Posts Tagged ‘Six Degrees Leadership’
Competition keeps you Honest and Excellent
Sunday, September 26th, 2010The great John Wooden said that Competition is there to keep you honest in the battle against yourself. In last week’s post, we discussed pushing the envelope on yourself and pushing your performance to the point of failure. Always stretching and growing to get better.
Open honest competition is a great external motivator that keeps us accountable and honest in pushing ourselves to do our best. If the purpose of the competition is only to win, then people start cheating and using less than honest tactics. However, if the competition is about providing the best value to the customer, then the result is bringing the best out of yourself. Even if you’re not competitive by nature, having honest competition makes you stretch yourself to become better, and there is nothing that matches that.
A few years ago, I happened to stumble across my high-school Senior-Year Book. Since my wife was with me, I decided to open it up and show it to her. In Italy, they don’t have this tradition, so it turned into a really fun activity. When we got to my picture, I was blown away by my senior quote that they had printed right there on the page: “No matter how hard you work, or how tired you get, remember that there is someone else out there who has worked just as hard and is just as tired, yet still pushes on.” I got goose-bumps when I read it, and thought, “What great advice for my life right now!” The quote is not about wanting to beat the other person. It is about using that other person as motivation in being honest with yourself about putting in your best effort.
Get the most out of your life! Build relationships that challenge you to be the greatest you can be!
Always have some competition in some part of your life – Pass that Passion for Excellence into all other areas of your life!
If it ain’t broke, BREAK IT!
Monday, September 20th, 2010Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. That is often why, in their marketing or their Resume’, people use the amount of time they’ve been in business - “In Business Since 1908” or “17 years of experience in…”
In so many cases, people don’t really have 17 years of experience: what they really have is 1 year of experience 17 times. For the most part, people can figure out how to do what they do in the first year or two, and they get in a routine of how they do it. From then on, they only change when they HAVE TO, and thus they stop growing.
Once you have become and “expert” at something, it doesn’t mean that you’ve achieved excellence. It means that you’ve gone through a great period of growth. Now it is time to use that growth to reach new levels. I think of it this way: you go to kindergarten to prepare for first grade. You go to elementary school to prepare yourself for middle school, then high school, then college. College prepares you either for a job or for Graduate School and, then, a Doctorate. The same is true in your business or any endeavor your choose to take on: your first business is to prepare you for the second, or the first phase of your business is to prepare you for the second.
People who understand this are not intimidated by the statistic that 9 out of 10 businesses fail. They also don’t expect to hit a ‘home run’ with their first business attempt. Instead, they push the envelope on themselves and their performance. Their goal is to learn and grow. What I believe Malcolm Gladwell is saying is that the expert with 10,000 hours of experience is the person who did not re-experience the same thing 10,000 times. It’s the person who, once they got comfortable with how they did things, they pushed themselves out of their comfort zone to get better, to get more experience. Once they mastered juggling tennis balls, they decided to try bowling balls, then flaming torches, then chain saws, then one of each.
You must push yourself to the point of failure, to the edge of your ability for hours and hours with the tennis balls, before you could even think of picking up a chain saw!
How do YOU think he got this good?
Are you growing? Are you pushing your performance to the point of failure? Are you just trying to keep up? Are you resting on your past achievements and thinking, “It’s working pretty good, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Or are you boldly crashing through the walls of comfort, intentionally causing pain to get better, thinking, “If it ain’t broke, break it! So we know how to make it better.” There is a lot of pain involved in breaking something that you’ve created, but it’s so Worth It!
Next week, let’s talk about what gets us through that pain! The power of competition to keep you honest and excellent.
Drive from Lack of Vision
Monday, September 6th, 2010I was in a Six Degrees Workshop, last Thursday, talking about Drive and where Drive comes from. This naturally lead us to Vision and how you are going to use your life. Then, Kecia Cossett piped up and said something that kind of hit me sideways. She said that sometimes people’s drive comes from a LACK of Vision. “Lack of vision?! How could that be?” She explained that sometimes people find themselves in a place in their life where they don’t want to be. In this moment of realization, they become driven to change their circumstance.
A great quote that parallels this principle is, “People will change when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.” We’ve all had some area of our life that we’ve neglected come creep back up on us. Maybe it was your health, your finances, a significant relationship that you didn’t pay close enough attention to, and, when the timing was absolutely worst, WHAM! It hit you: your health failed, you car fell apart, your significant other said, “I’ve had enough,” or your business stopped producing revenue. Suddenly, we see that we had lack of vision in that area of our life, and that is what gave us the Drive to change things!
What area of your life are you currently neglecting? Is there something you can do there today to keep it from falling apart? How do you know the health of that area? It may be time to do a personal tune up.
Take time this week to look at these Six Areas of your life and make sure all vital signs are healthy.
- Social (this includes your family)
- Physical (maybe time to schedule a physical, or time to look at your calendar and count how many hours of exercise you’ve been doing… ~if you need more than one page of your calendar to track 1 hour of exercise, that might be a sign~ Take a look at your diet, how much fast food have you eaten in the last hour, day, week, month, year?)
- Mental (What are you planting in the garden of your mind? What is your “Entertainment vs. Education” ratio, as Brian Tracy calls it)
- Spiritual (How often are you looking at your life from an eternal perspective?)
- Political (How are you handling the power in your life, do you ignore it, do you abuse it?)
- Financial (How much value are you creating?)
If the vital signs in any of these areas are lacking or out of tolerance, take a minute to think about the relationships that are affected, and the relationships that will help you get them back on track. Trying to do everything on your own is, at best, ineffective and unsustainable.
Positive Thinking vs. Purposeful Thinking
Monday, August 30th, 2010Positive thinking and having a great attitude are things that I talk about quite often, and, after watching this 10 Minute Video (Smile or Die), I realized that I needed to clarify my message. In fact, when I say ‘positive’ thinking, I use the term because of familiarity, but what I really mean is purposeful thinking.
The core of positive thinking is this: Think positive things regardless of your circumstances, and good things will eventually happen.
The core of purposeful thinking: Stay focused on your purpose regardless of your circumstances, and you will figure out a way to obtain it.
Positive thinking says, “Think about $1,000,000 long enough and it will eventually come to me.”
Purposeful thinking says, “If I keep trying to accomplish my major life’s ambition, no matter how many times I fail, I will succeed.” Depending upon what your ambition is, you’ll probably make a million dollars as well.
The difference is this: Positive thinking is very PASSIVE, while Purposeful thinking is very ACTIVE. To an outside observer, they may appear to be the same thing.
Let’s take a quick look at a historical figure as an example: Abraham Lincoln. Here is a man who had a major life ambition for significance. His early life was rattled with failure, he had several failed business ventures, several failed attempts at running for political office and many other failures. Yet, he never quit, he kept pursuing his major life ambition. While Lincoln was going through all of this, the casual outside observer might have noticed his “positive” thinking and wondered how someone going through so much could possible still have such a great attitude.
It wasn’t that he was thinking positively, rather it was that he was driven by his purpose. In a biography written by a fellow lawyer in the same firm, Lincoln was cited as saying, “You know, I thought my life was meant for something greater.” As we know now from history, it was!
Positive thinking for the sake of positive thinking is delusional. Purposeful thinking is what makes life worth living!
In keeping with the theme of this blog, “A Warrior’s Perspective”: Mercenaries simply fight for money. Warriors fight for their Life Purpose.
Fire, Ready, Aim!
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010Being in the Army, ‘Fire, Ready, Aim!’ was not the normal instruction we were given. However, you can tell a lot about where a person is on their journey by what order they put these three actions. In the Army basic training course you will often hear, “Ready, Aim, Fire!” This makes sense for someone who is in the training phase of his or her journey, especially if someone else is doing the training.
However, when you are in the innovative part of your journey, when you are making your life come alive, when you’ve decided to not play it safe anymore, that you were going to let your ideas fly and that you were going to use up every ounce of potential that is in you, then Fire, Ready, Aim will seem normal.
Ready, aim, fire is nice during training, but when you are in the situation that you’ve been training for, it’s not always convenient. As you may suspect, I like war movies, and I get pretty wrapped up in them as if I were there with the soldiers. When you are in situations like those depicted in Blackhawk Down, Band of Brothers, Saving Private Ryan, and movies of the like, you see that you don’t always have time to be ready and aim before you fire. Most of the time it’s ‘Fire, get the heck outta there, get ready, go back out there and aim really well.’
This is consistent with the advice I receive from people who are much older and wiser than me. The advice boils down to this: fire more often and before you are ready. The great Copywriter and Consultant Steve Kellogg recently wrote an article for the Social Capital Magazine called When in Doubt, ACT! The whole article follows the Fire, Ready, Aim Philosophy.
FIRE: Act before you are ready, it is the best and fastest way to learn. As Les Brown says, “Jump now, and learn how to fly on the way down.” Don’t use inexperience, poor relationships or unpreparedness as an excuse. Truth is, until you fire, you’ll never have the experience. In relationships, your boldness in acting is a great determining factor of how effective your relationship will really be. In preparedness, you’ll never be as prepared as you want to be. If you wait until all possible resources are ready, then, by definition, there is no need for leadership. Final thing to remember here is that you have a LONG journey ahead of you, regardless of your age. What I mean by ‘long’ is that you cannot see the end of your journey, it’s past the horizon. What you fire at today may take you to an amazing place that you never knew existed. Although you think what you’re firing at is the end destination, you’ll find that it’s only a stepping stone to the real destination. If you wait too long to fire, you’ll never make it to the first step.
READY: Once you fire, you’ve committed yourself to a course of action. Now that you’ve got some commitment, you’ve got some leverage on yourself. You’re getting ready now has a very different feel. Time is no longer on your side and, thus, you will seek out only the important things to know, and you’ll leave out everything else. This also forces you to surround yourself with people who have a higher level of knowledge in the area.
One thing I’ve noticed is that, when you are talking about doing something, people are always willing to give you advice and tell you every way to do a thing or why not to do a thing, etc. When you are in motion, you’ll find that people are much more willing to actually help, get on board and do something, as opposed to chat and talk about all the things to do and not to do. This is where your resources come from: when people see that you are serious because you are already in motion, they are much more inclined to be a resource for you.
AIM: Now that you’ve already fired, you’ve gathered some resources and are now ready, it’s time to aim. Because time was not a luxury before, you don’t have your mind filled with a thousand different options of how to do a thing. You went through and learned only the most important things, and now you are aiming all of your resources in that direction. Keep in mind that the direction you’re aiming your resources at may not be THE BEST possible place to focus them, but you’ve got them, and they are in motion, which is far more than if you had not fired at all. It is exceedingly difficult to steer a parked car.
Moral of the story? Comfort and Familiarity are WAAAAAAY overrated, and security is truly an illusion! Go Jump in a Lake full of Crocodiles, do the thing that just scares the pants off of you, you’ll be surprised at what you learn.
SEE YOU AT THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAKE!
Do you know people who are like this?
Ready, Ready, Ready… Yawn
Ready, Aim, Aim… Almost got it…(6 years later)
Fire, Fire, Fire… Oh yeah , Aim! This is fun.
Ready, Fire, Aim!
Ready, Aim, Fire!
What are some that you have seen?
The Cost of doing things For Free
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Alright, let’s talk about MONEY!!! When a small-business owner does something for a client for free, there are many more costs involved than what the business owner might think. The obvious costs are the physical materials you may have used or given away in your act of kindness (this cost, regardless of how big or small, is the least of my concerns for this topic.) Then, there is the cost of your time spent in performing the service (this is the second least of my concerns in this matter.) The value of the physical goods and the time spent performing the service are well-meaning charitable acts of kindness and should be viewed as such. But, there is a disservice that you are doing to yourself, and to the recipient of the act.
First, the disservice to yourself. Here is the background that we must start with. The purpose of business is to provide something of value to someone else. If you are providing value to people for free, how many people can you realistically provide high value to, and still sustain shelter and a family? A very small number. If you receive money for providing that value, you can do two things: you can sustain a shelter and a family, and you can put money back into the business, both to improve the quality of the product and to hire people and serve a greater number of customers. If the purpose of business is to provide something of value to other people, then the more people you can provide value to, the better your business will do.
Whenever you do something for free, you limit the number of people you can provide your value to.
Second, the disservice to the customer. I have a friend who provides an excellent education-based service. He recently decided to accept a person’s request to attend his classes for free. As it turns out, this person came to the first class, raved about how good it was, and has never come back. My friend hears from him on a weekly basis (every time there is a class) and he apologizes for not coming to the class. His friend’s lack of commitment is directly proportional to his lack of payment.
In this case, the problem is not that the person doesn’t have gratitude or doesn’t appreciate the gesture, because he expresses these feeling to my friend every week. This person desperately needs this class and he knows it, but, without his financial commitment, his physical commitment stays low too. He is literally taking something that would help him a great deal and throwing it in the trash, while other people are spending their hard-earned cash for the same thing.
In so many cases, things given for free turn out to be a lose-lose proposition.
I am not suggesting that you never give anything away for free. If you have a marketing strategy that involves giving a gift or giving something of value at no charge, that is something completely different. Marketing strategies and charity are two great examples. But when someone comes to you and expresses a “NEED” for your product, but they are in need of it for free, keep in mind the consequences of the lose-lose proposition.
If you really want to help, get creative and help the other person come up with something that they can offer you that would be of value to you, and require effort on their part to produce. In the end, this act will prove to be more beneficial to both parties.
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