Its a New Year

New Years Resolutions. I do not make them because they rarely work. Without accountability to someone they almost always get lost somewhere in life. I found something that works for me very well. Previous year reviews. Try it. Remove the negative and soar.

1.    Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.

2.    Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.

3.    For each week, jot down on the pad any people and activities that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month.

4.    Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”

5.    Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in 2018. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for shit now! That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2018. These are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.

Try it, be vocal about how it goes.

Remember you are always in the right place at the right time, if you have the right attitude.

Thanks to Timothy Ferris for PYR. It can change your outlook and life.

If I can do it, any ordinary Joe can, (no offense to any Joes).

Earlier in my life, I was foreman of a door and roof truss plant. We made pre-hung doors and manufactured wood trusses for houses. A large saw was used to cut the wood for the trusses. Very dangerous. One of the fellows running the machine took a shortcut one day and replaced a bolt with something he should not have. Unfortunately, he got caught in the device. His arm was forcibly removed from the socket and his body. Giant clamps cut off his airway. Thanks to quick reactions by a couple of coworkers he was given CPR until EMTs arrived. They saved his life. However, his arm could not be saved. The story does not have a happy ending. He spent his whole life bitter about the accident, blamed everyone but himself. Sued everybody he could. He was a mean and angry man. I am not judging him. I do not know how I would react to the same situation. Some people deal very badly with adversity. Others tell stories that inspire us all. We hear and see stories of overcoming hardship and trouble every day.

Ted talks are wildly popular. Most have a theme, if I can do it, any ordinary joe can. (no offense to any joes). It is easy, just do this and this.  We search every day for people overcoming tremendous adversity. We listen to their stories and think, wow, that is amazing. Yes, it is. It inspires us for a day or two then we go back to our life.

On the other hand, Success stories from people who have not suffered don’t inspire us so much. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time relating to Warren Buffet. His background is not much different than mine, yet he is unbelievably wealthy. Bill Gates, Ray Kroc, the list is endless.

Why then do we not do the same? What thoughts stop us. Where you are in life is a direct result of the views that prevent us from success as well as propel us forward. How difficult is it to think about this when all you are focused on is paying rent, or buying food?

Why do some succeed, some fail, some just living enough to breathe.

Without a catastrophic event to help you change, how do you do it?

One small change at a time. Do not look at the whole picture and expect it to change. Find the discipline to change one little thing at a time. Your focus can still be on paying the rent or buying food. Perhaps you should let the small stuff that bothers you go. Stop yelling at drivers on the road. Quit worrying about that which you have no control.

We all have it in is to be whatever we choose to be. Decide what that is. It is ok. Break it down into small items and begin. As simple as, I will start every morning with a pep talk to myself, or perhaps no sugar in my coffee. Small disciplines add up to massive changes. A good friend gave me this advice.

It is up to me.

Remember, you are always in the right place at the right time if you have the right attitude

Do you know these leaders?

There are two kinds of leaders:

1. There are leaders who put themselves and their purpose, mission, agenda, belief system in front of everything else — and their brilliance, if they are in fact brilliant, is enough to carry the whole culture forward. And those employees in a culture with a self-driven leader are either willing to drink the punch and follow, because there’s a lot of money to be made or some other prize. And that’s how we get toxic workplaces.

2.  The other kind of leader is the antidote. A leader who makes strategic decisions based on people and the product or service they’re responsible for. That puts the well-being and engagement (and engagement is a key concept here) of others first. Is this selfless? Not exactly. Is it socialist? Not at all. It’s the essence of being responsive to the market — using the workforce as the microcosm. If they’re happy, if they’re performing, the theory goes, so will the company.

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for more of these.

Do you know these leaders?

Remember, you are always in the right place, at the right time if you have the right attitude

Talent Culture Community

VOB Break all the rules

What if you are not a Navy Seal?

Should you just give up? Most motivational training makes us feel inadequate. It is no wonder we do not keep at it every day. Don't you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe? Some of us just want to breathe.

Years ago, I was sitting in a training class, the instructor was very well-known. Rumor had it he was the number one sales man in the US of A. He sold 70-80 cars a month.  He had his own staff to make calls, send out his mail and make appointments. I was listening to every word he said. I am as good as this guy, I kept thinking, I should be able to do it as well. Why wasn’t I? Every thought was negative. I was lazy, a procrastinator, if I really wanted to it would happen.

He gave us all some advice, I never took it. Almost all the training was based on scenarios we never encountered or if you followed it made you very uncomfortable.

 At the time, I kept this to myself. I did not voice this opinion for fear it would make me look weak. I knew if I say that to a customer they will walk away. There is no way he followed his own training and was successful in building the trust he needed. As you can guess, the rest of the day was wasted. Could I have sold 70 cars a month? Sure. Did I want to? Not really.

The seeds of my passion were planted that day in Scottsdale.

There is no training for the average person out there.

What happened. The little guy gets left in the dust. What if your goals are average, you don’t care about being the top dog in the country.

Real world training and understanding. How does that filter down to the average person? On a team of 20 people, 4 will make all the money. 16 will be average or less. You want to be successful, focus on the 16. 4 want to succeed as bad as they want to breathe, 16 just want to breathe and maybe laugh now and then.

One of the lies we all believe is there are no good people out there. We buy into the illusion that millennials are lazy, Gen X wants everything for nothing, and baby boomers think the young generation do not know how to work. If we only focus on the top dog of course there are no good people out there.

The focus for all. Not just the few. We all cannot be Navy seals. To the amazing few, salute. For the rest of us, we can learn. Focus, Believe, Understand. Be happy, its okay to be who we are. Do not be disappointed if you are not the top dog. Quit comparing yourself to others. Your competition is you. Better today than yesterday. Focus on you. Believe in you. Set your goals about you. Be better every day.

Remember you are always in the right place at the right time if you have the right attitude.

tapestry of self deception

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our

most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of

feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts

into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing

suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and

spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea,

no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.

That is all

Credit to Barry Eisler