In sports, the only thing a player can truly control is effort. The same applies
to business. The only thing any entrepreneur, salesperson or anyone in any
position can control is their effort.
I had to kick myself in the ass and recommit to getting up early, staying up late and
consuming everything I possibly could to get an edge. I had to commit to making
the effort to be as productive as I possibly could. It meant making sure that
every hour of the day that I could contact a customer was selling time, and
when customers were sleeping, I was doing things that prepared me to make
more sales and to make my company better.
And finally, I had to make sure I wasn’t lying to myself about how hard I was
working. It would have been easy to judge effort by how many hours a day passed
while I was at work. That’s the worst way to measure effort. Effort is measured by
setting goals and getting results. What did I need to do to close this account? What
did I need to do to win this segment of business? What did I need to do to
understand this technology or that business better than anyone? What did I need to
do to find an edge? Where does that edge come from, and how was I going to get
there?
The one requirement for success in our business lives is effort. Either you make the
commitment to get results or you don’t.
3rd January 2012
Christmas in a cat loving home.
How can you not be inspired by this interview with Scott Harrison Founder and CEO of Charity: Water?
Notes: 7
The solution [for more successful projects] isn’t necessarily for me to become a better shot. I mean, there are goalies in the world, and sometimes they stop pucks. What’s really needed is more shots. More potential projects= more completed projects= more paid projects.
My brilliant brother, Kyle J. Baker wrote the quotes above and below on his blog Thinking Creator. He’s talking about how a change in viewpoint is crucial. I was arrested by the visual of goalies stopping shots.
In an earlier part of this post, Kyle makes another great observation about himself. When he wants something to take off, and it doesn’t, he immediately ties it to something he said on his blog. In all reality he has just succumbed to the cum hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy aka assuming causation because of correlation.
Like most amateur artists, I get excited by every new possible project and depressed when one doesn’t work out, convinced I scared them off by something I said on my blog. The reality is more likely that they lost their funding, or their boss said no.
But he isn’t alone in his logical fallacy (if he were a Wikipedia article wouldn’t exist for it). No, everyone falls into this trap, unintentionally of course but we still do it. We shouldn’t stop trying to understand the world around you, or why things failed…no that is still very important. But we should take a step back and if the failed scenario were a painting, take a good hard look at it. Critique it, realize that yes we have helped paint some brush stokes that don’t fit, or are in the wrong palette but that overall we didn’t ruin the painting. Perhaps the canvas was too big, or too small. Maybe the style was wrong. And maybe, just maybe, we aren’t as important as we’d like to think we are. Some projects falter. Some projects fail. Some projects fly. If we get “more shots” in, we’ll see more projects fly.
Here is a man who continues to pursue his dreams. From Sports Illustrated:
Joe Moglia was a millionaire hundreds of times over. He remarried in 1995 and became a step dad. He played Texas Hold ‘Em with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates at the Omaha Country Club. In the spirit of Buffet, the Oracle of Omaha, Moglia lived comfortably but simply in the Midwest.
But part of him wasn’t being nourished. When he thought about his unlikely narrative and took inventory of his life, he realized that his happiest professional memories came in the ’70s and ’80s when he was coaching. “I didn’t lose a second of sleep thinking about missed business opportunities, but I couldn’t get the football thing out of my mind,” he says. “It was like, ‘How do I get back to coaching in the fastest way?’”
So he stepped down as CEO of Ameritrade (as a billionaire) to pursue his dream of coaching college football and as a volunteer apprenticed himself to Nebraska’s coaching staff. Three years later, he is the newly appointed Coastal Carolina’s Football Coach. What a great and inspiring story.
Jim Mellado, president of the Willow Creek Association and Harvard Business School (HBS) MBA combines both worlds sharing how innovation affects the church.
(Source: businessinnovationfactory.com)
Reblogged From basecampx
(Source: TechCrunch)
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