Why? Improve Your Position

Improve your position.  This mantra for success is something people forget every day.  When you get up in the morning and keep doing the same thing, you end up in the same position at the end of every day.

Fear.  When you think about it, the real root cause of doing the same thing every day is the fear of the unknown.  Fear of leaving your comfort zone.  Fear of not making that next car payment.  Fear of missing time with your friends, fear of losing time with your co-workers.

There is always that one person though.  That one person that takes a little time away from the group.  There is always that one person that moves out and up.  That person that you watch and wonder why it wasn't you.

The secret?  Improve your position.

There is more to it though.  In order to improve your position, you need to define "improve".  How do you know what improvement is if you don't have a destination?  The key is to create a vision or destination that is a very clear vision of where you are going.  When you have that vision you can improve your position.

In simple terms, if you want to go to the park at the end of the block, and your neighbor asks you to watch the game, are you getting closer to the park?  If you want that new car, and your friend calls with tickets to the concert that cost $100, does the concert get you closer to the new car.

These are obvious examples.  The most difficult involve an overload of information.  The secret to speed in improving your position is filtering out the chaff or useless information.

Simple decisions can hold you back if you don't pay attention, or pay too much attention to the chaff instead of the important points.

Living life with a purpose means having a "mission" in everything you do.  Even on vacation you can have a "mission" or "purpose".  It might only be to "relax".   Everyone needs to recharge from time to time, and that means different things to different people.  For me it means turning off the office and work in the front of the brain and letting the back 90% do it's job.   For other people it is just to get the family "off their back".

How can you improve your position while on vacation?  The reality is that you can always practice cutting through the chaff, even while traveling.  Always listening will bombard you with a lot of useless information, and it might just get you that great idea or solve the problem you have been having at the office.

Every time you get a call, ask yourself, "Does this improve my position or put me into a position where I can improve my position?"  If it doesn't, learn to say "no" if you want to move ahead.

What Are The Real Keys To Success?

As you know, I have been trying to fine tune the "formula for success" so that more people can create a lifestyle that they want, not just one they settle for.

I want to help you find a better way to live your life that fits you.  You can't be me and I can't be you, but we are both human and so the rules must be similar.

Recently I found the book was worth adding to my reading list for my clients and sharing with you.

The book is Cal Newport's "Be So Good They Can't Ignore You".  Cal Newton argues that chasing your dreams is a waste of time.  I agree.  You can have all the passion in the world for something but if the world doesn't it want it that way from you, you will go broke.

Like many people there are several things that I am passionate about.  I accept that those passions will not provide me sufficient income to maintain the lifestyle I expect. Instead those passions are my hobbies.

What he says to do is act like Steve Jobs at Apple.  Steve created a bunch of products and saw what worked and what didn't and he kept fine tuning based on the feedback of the market.  Remember the Newton?  Even the original iPhone (or should we call it the "Classic" now?) wasn't really much to speak up.  The bugs weren't worked out until the iPhone 3G.

Do the same thing in life.  Pursue a bunch of things and when you find one you like and that the market keeps asking your for, become great at it.

One of the aspects I really enjoy about blogging is the feedback from the market. It doesn't matter how many people comment on my blog, Facebook page or Twitter feed. When they do, I always appreciate it and try to respond in kind.

The metric that I really like however for blogs are the number of reads, and the number of reposts. It's very easy to see what people want to hear about from me when I look at those metrics. When I write about flying airplanes the scores are dismal. When I write about building a business or real estate empire the graph shoots off the page. There is no question what people want me to write about.

If you are at a crossroads, or stuck on a plateu, keep visiting this blog, or check out our new jumpstart program opening in March.

Is Failure The Road To Success?

Several people throughout my life have said something like "Failure is the road to success".  I even noticed a little ad in the Wall Street Journal this week that used that quote.  So do we really need to lead a life of failure to succeed?  Does that make any sense to you?  How could you possibly want success if you knew that your life was going to be littered with failure.

Is this why so many people just accept where they are in life?  Doesn't everyone want to know how to be successful?  If not, why wouldn't they want to be successful?  Don't you want to be more successful than you are now?

Since a big part of my work now is helping other people become more successful, I started thinking about failure and its role in life after reading an article in the recent issue of INC magazine. A few of you will know my success principle of "Be careful who you listen too".  For those of you that don't know it, one of the principles I live by, one that I consider one of the keys to my success, is that I don't take advice from anyone who isn't doing better than I am at the thing they are advising me on.

Real Estate Agents are a great example.  A big chunk of them don't own a home, and a larger percentage don't own investment property.  So how can they give me advice on something I am pretty good at, and they aren't really doing?  My opinion is simply they can't.  I got my own license about two years ago to do better for myself and help anyone who is serious about buying or selling.  Don't call me if you are a "looky lou".

The recent INC magazine article was focused on Jim Collins of Good to Great fame and his work at The United States Military Academy.

Most of you know the United States Military Academy as "Westpoint".  Many who know about it consider Westpoint the college for the elite army officers.  The list of high achieving alumni supports this view.

According to INC magazine, Jim Collins learned a little about leadership while working with the cadets.  As the article points out, Jim Collins has spent his life researching organization success, not personal success.  Westpoint should have realized, that Mr. Collins isn't an expert at Military Leadership either, and as he learned these are very different things.

Another question I had to ask about the articles perspective; Is there a difference between organizational success and individual success?  Can you have highly effective organizations that we call successful without having highly effective or "successful" people running it?  I believe that one is required to have the other.  An organization can hold back great people, and a great organization can be destroyed by lesser people being at the top.  What I have read in Mr. Collins books lead me to believe that he agrees with my premise even though he doesn't directly say it.

My thoughts are that at the core of all great companies is great people.  Do you think you can build a great company with idiots?  This should be common sense right?

Some companies are better at collecting a higher percentage of successful people to create a more successful company.  Others do a great job creating successful people who in turn create successful businesses.  This was really the legacy of Jack Welch during his reign at GE isn't it?  He created a great management and leadership funnel, the people that made it through the funnel made great companies.

Tommy Caldwell, considered one of the worlds best rock climbers, is attempting to be the first person ever to climb the face of El Cap in Yosemite park un assisted.   This means he is going to do it with no ropes, no nails in the rocks, no hexectric nuts or link cams, just a man climbing a rock.  I am sure he gets to wear the shoes though.

So far he has "failed" four times, and according to INC, when Jim Collins asked him why he goes back after failing, Tommy Caldwell replied that he was getting better each time.  Tommy Caldwell didn't fail, he tried and improved. Just as the Japanese use Kaizen in business, Tommy Caldwell uses it in rock climbing.

Right there was the secret to crossing a long section of the road to success.  Failure is not the road to success.  Failure is failure.  Moving forward on the road is how you get you to success.  There is no other way.

Some of this may appear to be semantics, some of this is in "The Mind", and the reality is still that failure is failure and progress is progress no matter how you define it.  Success does not come from failure.  Success comes from moving forward no matter how difficult.

This point of view was a frustration I have had with many business improvement and self help books.  They would use the word failure when referencing attempts to move forward.  I really didn't address this issue correctly in the book So Now What?

As a competitive marksman, there were two competitions at every event, a team competition and an individual competition.  The best victories where when the team won, even though I wanted to win also.  In 1989, both happened, and it is the best victory in my career.  I won the overall event, and the team won the team event.  When that happened our margin was so big, I could have been third on my team and we would have still won.  Nobody carried the team and nobody held the team back, the entire team kept pushing that year.  There was never a failure, only opportunities to improve.

Thomas Edison had it correct when he was asked how it felt to fail at creating the electric light bulb 10,000 times.  He replied, "I didn't fail 10,000 times, the lightbulb was an invention with 10,000 steps."  It was an invention worth the journey.  The bigger the prize at the end, or the bigger the contribution, the more difficult the journey will be.  There are no short cuts.

Those who don't really want success will see the steps as too difficult and therefore a failure.  Failure becomes an excuse to quit rather than a step forward.  When you say to yourself that you have failed, you give yourself permission to quit and seek a new road.  You change your definition of success to fit your failures.  Failure is failure only if you don't learn from it and let it choose your direction.

This may seem like a very subtle difference in language and it really is.  How you view the steps will determine if you make it to your destination or not.  When you look at high achievers, they are still real people just like you and me.  The difference starts with how they view failure, and how big their goals are.  When things don't work and people laugh and ridicule, high achievers keep moving.  They don't quit.

So why do people accept failure as failure?  Simply put it is comfortable.  Since none of their peers have done it, they don't feel the need to do it, and not doing it keep them at a level they are comfortable with.  This can happen to anyone at any level in life.

The times in my life I wanted to quit are few but they happened.  I have lived through and proven both sides of this process of the mind as it relates to failure and success.  The most memorable for me was in 1990.   I was ready to quit Air Force Pilot training because of a letter stating that I did "not have the attitude conducive to fly a fighter".  It didn't say I wasn't qualified or I had failed, but I read it that way and I accepted the letter as failure.

Ready to walk away and return to my "comfortable" life, a friend, classmate and Air Force Academy Graduate, Mike Leonas, convinced me it was simply an opportunity to improve.  Thanks to Mike I ended up having a great time flying in the military for the next 14 years.

If you really want to get where you are going, get better with each attempt.  Get stronger at the core skill so you can push a little harder each time until you get "there" and can come up with a new place to go.  More importantly, as Mike Leonas showed me, surround yourself with friends who don't understand failure, and truly understand opportunities to improve.

The journey really is the thing.  Why do you think Richard Branson keeps building companies?  When he gets to one destination, he keeps moving to another one.  When Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, he continued to move towards his destination.  When he came back, he brought Apple with him.  Life is about the opportunities to improve.

Think about Elon Musk starting a new technically advanced car company that only offers 100% electric cars.  He already had a successful business and was a billionaire, why risk it all to get into the car business and build a car that no one else builds?  Didn't anyone tell him about the Tucker Car Company? Clearly at that level, Constant Improvement works.

Failure is not the road to success, failure isn't even on the road to success.  The road to success is paved with little cobblestones of success and then taking one step to place the next stone.  Always pushing a little more each time than you did the time before and getting closer to the goal each time is the key.  Failure is when you quit, nothing more.  This is why a coach can be such a big help.

Making each step better than the last is the key to success.  Failure is how some people will define a step that doesn't end at success.  The problem, like Edison found, is that you don't know how many steps that will be.

As the proverb goes, You are closest to success, just before you quit.

Get better at what ever you do every day and you will be called a success before you know it.

Who Do You See In Your Mirror? Survivor, Dreamer or Visionary

What mode are you in, survivor, dreamer or visionary?  As children we see a world with no limits, and try anything.  We'll eat food off the floor, stick our hands on a hot pan, and jump into a pool having no idea how to swim.  Somewhere along the lines we learn fear.

Some kids learn fear early.  Their parents are quick to stop any action which has any risk.  Kids who are raised alone tend to have more protective parents.  younger kids of larger families tend to get more leeway as parents realize, the kids will eventually figure out the hot stove hurts and they'll quit touching it.

As we become adults the same things happen to us.  Our bosses tell us to toe the line.  Banks say they'll take our homes if we don't make the payments.  In extreme cases you might lose your job and not be able to eat.  This is how people end up in survival mode.

Sadly I meet more and more people in survival mode every day.  Some of it is likely my environment so my evidence is strictly anecdotal.  There are all kinds of studies to measure where people are mentally like the index of "consumer confidence".  I haven't seen a "visionary scale" where we measure how many people are in each of the three categories I mentioned.

A visionary is someone like Richard Branson,  Bill Gates or even actors like John Travolta, Henry Winkler or Tom Cruise.  No matter what happens they are always looking forward.  They see more possibilities and are rewarded for it.

At the other end of the spectrum are the people in survival mode.  Survivors are people who worry about getting work tomorrow, or feeding themselves or their family tonight.  They aren't looking at next month or vacation next year.  They are just struggling to survive.

For generations, prophets and success coaches alike have said that it all starts in your head.  If you are worried about putting food on the table tonight, the best you will be able to do is put food on the table.  If you are worried about changing the world, food will happen because it has to happen as you put your efforts into changing the world.

Once you hit survival mode, you enter a very difficult place that usually takes some major event to break you out of that mode of thinking.  Sometimes bankruptcy can shake you loose, yet some people have gone bankrupt multiple times.  As a business owner who has had successful businesses and not so successful businesses, I can tell you that explaining to your family that you are broke can be very motivating. 

I can also tell you it can be very depressing.  I have personally known people who took their own lives when they hit bottom.  When you hit the bottom you only have two places to go, up or out.  Out should never be an option, we should always have somewhere to turn.  Sadly not everyone does.

In the middle are dreamers.  They are doing ok, think big and maybe even talk big but never seem to move forward.  They are always looking at what other people are doing, and trying to emulate their success, all the while staying put.

If you think you are a visionary, ask yourself this, How much better off are you this year then you were last year?  True visionary are much better off.  If you are about the same or only a little better off, you are closer to being a dreamer.  If you answered that you are a little worse of, or definitely worse off, you have slipped into survival mode. 

If you are truly in a visionary position now, you have already done this and know where you are going.  If your are a dreamer, you might have done this but haven't really focused on it.  If you are in survival mode, you haven't even thought about it.

What is "IT"?

"IT" is your vision.  Your vision can't be complicated, and it must be clear.  Last year I had a dozen goals or "things" on my vision board.  One of my personal coaches said to reduce it to three because twelve things where simply too much to focus on every day.  He said my vision board was too cluttered and therefore my mind was getting cluttered.  He was right, I had stalled and fallen back to "dreamer" mode.  It was the same advice I had been giving clients.

I learned as an instructor pilot in the military, it is always easier to see what other people can do to move forward and make great leaps of progress than it is to see what you are doing wrong or what you can do to get ahead.  Using that philosophy, I hire coaches just like people hire me.  The key is to listen to them.

When I trimmed my list down to three major objectives, I hit the first one in just a couple of months and took it off the list.  Then I added another.  I will probably only get six or seven of my original twelve goals completed, but the reality is that a couple of the goals probably weren't that important anyway, and I'll forget what they were when it is time to add them back to the list.  More importantly, I probably wouldn't get more than two done had I not trimmed the list to focus on no more than three at a time.

Spend time asking yourself how you are doing right now compared to last week, last month and last year.  If you are worried about putting food on the table tomorrow, make that your goal, and as soon as you have it figured out, don't relax and don't let up.  Take time to create your three major goals for the year and spend 15 minutes each day thinking about them until you can say you are better off and have accomplished them.  Then do it again with three new goals or objectives.

Always move forward even if the steps are very small and slow.

Put your mind to work while you sleep and get out of survival mode.  It won't happen tonight, and it won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen.  If you are in dreamer mode, pick one big dream, and give it everything you have.  You'll get there.  It might take a year, or it might take ten.  In the words of Winston Churchill, "Never, never, never, never, never, never ever give up."

As I write this I am thirty pounds lighter than I was a year ago.  One goal done....Next.

Keep Your Eye On Your Targets for Your success

One of the smartest things I ever did was move into a neighborhood I couldn’t afford.  On the surface this sounds stupid, so please let me explain why it wasn't.  This wasn’t a neighborhood of new fancy tract homes that all of the other couples my age were moving into.  This was a neighborhood full of what my friends called “old people and junky homes”.  My wife and I both liked the neighborhood because you had to pass by a winery while cruising down a road lined with old walnut trees to get there.  The area just had a great romantic feel and was very close to both of our offices at the time.  There was also a private country club featuring a championship golf course.

Years earlier I had discovered this little area of about 100 homes while out on a Sunday drive.  My wife and I later set our sights on living in that area at any cost.  We would scrimp and save and just about when we thought we could afford a house out there, the prices would go up.  We drove the neighborhood at least twice a month.  We thought we knew every street and every house in the area cold.  We went to every open house, and knew all the real estate agents.

Eventually we were the last of our friends in our old neighborhood.  Everyone had moved away into some “cool” area.  Some new tract of houses with a neighborhood pool, or that was closer to shopping would attract our friend’s attention.  I knew it wasn’t right for me to move into one of those neighborhoods so I stood my ground and waited. 

Is A Business Strategy Important to Building a Business?

Recently I have been working with a couple of business owners who are stuck on the whole strategy thing. These owners want me and my company to take over their internet marketing, you know SEO, pay per click and all of that kind of stuff. The problems is they can't clarify their strategy for us. My rules are pretty simple, no strategy, no marketing. The simple reason is I want to keep clients for a long time.

What I have learned in 20 years of owning and building businesses is that anyone can grab an opportunity, throw money at it and fail. I don't want these clients because I am lazy. Not lazy because their business is too hard to market, but lazy because I don't like chasing down new clients if I lose one.

Before we had the strategy requirement in place, clients would last anywhere from six months to about a year and a half. The few that have been with us over five years all have two things in common. First they have a strategy. While the strategy has changed a little over time, we have been involved with the changes so we could change the marketing to meet the needs of the client and their market.

The clients that we took on who were opportunists and didn't have a strategy would not see the progress they expected and jump on the next opportunity. Every six months we had to completely revamp their marketing. In the world of the internet, consistency is a critical component of success. The first month of any campaign is the most expensive, and we usually lose money getting a client set up. In fact most of the time, you don't see real progress for two or three months.

When a client jumped from opportunity to opportunity it was like getting an entirely new client. None of them would pay the higher fees of the first month, so each time they "re-invented" their business we lost money. The clients with a strategy are all still in business, still clients and still profitable.

Recession Success Tips for Small Business

Recently I was eating at a sushi bar with one of my partners .  The Sushi chef noticed our Rustic Creek logo shirts and asked how business had been.  When I responded “great”, all conversations stopped and everyone stared at me.  I felt like I just rained on everyone’s parade.  It turned out we had joined a group of builders commiserating on the state of the economy and the housing market.

On the way back to the job site, my partner asked why I thought we were so busy and getting busier every day while everyone else seemed to be struggling or going out of business.  I didn’t have a simple answer for him.  What I had was a 30 minute version of a full semester course I took in college.  I didn’t realize how much I remembered and was able to use until that point.

Success Tip: Communicate, Communicate, Celebrate

When you walk into work in the morning, are you ready?  Do you have a plan?  If not get your goals for the day done right away.  With your goals in hand, does everybody above you and everybody below you know exactly what you plan to do? One of the truths in life is that we cannot do everything ourselves. We must depend on other people to do some of the work. In fact the bigger your life becomes the more you depend on other people to accomplish things for you.  You can teach anybody to do just about anything if you have enough time, patience and money. If you only have two of the three requirements for training someone your chances of success begin to approach zero rapidly.

If you are not a practiced teacher, time and patience may not be on your side. More often than not, it is a shortsighted view of money and the investment in training that prevents us from training other people to do their job to the best of their ability. So many times I hear people say things like "I just have to get them working". or "I have to get them producing, I have too much work to train them." Instead of taking the time to train them to be successful you throw them into the fire headfirst.