Six People You must Properly Manage for You to be Successful

By Dorcas Karuana,
Building strong relationships with people is one way that can make you successful in life, career, family or business. For instance; role models, mentors, motivators, financiers etc. However there are people you should either stay away from (if you can achieve it) or people you have to properly manage if you want to be successful.

1. Haters- We all have enemies; a group of people who do not wish you well and would rather see you fail than succeed. The reason(s) they feel this way about you is not really important because it is practically impossible for you not to have such people in your life. Hence, there is little or no need for you to try to please them.
To deal with this persons, I will recommend using one of the 48 laws of power; “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy.” Find out whatever they plan against you and be actively a step ahead of them to ensure that you can counter their every move. However, never concentrate most of your time, energy and resources into battling them, consider them as hurdles in your path, scale over them and maintain your fast sprint to success.

Knowing about your rival is critical.  Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead.  Better still: Play the spy yourself.  In polite social encounters, learn to probe.  Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions.  There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

2. The Confused- These are people that don’t really know what they want, how to get what they want and cannot be relied on for anything if you want to be successful. In most cases the person does not think as clearly or quickly as you normally do. Confused people are disoriented and have difficulty paying attention, remembering, and making decisions. Some confused people may have strange or unusual behavior or may act aggressively. You must understand them but never seek their advice or validation for anything. They will only what? You guessed it- confuse you.

3. The Incompetent- These people are just not capable of doing a job; they are unreliable and cannot simply deliver. They are biased against action with plenty of reasons not to take a decision, reasons to wait for more information, more options, and more opinions. Also, they focus on small tasks; do not like commitments and lack priorities so whether it is in terms of seeking advice or getting help in whatever form you require, do not go for them. You must also be weary of the “arrogantly incompetent”. They don’t know what they are doing but will claim to know best. Look away from their superficiality and identify with key performance indicators, whether or not they are the “masters” they claim to be.

4. Procrastinators- This group is of people who never seem to get around to doing things; they just love pushing forward deadlines. Their favorite quote is “Tomorrow never dies” or “There is no hurry in Africa”. Procrastinators have confusion of interests, weak will power are not sure of themselves and always cautious out of fear; of failure, perhaps fear of success, fear of a wide variety of challenges of new experiences. These traits are often tolerated by most of us but can be the most destructive in terms of preventing us from achieving success. Your motto should be: “Never delay what you can do immediately.”

5. The Lazy- This set of people just hate work, cannot properly manage the time and resources. They are best players in Blame game; never responsible for their actions and always miss in the action. They accuse their behaviour on addictions to drinking, smoking, drugs, gambling, sex, chocolate, video games, the Internet, email etc. You cannot succeed without working whether it is hard work or smart work, work is still work. Therefore, it is imperative that you focus on doing the work that is required to be successful and stay away from lazy people that would like you to be the same with them.

6. Criminals- This ought to be a no-brainer but with the high number of people who run fowl of the law in their bid to become successful, it is important to restate what you have heard several times I am sure, “crime doesn’t pay”. allow me to put it that 'crime doesn’t pay long term.' To be truly successful, you have to make-it long term. So, no matter how strong the temptation you feel to go into crime for immediate “success” is, stay away from it to be truly successful. Criminals are definitely not people you should associate with; avoid them by all means at your disposal because they will almost certainly come to you, it isn’t everybody you know that will be upright in the eyes of the law.