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So you’ve been knocked down…now what?
In golf, as in life, you will suffer defeat. There will be times when you choke, succumb to pressure, or just lose it in the furnace that is a stressful and important situation.
At almost every major golf tournament each year, someone “blows it.” Someone who has never won a major championship before (there are four each year), leads with 18 holes to go. Or perhaps even only three or four holes. And they “find a way to lose.”
Most people are really lazy.
Myself included.
Interestingly enough, it took a sign that I saw while shopping for a Mother’s Day gift last month to convince me of that.
The sign is true. If we actually did all of the things we were gifted to do...it would blow our minds.
Most of us want to live an astonished life.
We want to do all of the things we dream about. To change the world and do what we’re called to do.
We want to wake up utterly astonished at what is happening in our lives.
We want to be wide-eyed at what has happened, curious and excited about the future, and doing everything we can to make right now amazing.
Is your workload a status symbol?
A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled, Why Men Work So Many Hours, had a passage that totally floored me:
How do the elite signal to each other how important they are? “I am slammed” is a socially acceptable way of saying “I am important.” Fifty years ago, Americans signaled class by displaying their leisure: think banker’s hours (9 to 3). Today, the elite — journalist Chrystia Freeland calls them “the working rich” — display their extreme schedules.
What is risk?
That question was posed by a professor to sixty MBA students who were executives of public corporations.
I was reviewing my notes from the book, The Millionaire Next Door this week, and transferring them to digital format. My copy of the book is so old, I think Gutenberg himself printed it. E-readers were a fantasy when this gem came out. And yet, the book is still relevant today.
In the book, when the professor asked that question,
One student replied: Being an entrepreneur?
His fellow students agreed. Then the professor answered his own question with a quote from an entrepreneur:
What is risk? Having one source of income. Employees are at risk…They have a single source of income. What about the entrepreneur who sells janitorial services to your employers? He has hundreds and hundreds of customers…hundreds and hundreds of sources of income.
I was asked a similar question recently at dinner with some new friends. When I mentioned that I went out on my own almost two years ago, one man replied, “Wow. That must have been scary and risky.”
Can business success lead to business failure?
Yes. I’ve allowed it to happen.
Five years removed from my time at one business, I had time to do an autopsy. Here is what I learned.
A few months ago, Chris LoCurto posted about what he calls the clarify paradox. The question he asked is:
Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful?
He then presented four stages which moderately successful business often go through:
Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.
A warm network is critical in today’s economy.
We live in a connected world, dependent upon relationships. I have written quite a bit about networking before and include links to those posts at the bottom of this one. I have also had the privilege of consulting one-on-one with numerous people about building and maintaining a powerful network. The success stories have been inspiring.
In your efforts to develop a network, please don’t make the mistakes one poor fellow made below.
A friend of mine and I recently got the exact same email from a mutual connection on LinkedIn. This is someone I worked extensively with at another company, so we have a decent relationship.