Are you performing up to your potential? Are you afraid to jump to the next level? Are your habits pushing you forward or holding you back?

The most important book on self-motivation and achieving more than you imagined hit the bookstores last week: “High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way,” by Brendon Burchard.

Brendon is the world’s leading high-performance coach and a sought-after personal development trainer. Drawing inspiration from Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Successful People,” which he describes as “the best book of all time,” Brendon was determined to answer three questions:

-- Why do some individuals and teams succeed more quickly than others and sustain that success over the long term?

-- Of those who pull it off, why are some miserable and others consistently happy on their journey?

-- What motivates people to reach for higher levels of success in the first place, and what practices help them improve the most?

I’ve heard Brendon speak on several occasions, so I invited him to speak to my Roundtable group about his results. “The right habits lead to sustained long-term success. High performance means succeeding beyond standard norms, consistently over the long-term,” Brendon explained. “It feels like full engagement, joy and confidence that come from giving your absolute best.

“What we know about high performers,” he said, includes the following:

-- They are more successful than their peers, yet they are less stressed.

-- They are more confident that they will achieve goals despite adversity.

-- They are uniquely productive. They’ve mastered prolific quality output.

-- They work passionately, regardless of traditional rewards.

-- They are admired and adaptive leaders.

-- They are healthier than peers.

-- They feel appreciated and feel their work makes a difference.

Shockingly, just fewer than 15 percent of the population are high performers.

Years of research led Brendon to identify the six deliberate habits that gave people the edge. He also discovered that anyone can practice these habits with extraordinary results in their lives, relationships and careers. “High performance is not strongly correlated with age, gender, nationality, intelligence, personality, strengths, creativity, empathy, years of experience or compensation,” he said.

Brendon sites six habits in a long-term success story:

-- Seek clarity. “Compared with their peers, high performers have more clarity on who they are, what they want, how to get it and what they find meaningful and fulfilling,” he said.

“You generate clarity by asking questions, researching, trying new things, sorting through life’s opportunities, and sniffing out what’s right for you. It comes from asking yourself questions and further refining your perspective on life.”

-- Generate energy. “I’ve found that the most effective way to help high performers increase their energy is to teach them to master transitions,” which he defines as “a powerful space of freedom between activities. ... I’m convinced that if we can get you to change the way you shift from one activity to the next, we can revitalize your life.”

-- Raise necessity. “Necessity is the emotional drive that makes great performance a must instead of a preference,” he explained. “When you feel necessity, you don’t sit around wishing or hoping. You get things done.” He continued, “If I’ve learned anything from my research and a decade of interventions developing high performers, it’s that you cannot become extraordinary without a sense that it’s absolutely necessary to excel.”

-- Increase productivity. “The fundamentals of becoming more productive are setting goals and maintaining energy and focus,” he said. Clear and challenging goals are the starting point. Taking care of yourself, including good sleep, nutrition, exercise and positive emotions help you maintain energy. Keeping focused isn’t easy in the modern era with information overload, distractions and interruptions diminishing productivity."

-- Develop influence. “Having influence means you can get people to believe in you or your ideas, buy from you, follow you or take actions that you request of them,” he explained. “Of course, influence is a two-way street.”

-- Demonstrate courage. “Our coaching interventions suggest that demonstrating courage is the cornerstone habit of high performance,” Brendon said. “Demonstrating courage doesn’t mean you have to save the world or do something grandiose. Sometimes, it means taking a first step toward real change in an unpredictable world.”

In his new book, Brendon offers specific examples that illustrate how to develop these habits as well as exercises and practices for achieving high performance status. He even offers a link to a free professional assessment. Get ready to up your game.

Mackay’s Moral: The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.

I’ve always felt that the real title to every book I’ve written and most of my nationally syndicated columns is Prepare to Win. But I have a fondness for catchier titles, so for my networking book, I went with “Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty.” Bottom line: Networking is all about preparing to win.

In that book, I wrote a chapter about people who should be in your network: doctors, travel agents, bankers, insurance agents, auto mechanics, ticket brokers, recruiters, community and religious leaders, real estate brokers and on and on.

These are all must-haves -- especially for me -- but one of the areas I later realized that I neglected to cover is connections to cultivate inside the workplace, which are crucial to succeeding in anyone’s career. After all, there’s a reason we call them connections. You must connect.

That’s exactly what I did when I started my career many moons ago at Quality Park Envelope Company. My gut instinct told me that if I could figure out who I could befriend and impress with my business qualities, I would be able to move up in the organization. Sure enough, within a couple months, I moved from the plant to the sales department.

All it took was for me to do the best I could do, make sure the assistant plant manager knew it, and latch on to a guardian angel -- someone who was equally eager to escape the plant and who took me with him when he wrangled his way into sales.

I was beginning to learn the finer points of internal networking. Networking is not a numbers game. The idea is not to see how many people you can meet; the idea is to compile a list of people you can count on.

This was my first exposure to what I later learned was called the sausage theory. When one link moves, the other links follow. I’ve seen this play out many times over the years. When one person gets a different job in an organization or jumps to a key job at another company, they often bring a lot of their co-workers with them.

Here are some of the co-workers to get to know who can help you move up:

-- A best friend (or two or three). Find a few people you can count on for support and assistance. You’ll be more productive knowing you’ve got them to talk to about work. Don’t make it a one-sided relationship, of course -- be available to listen and help your friends as necessary.

-- A human resources rep. Get to know at least one person in your HR department so you have someone to go to with questions and concerns. You’ll be more comfortable discussing issues if you don’t walk in only when you have a problem.

-- A mentor. Seek out a senior worker in your organization to consult for career advice. Let the person know you respect his or her reputation and would value any tips he or she can share. With luck, you’ll gain a sponsor who can help you move upward in your organization. I owe much of my success to my mentors.

-- A rival or challenger. You’re often in competition for top assignments. Instead of treating it like a battle, get to know the people with the same goals and ambitions you have. You may find common ground that will help you all succeed. Competition makes you better.

-- Gatekeepers. The best way to open doors is to know gatekeepers. Get to know the people who have access to executives and senior managers, and make sure they know you. This can be very important for getting through to people who can approve your ideas and help you get ahead.

Bottom line, your career can be linked with the careers of others. As your friends and mentors move up, so can you, especially if you have been a key contributor to their promotion or success.

It doesn’t matter how far down the food chain you are when you start out; networking can pay off big time. It isn’t where you start that counts, it’s where you finish.

Just remember, there are no dead-end jobs. If you build a network, you will have a bridge to wherever you want to go.

Mackay’s Moral: Working your way up is much easier if you’re networking your way up.

There’s a good reason why Debbi Fields of cookie fame is so successful, and she summed it up in an aphorism I’ll never forget: “Good enough never is.”

Debbi told me how she coined that phrase after she visited one of her first stores. She walked in unannounced and saw a large crowd of customers in line. She noticed the most recent batch of cookies was overcooked, and she didn’t want those cookies sold. When she confronted the manager, he said, “They are good enough.” Debbie responded with her now famous line, “Good enough never is.” And she threw the entire batch in the trash and made the staff start over. She went through the line explaining what had happened. After apologizing to everyone, she said their orders would be free, if they came back and gave them another chance to show they were the best cookies in the world.

I can attest to how good they are because Debbi made a batch for my wife and me when we visited her at her Aspen home. What a cookie, and what a lesson!

I also learned another valuable lesson from Debbi. She started cooking at an early age because her mother’s cooking was just “good enough,” and Debbi wanted better. Initially, her mother was not in favor of Debbi starting her cookie business because she thought it would fail.

That made Debbi realize that there are two sides of life. There is the negative side that points out the risks and wants to rain on your parade. Then there is the positive side that cheers you on and roots for your success. It’s up to you to determine the best path.

Fortunately, Debbi Fields chose the positive side, as the company now has over 300 franchised and licensed locations throughout the United States and in 22 other countries since she opened her first store in 1977.

Giving 100 percent in everything you do is so important. According to statistics compiled by the communications division of the Canadian oil company Syncrude, if 99.9 percent were good enough, then:

-- 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day today.

-- Two million documents will be lost by the IRS this year.

-- 22,000 transactions will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60 minutes.

-- 1,314 phone calls will be misplaced by telecommunication services every minute.

-- 268,500 defective tires will be shipped this year.

-- 14,208 defective PCs will be shipped this year.

-- 103,260 income tax returns will be processed incorrectly this year.

-- 5,517,200 cases of soft drinks produced in the next 12 months will be flatter than a bad tire.

-- 3,065 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the three sections.

-- 18,322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.

-- 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.

-- 880,000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect cardholder information on their magnetic strips.

-- $9,690 will be spent today, tomorrow, next Thursday, and every day in the future on defective, often unsafe sporting equipment.

-- 55 malfunctioning automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12 months.

-- 20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.

-- 114,500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.

-- 315 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language will turn out to be misspelled.

-- Two plane landings daily at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago will be unsafe.

-- 12 babies will be given to the wrong parents each day.

Given numbers like those, does a pan of overbaked cookies seem like such a big deal? It is if your standards are as high as they should be. And never stop trying to exceed those standards.

Take it from Orison Swett Marden, founder of SUCCESS magazine, “The quality of your work will have a great deal to do with the quality of your life.”

Here’s a work/life example that illustrates his point.

In ancient Rome, when the scaffolding was removed from a completed Roman arch, the law read that the Roman engineer who built the arch had to stand beneath it. The point was that if the arch came crashing down, he would experience the responsibility firsthand. As a result, the Roman engineer knew that the quality of his work was crucial and would have a direct personal impact on his life.

Mackay’s Moral: There is no substitute for quality.