go again, faster they can achieve their goals and dreams.

So with this in mind, choose one thing that may not be going exactly as you wish right now and do one thing to move you closer to achieving result you want. And remember, life is about learning and growing.

Still another common error is profiling only your top performers. Unless you profile your bottom performers as well, your information is invalid. If, for instance, your bottom performers scored same as top performers in a certain category, that trait could be an insignificant concern in hiring process. Yet, testing just top performers would narrow your field and decrease your chances of successful job matching. The benchmarking process is intended to improve productivity and performance but opposite can occur if certain variables in environment are not accounted for in ranking process. It will not be an effective benchmark if your top ranking performers are in a "flush" market - that is, where almost anyone could do a good job. Other environmental factors such as consistency of systems and procedures across all employees considered in benchmarking process may also have a powerful influence. If only half of your team is computerized, behavioral job description may not be same at all. Likewise, communication behaviors appropriate for supporting Sales & Marketing staff is probably quite different from doing that same support work for Auditing. A better method is to have those who work, manage and know position do an objective behavioral job analysis, starting 'from beginning' - that is, don't look at current people, but evaluate job itself. Some of newer tools on market make this exercise convenient (15 to 20 minutes), accurate and inexpensive. Once ideal behaviors are prioritized, job description becomes much easier to define and fulfill. This refinement also accelerates orientation process, greatly reducing that period of time it takes to "get feel" of a new job. Turnover is reduced, performance is enhanced.