Leadership guru John Maxwell writes (in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership) that momentum is the leader’s best friend. That’s not just a law of leadership – it’s a law of life!
Life is good when you’re on a roll, and it is therefore very much in your interest to get on a roll and to keep rolling. Today I’ll share a baker’s dozen great strategies for building and maintaining your momentum at work and in the rest of your life.
A lot of jobs that once were, aren’t coming back. Ever. To look for what isn’t there is a waste of time and an insult to your dignity.
If you haven’t noticed, the world has changed — radically. The traditional yellow brick road to success and financial security has imploded. The path to a high-paying job used to involve getting the highest academic degree you could obtain, along with specific technical job skills, to start climbing the ladder. Today, most of the ladders are decimated. If those jobs still exist, the needed knowledge and skills of those jobs have changed… and change again every day.
Yep. I said it. I just told you to shut up and stop whining. Not many people would dare begin an article with a line like that. But then again, I’m not like most people. I am The Pitbull of Personal Development and the author of the Wall Street Journal #1 Bestseller, Shut Up, Stop Whining and Get A Life. I am not like most self-help authors and speakers.
It doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty. The only thing that matters is whether it quenches your thirst. In other words, does it work?
There are literally thousands of motivational speakers spouting ridiculous platitudes that do nothing more than make you feel good for the moment and have very little lasting effect. They sound good, but they don’t work. Let me prove it to you. I bet you’ve heard these lines:
When it comes to communication, whether you are speaking to a large audience, selling to an individual, teaching a class or having a conversation with your spouse, I believe that most of us aim at the wrong target.
When you read any book on communication, or if you ask anyone what their goal is for their presentation – they will talk about making it perfect.
They want you to have the right opening, structure the presentation correctly, back up every point, make it engaging, and close in a memorable way. I agree with all of those concepts (in fact I teach them) but I believe we miss the mark if we focus on perfection.
One of the greatest success secrets is something we often miss when studying the greatly successful: Whatever field they are in, whatever business empire they run, the chances are excellent they have done it at some point with their own hands, learning it nuts and bolts, from the ground up.
Abraham Lincoln knew law. He’d practiced it in freezing-cold, bare-floored small-town courtrooms. So did Gandhi. They both emancipated millions, but only because they knew the feel of the craft in their hands.
Variety is the spice of life. But if you — like me — view the world as an exciting buffet of opportunities to learn, try and create new things, you know that variety can be dangerous.
The problem is that it’s easy to get distracted from the goals and commitments you’ve already made. Rather than seeing things through to completion, you abandon the goals and projects you’ve already started to chase after whatever new thing has just caught your eye.
I call this “shiny object” syndrome, and it has derailed the success of many people who could be very successful — if they only could maintain their focus long enough to complete a goal.
Many times I use the phrase, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you handle what happens to you, that’s going to make the difference.”
Initially, the ball appeared not to have bounced Celeste Baker’s way, but that was just initially. She has a disease in her left leg called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy which causes her a considerable amount of pain.
The way Celeste handled her challenge was such an encouragement to her classmates at Baldwin Jr./Sr. High School in Baldwin, Florida, that she was given the “I CAN” Award one school year. The next example helps explain why.
Yesterday I was talking with one of my good friends about risk…
My dictionary tells me that to risk is “to expose oneself to the chance of loss.” I suppose that is true. Another piece of literature I was once given (author unknown) suggests that:
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
Chances are that you go to work, come home, eat a little unhealthy food, watch four or five hours of television, go to bed, don’t sleep well and then get up tomorrow to do it all over again. You spend more than you make, exercise less than you should and complain that there just isn’t enough time to get it all done. And you wonder why your life is the way it is.
Your life is the way it is because that’s exactly how you want it to be!
“How can you say that? I want to be happy, healthy and rich.”