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One of the most important things you can do for your business and your life is to get your day started off right. If you don't take that control of your day from the beginning, things can spin out of control quickly.

You probably hear all the time that you learn your best lessons when you fail. I agree you learn great lessons when you fail, but I actually think you learn your best lessons when you succeed.

Would you enthusiastically rehire everyone on your team? An honest answer to that question will have a revolutionary impact on your business. Here's a great way to assess your team's talent and develop the most powerful action plans based on that assessment.

How many times have you put off a difficult conversation with someone at work, only to see the problem get worse and worse until it finally explodes and you wish you had that conversation three months or six months ago?

I know I'm not telling you anything new when I say that one of your most important jobs as a leader is to work with your team to set goals. Although most of us know that's important, most leaders, do it wrong.

Who's accountable for increasing sales? The sales department, right? Well, partially. The better answer is to build a sales culture throughout the organization. Growing revenue should be everybody's job.

How do you gauge your own success? For most of us, we do it by comparing ourselves to other people. I do that all the time - but there's a real problem with that.

The best predictor of the quality of your life is the quality of the people you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by people that are negative most of the time, you'll be negative most of the time. If you're surrounded by people that complain a lot, you'll look at the world as a very frustrating place.

Being vulnerable makes you stronger. Here's the definition I found for the word vulnerability: the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally. That doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but vulnerability is critical on a team.

Done right, your weekly team meeting is your most important meeting. Done right, the weekly meeting is the seed that real accountability grows from. Done wrong, accountability dies.

When it comes to making decisions on the makeup of your team, most leaders have the wrong philosophy. They hire fast and fire slow when they should be doing the exact opposite. What are you doing to ensure you fire fast and hire slow?

Too often, we say we're coaching people, and what we're really doing is managing them. By managing I mean we direct them, we advise them, we hold them accountable. Those are all important things, but that's not coaching.

A core purpose answers the question: Why does our business exist? It's not to make money, despite what your CFO might say. Your purpose needs to have a higher intention than money. Money is the benefit you get for adding some value to society. What value are you adding?

The one thing I found that has the biggest impact on someone's willingness or likelihood to make a timely decision to take action - to get results - is a lack of confidence.

As a leader, it's critical that you take the time to periodically step back and evaluate the folks on your team. Who are your A-players, your B-players, your C-players, or what I call your toxic C-players?

As the leader of a company or the leader of the team, one of the biggest challenges we have is to keep that energy going - energy going through those obstacles, energy going to reach those opportunities - because if we lose that energy, it cascades down to the rest of our team, growth stops, and we quit.

When you set priorities, but then you don't focus on committing and moving forward to those priorities, the whole planning process becomes a joke. It impacts your productivity, it impacts your morale, and it impacts the whole culture of the leadership team.

There's a lesson I learned a number of years ago - and I say learned it, but I need to relearn it almost every day - called the Law of Positive Intent. The Law of Positive Intent simply says: everyone is just trying to do the best they can with the resources they have.

I want to talk to you about innovation. Not company innovation, not product innovation, but personal innovation. If we truly want to consistently innovate for our company, for our product, for our service, we need to be innovating personally.

The success of your company is driven by the success of each function within the company. While that sounds logical, very few companies really know how to measure the success of each function.