(No vid today. Sinus infection instead… “The show must go on” doesn’t translate too well to those of us who look and sound like Squidward Tentacles when illin’.)
A quick anecdote to kick things off: At lunch yesterday, I mentioned to a colleague that “balance is the result of following your passions. Balance is an natural outcome of being successful, not a goal.”
His response was a 3-sentence condemnation of nearly all the leadership and self-help advice on the market: “I think you’re exactly right, but before I found entrepreneurship, I wouldn’t have believed you. I wouldn’t even have understood what you’re talking about. Someone who has never found his passion has no way to process that comment.”
The problem he articulated so crisply is that if passion/winning/leading/succeeding is a foreign concept, then you probably can’t achieve it, because it’s hard to get to a place you’ve never envisioned before… so hard, in fact, that society celebrates and even reveres the few explorers, visionaries, and pioneers who prove themselves able to do it. (Usually.)
I need to solve this problem right up front, in Chapter 1. I do so by first walking through the universal *feeling* of success… winning looks very different to a speed skater than it does to a spelling bee champ, baseball coach, hostage negotiator, or trial lawyer, but the euphoric feeling experienced by each is the same. I try to capture that feeling and get everyone attached to it so that as we walk through the rest of the book, we all do so with the same goal in mind.
Second, I need to describe the process of finding passion/earning victory/achieving success. Not everyone who picks up this book will be in the same place emotionally; some will be closer to “success” than others. Therefore, I also need to break down the process of achieving successes… so that no matter if you’re trying to claw out of a dead end job, or putting the final polish on a fast-track career, you can identify and then plug in to the process at the right stage.
(The good news with this second part is that the process of achieving success *also* leads to the same feeling as winning… sometimes, more so. James McEnroe once described a tennis match against Jimmy Connors by saying he felt like he was half a second ahead the whole game; he just *knew* where every shot was going to go. Talking to ESPN, it wasn’t the victory he remembered, it was the process of earning it! The feeling he describes has given rise to phrases like “flow,” “in the zone,” and “on fire.”)
Third, I share a model for creating, maintaining, and enhancing these states, so that you don’t just know what they feel like, but you can actually create the conditions to experience them for yourself more often. This way, no matter where you are in your journey toward success, you can take “the next step.”
Specifically, Chapter 1 explores:
1. The Universal Feeling of Success: Quality Time
1.1 Attitude—The fundamentals. I’m doing my best to approach this topic without defaulting to a set of cliches we’re all so tired of. It’s got me stretching as an author.
1.2 Objective—Some objectives help move you toward success, some don’t. I walk through the conditions of worthwhile goals, some of which are surprising. I also look at how goals shift or lock based on the feedback we get:
1.2.1 Making objectives realistic (Assessing goals strategically; communicating about potential goals without sounding either idealistic or dull)
1.2.2 Making objectives tough (Developing the self-awareness to know your limits and how/when/where to push them; the role of determination; the roles of confidence and courage)
1.2.3 Getting feedback (Hearing indirect feedback; hearing direct feedback; how to tell “good” feedback from “bad”; exercising self-control when getting useful feedback from a distasteful source; developing the social skills needed to elicit indirect feedback)
1.3 Environment
1.3.1 People (Accepting people for who/what they are—eliminating “if only” from your vocabulary; doing a stakeholder analysis to determine who is most relevant to your goals; developing the communications/negotiations/sales/social skills needed to interact with them and win them over to your cause)
1.3.2 Places (Creating places that are comfortable, calm, and conducive to success… even in stressful environments)
1.3.3. Things (Finding the tools and resources needed to succeed… and doing so in the right order)
1.4 Mindset—If you’re going to follow a path based on what success feels like, you’re going to need to train your brain to think in a different way… your brain is going to have to learn how to guide your emotions rather than control them or replace them with logic. There is a specific dance that reason and emotion do inside the soul of a successful person. Here are the dance steps:
1.4.1 Open perspective (You have to be willing to succeed if you’re going to succeed… here’s how to overcome issues of disillusionment, frustration, etc.)
1.4.2 Focus (Here’s where I get into things like discipline, drive, desire, competitiveness, and maybe even a little ethics)
1.4.3 Patience (Success can’t be forced, it can only be courted. Personal responsibility, acceptance/patience, and grace under fire are the topics that round out this section)
Hmm… as I read this, I’m thinking maybe this is more than one chapter. Maybe it’s its own section.
What do you think? Is this getting kicked off the right way?
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I agree, I think this is more than one chapter if you want to do more than just touch on each subject superficially. I would also suggest you add to 1.4 some info on how to deal with back sliding. Sometimes you have to get worse to get better. Whenever you are learning something new or overcoming something you will always backslide a little on the way. You have to learn how to overcome the frustration and self-recrimination that comes with that.
And maybe something on not letting too much planning become a means to procrastinate. I can provide you with a bunch of references for procrastination research if you are interested, it’s what I did my Master’s project on.