Regardless if you're a young professional or an experienced veteran of the workforce, there will always be areas where you will have plenty of opportunity to earn the respect and the trust of your colleagues and clients. Here are my favorite focus areas for professional excellence that require zero talent whatsoever: 1. Diligence The quality of the work you deliver to your customers on a daily basis is your signature. In the perception of your customers and colleagues the impression of how much you care about delivering value to them is visible in the quality of your output. Hence it is always quality first and quantity second. Always put quality on top of your priorities. That being said this does not mean that you have to get everything right one hundred percent of the time. Often you will have to abide by deadlines and circumstances you can not -fully- influence. Oftentimes 'highest quality' means that you take a caveat of a given deadline into account. As a result a rou...