The Carrot and Stick For Higher Personal Performance and Success

I've been bouncing around the ideas of Activity - Reward and Carrot - Stick for business and personal success.  This will be about personal success, because your business can't succeed if you aren't a success yourself.

To start I want to talk about "being" for a moment.  In the Zen sense of it all "being" is just that.  Basically meditating or doing something without effort or thought.  When you do that you are just "being".

The problem is that most people don't have any ingrained survival skills any more when they are just "being".  When a cat is "being" and it runs across a mouse, it will catch the mouse, and if it is hungry it will eat everything but the head.  It saves the head as a gift for it's master.  The cat is simply "being" a cat.

A buddhist monk can just be walking the monastery, growing food, preparing meals and meditating because they have trained to exist in this mode of being.  Most of the rest of us haven't trained to survive and therefore succeed in any mode of being.

Socialization and industrialization has conditioned our ability to survive out of our "being".  When we are hungry, we don't kill the next bird that fly's by and eat it do we?  Leave a former Navy Seal alone on the street hungry, and he will.  Why?  Because he was conditioned back to a different level of survival and to him, being hungry simply means time to gather food.  The bird is just food.

In order to succeed while you are just "being", you must first have a vision of who you want to be, where that person is going, what it took to get there, and then "become" the person who makes the journey from where you are today to the person you are "being" and therefore become.

Imagine a woman, broke, lonely and working at a dead end job barely able to make her rent.  After going to a big self help conference she decides to set some huge goals and shoot for the stars.  She decides that she is going to make $5 Million dollars this year.  She goes home reads the books, thinks about making $5 Million a year, maybe even prays to make $5 Million a year.  At the end of the day she keeps her same job, and at the end of the year, she gives up feeling that she failed because she wasn't making $5 Million for the year.

What went wrong?  Aren't we supposed to "Think and Grow Rich"?  The answer is a little more than just thinking about making $5 Million a year.  Before you can be someone who makes $5 Million per year, you have to be that person who made $24,000 per year who then made $5 Million per year.  "Being" a lottery winner or trust fund baby only works if you get lucky, and this isn't about luck or are born into a wealthy family, and this isn't about that either.

You can't pick your parents and you can't fix the lotto.

What I mean is this.  If you want to make $5 Million per year, you have to find out about people who make $5 Million per year.  They all did something to get where our woman wants to go.  One of those people made the money in a way that she would find tolerable.  Now she must "be" that person until it becomes part of her "being".

Before you can make the decision of who you will be, you need to know the sacrifices they made to get there.  You have to be ready to make similar sacrifices.  There are stories of many famous actors who finished great colleges or theater programs only to end up sleeping in their cars before their big break.  If you want to be the next Brad Pitt, are you willing to sleep in your car?  I know that "being" Brad Pitt isn't for me, and likewise this is where most people just walk away from big goals.  They aren't willing to take the sticks and thorns of the path less traveled.

You will need to know what sacrifices they endured, what sticks they were hit with, which ones they respected and avoided.   You should also know the little rewards they gave themselves on their own journey to the goal to keep moving when the journey appeared hopeless.

When you accept the sticks and carrots of the journey as your own life, then you can become someone on the journey.  Only then are you "being" the person who WILL make $5 Million per year instead of the failure who didn't make $5 Million per year.

Setting goals that you don't reach is a downward spin you need to stay out of.  You can only do that by understanding and accepting the real costs of your goals and "being" the person that pays the price to make the journey and achieve the goals.

"Being" is easier when you know what the carrots and sticks are and are willing to take them both anytime they happen.