Play to Win

When faced with choices, there are the safe ones and there are the best ones and they are rarely the same thing. In sports we have a popular saying: “You play to win. You don’t play NOT to lose.”

When we play “not to lose” we are making timid choices. We coach scared, we play scared, we don’t take risks with our business, we simply protect what’s ours. This usually happens when a team is up and ‘defending’ a lead. In business this happens when we have developed a successful product or service and we shift our mindset in order to NOT lose customers. We get comfortable and we do what we have to (which is usually the bare minimum) to keep the lead or customers we have instead of going out on a limb for more.

We operate with the mindset that there is more apparent risk in ambition than there is in maintaining our current situation. The sad part is that when we start playing “not to lose” we change the mindset that got us that upper hand to begin with. Don’t play NOT to lose this week, play to win.

Influence, don’t manipulate

I have purposely avoided reading “How to win friends & influence people” even though it has been recommended to me for years by a number of different people. The book itself seems to be a good literary work and I will, at some point, read it and more than likely take a great deal of knowledge from it. However, I have never wanted to see myself as someone who seeks out to influence others. And in my time I have met more than a few “influencers” that have their own ideas, agendas, and purposes for the people around them. Coincidentally those ideas, agendas, and purposes all benefit the “influencer” and that is what I consider manipulation.
Influence is something that many people strive to achieve. We wish to be able to have followers, we wish that people would quote us, we wish that if we said a restaurant was great people would flock to it, and we wish most of all for others to come to us for advice. We have the opportunity to influence others when we are confident in who we are and that we can help steer friends and family when they need it. We can give helpful, positive advice and we know that what we have to say is not always something that needs to be broadcast for the masses to hear. Those who have influence, don’t always need a microphone and those with a microphone don’t always have influence.
On the flip side of the coin, when we seek people out to tell them what they should be doing different or how we would have done it, than we are attempting to manipulate others. Manipulation is an ugly thing and it’s not always recognized in the act. The biggest attributes that I’ve seen in manipulators are forcing their own agenda and that they hand out their “advice” even when it’s not asked for. If we find ourselves pushing our beliefs onto others that we seek out, we’re probably attempting to manipulate them. Manipulators have an ability to affect others, but more than likely it is for their own good and can be detrimental to those that they are manipulating.
We need to keep ourselves in check: Influence, don’t manipulate.

Exception Versus The Rule

All organizations make changes and at the time they are all changes for the good, or at least we think. Often times changes are spurred by activity such as customers’ reactions to a sales technique, an accident, or a new idea that someone read in a trade magazine. I am all for changes, especially for the betterment of an organization. However, when a change is made because of the exception versus the rule, the change is being made for the wrong reason.

For example, when a sales person (particularly a new one) goes on a sales call and fails, they typically come back with some sort of excuse as to why they didn’t make the sale. When that no-sale report comes back it is frequently accompanied by a suggestion as to how the process for making sales didn’t work and a way to make it ‘better.’ This can sound like a number of things:

  • “She didn’t like that I told her all the features of it first, maybe we should move that to the end of the pitch”
  • “He said he felt uncomfortable that I was in a suit, I think we should just wear polo shirts and khakis from now on”
  • “She told me I was unprofessional because I didn’t use her first and last name when I introduced myself, should I start calling people by their full names?”

Now these may all be legitimate concerns depending on the line of work, but they are all more than likely the exception versus the rule. If these people went on 100 sales calls and 99 of them liked all the features at the beginning of the pitch, felt professional when they were in suits, and preferred being called by their first names, than the entire sales process doesn’t need to be changed just for 1 person out of 100! This is applicable to so many other industries and situations that it’s sickening. We watch huge organizations make enormous changes to their products that work great in favor of something that is an overreaction to 1 whiny customer who will never be satisfied no matter how accommodating we are to their needs.

Instead of letting that 1 customer go and focusing on perfecting their product/process/service, many organizations will have a panic attack and change up what they’re doing. In turn, risking the 99 others that were already satisfied with what them. Make pivots is crucial for an organization that wants to grow, but changes for the wrong reasons can stifle growth and take organizations away from the things that made the successful in the first place.

As with anything, there are exceptions to this rule, but I’m not going to change this post for them because that would be silly, there will always be dissenters. Have a great weekend!

Key to Success

The only way to be successful is to help others reach their goals. The key to success isn’t necessarily having a master’s degree or networking with the right people, the secret is helping those around us accomplish what they have set out to do. If we’re selfish and it’s all about us, people can see right through that agenda and nobody wants to help a self-centered person… they have it all figured out anyway. And this is applicable to anyone whether we’re just starting as an intern, a middle manager, an entrepreneur, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 enterprise. Leadership in an organization should never just be from the top down, it needs to permeate throughout the company.

If every day and every move is about us, we cannot help those around us. When we cannot help those around us,we’re working for ourselves, and no single person has ever moved mountains on their own. Abraham Lincoln had a cabinet full of ambitious men, Rosa Parks & Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had entire communities behind them, and Jobs had Wozniak. None of them were alone.

In our professional careers there will be times when we have opportunities to go out of our way to help others. Pounce on them. Do not let them go by, those good deeds will come full circle and be repaid when we need them most. This can be helping to meet a deadline, it can be offering an outside opinion, it can be a listening ear when it’s needed, and so many other things. If we’re giving of our time and our energies, we will be repaid and we will build a reputation as someone that everyone wants to work with.

Everyone has their own personal goals and aspirations, I’m not saying to forgo them. But if those are always in the front seat and we determine that nobody is worth deviating, we will soon be standing by ourselves. And even is we do accomplish those life goals and we make it to the top, we’ll have nobody to share it with. The key to success is building others up, not building ourselves up.

Who can we help to accomplish their goals today?

Walk Away

Any artist will tell you that the hardest part of creating is knowing when to walk away from. Painters will add a touch of color here and smear a bit there and before they know it they have a completely new piece that they aren’t satisfied with. The same goes for musicians, sculptors, book writers, and all of us making a living in the business world as well.

I learned this from building a coffee table for myself with dear friend Ryan Besand and he guided me along the way engineering the woodworking and helping make my vision come alive. Once the project got to a certain point, he warned that I’d need to decide when to walk away and not keep fiddling with it or I’ll take away from the original idea. At the time I was wary about not finishing off every little perfection and blemish, forgoing to sand off a few corners and add another layer of stain. But now that it’s over a year old and it gets used almost daily without defect, I know that he was spot on. I can’t even notice the imperfections I was concerned about a year ago and I love showing it off… I even wrote an entire blog post about it.

Walk AwayLearning to live with imperfections is a contentment that is hard to practice, but is a must if we want to churn out good work. This does not mean put sloppy work out there, rather don’t fall into the trap of spending hours and days fiddling with something that only a single person is going to notice. Focus in the beginning of a project translates to an early ship date if imperfections are limited, some call this measuring twice and cutting once.

Seth Godin has said, “Good is good enough” and Eric Reis preaches a “Minimally viable product” and Tim Ferriss references Pareto’s Law to learn 90% of something quickly and not even bother with the last 10% because it will take too long to learn. Yet we never hear about perfectionists in the ever-evolving world of business… It’s because they could never get their literary works ‘perfected’ to their point of shipment. The thought leaders we hear about today do not have a platform of perfect it before you ship it, they are of the mindset to ship early and ship often!

The most successful artists and the most successful business people aren’t always the brightest or the most talented, but we finish. And when we finish, we can start another, and another, and continue to build our businesses, galleries, empires, or whatever it is we’re striving for. Learn from our mistakes and don’t make the same ones twice. Know when to walk away and continue building, the real successes will learn from our prior shipments and become better and better at shipping with less imperfections.

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Leave me a comment or chat with me on Twitter, I’d love to hear from you. Have a great weekend!

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First Things First

In the realm of personal productivity, there are a number of ways to get more done. We’re all allotted the same amount of time each day, so why not make the most out of it? There are entire books written on productivity, weekly podcasts about it, and even businesses that have emerged from individual’s relentless pursuit to be more productive. So what is the best way to increase productivity throughout the day?

“Eating the frog” as Brian Tracy coined it, is the most important way to start this journey to a more freed up life. This is the practice of crossing off the most important task off our to-do list first. Not checking email when you get in, no chatting with co-workers for twenty minutes, not updating your Facebook to say, “Ugh, 3 meetings today… Yay, for Tuesdays! – feeling sarcastic” but getting right into our work and accomplishing something before the days begins to wear on us. Tim Ferriss, the man who wrote the 4-Hour Work Week/Body/Chef, believes and practices this and he “work(s) harder and smarter than probably anyone you’ve ever met.” He doesn’t just work smarter to have more time on his hands, he frees up his time to get more done in that same 24 hours.

What is great about this practice is that it seems simple on the surface, yet if we practice it we find out there’s much more to it. Below are a few things that “eating the frog” forces us to do:

1.) List our work

  • If we aren’t organized, yet we want to be more productive, this is a great way to force ourselves to put our tasks on paper. If we can put our tasks on paper it will either give us a sense that we don’t have as much to do as we originally thought (OR we’ll have a panic attack after seeing how much it is – don’t worry Point 2 covers this). And when we don’t seem so overwhelmed we are more vigorous in our work.

2.) Prioritize our work

  • Once we have all of our work on paper, we now have to prioritize it and determine what is important vs what is not. For example, the final touches on a presentation due tomorrow is a much higher priority than re-arranging the filing cabinets. Once this is realized, even the largest to-do lists become easier to manage because once we see that everything is not the highest priority, we are able to focus on what’s really important.

3.) Commit to plans aka goals

  • We all know I love to have goals, and making plans for the following day is like making goals: We put something on paper, we commit to it, and we get it done the following day. This gives us a great sense of accomplishment when we cross off “Priority 1” from the to-do list and make it just a little bit shorter. This confidence sets the tone for our day and helps us elimiate distractions when we know we’ve got something those top priorities cross off the list. It becomes a routine to set a plan (aka goal) get to work as soon as we get it, and reward ourselves by crossing it off when we’re finished.

4.) Top priority is difficultincrease productivity

  • The most important task for the day is NEVER easy. And if it is easy, we need to be challenged more in our work or start taking on more challenging projects that push us. When we prioritize we are forced to attack challenges head on that are not fun. When we can put ourselves in those uncomfortable situations and stop procrastinating we then can begin to grow in our profession. None of us have ever become better at our jobs or our sports because we relaxed, we have improved in difficult situations.

Resolves to put ourselves in those difficult situations each morning and watch your to-do list shrink and your productivity soar!

Challenging Ourselves

As we manage teams we should always be looking for ways to push their limits. This is not a revolutionary idea, however we need to constantly practice the idea to constantly improve. Without calculated growth exercises or strategies, we run the risk of allowing ourselves and our teams to be mediocre. Constantly challenging ourselves and pushing the boundaries of what we’re capable of is the only way to get better. In sports this is when teams play someone at a higher level, for entrepreneurs this happens almost daily when faced with new challenges that we’ve never seen, in sales this happens when we stop choosing the low-hanging fruit and swing for the fences, and for me it happened when I was reading.

I was recently asked to perform a guest lecture at CSU and I am extremely excited to speak to a class of juniors and seniors about my experience thus far in the ‘real world.’ While I was putting together my notes for this class I came up with a particular piece that will be encouraging each of them to continue their education through constant self-improvement with books, articles, podcasts and more to help them grow. As soon as I transformed those thoughts into words I realized I was not practicing what I am about to preach.

A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions Fortunately, I had just finished the book I was reading and it was time to pick another.  Most of my book selections these days are non-fiction business books that tend to be 200-400 pages in length. I chose Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin which happens to be close to 1,000 pages. I came to the conclusion that I have not been challenging myself enough and that it was time to step my game up. 27 pages in I realize this will be a long journey, but I know that when this book is finished I will have pushed myself further than I have been.

This lesson is more than applicable to the ‘real world’ that I’ll be lecturing on in a few days. With the teams and the projects that we manage, are we pushing our team members? Are we giving the people we work with challenges that will enable them (not force) them to grow? Have we set BHAG’s for them? Have we taken on that project that nobody wants to touch because it’s “too much work” and everyone is scared of it? How can we push the limits of what we’re capable of today? This week? This month? This year? Without challenges, we do not have opportunities to grow and the worst thing that an organization can do is remain stagnant. No growth means we are standing still, and that means the competition is catching up or even worse, pulling away.

The Best

I used to call it creating a ‘wow’ experience for customers, Seth Godin refers to it as being remarkable and has dedicated an entire book to it, and my friend Jada Ross said it perfectly last night: “If you’re going to do something, dedicate yourself and be the best at it.”

Jada was inducted into the Charleston Southern University Hall of Fame for his football achievements. Jada didn’t just say those words with empty thought, he had power and conviction behind them. Jada amassed over 450 career tackles in his collegiate career (an amazing feat in itself if you don’t understand football) as well as setting numerous school and conference records for his individual play. He also helped lead our team to a conference championship (first in school history), a 14 game win-streak spread over 2 seasons, and was an integral part of turning a program with a losing history into one with a winning mindset. He was the ultimate combination of an outstanding individual talent that played well on a team and never put himself or his achievements over the team as a whole. He was the best at his position, and he more than deserved that induction into the Hall of Fame.

When Jada said, “dedicate yourself and be the best at it,” he was speaking directly to the current student-athletes in attendance at the induction celebration. But as he spoke there was the faintest mummer of agreeing that swept the room from coaches, faculty, has-been student-athletes, and more in the room that his words resonated with, especially me.

When was the last time we put our best effort forward? When was the last time we dedicated ourselves 110% to a task and did not let excuses get the best of us? As Jada also said, “The time will fly and it will be over before you know it,” and even though he was referring to the student-athletes remaining time to compete, it is applicable in our everyday lives. Nobody has ever been celebrated for giving a sub-par effort in sports, in business, or in life so why wait? If we’re going to do something, let’s dedicate ourselves and be the best at it.

Congratulations Jada, I’m proud to call you my teammate!

Jada Ross - Linebacker