One thing a day

Rather than dividing up your day into tiny time slots so small than nothing useful and enduring can be accomplished, why not get at least one big thing done each day?

What will it be today?

Forced personal evolution

Expressed, stretched, challenged, purpose.  Being an entrepreneur is one great way to use our talents, discover and fill in for their gaps, and grow as a human being.

As difficult as it can be, we need the chase.

Ambition

There is nothing wrong with ambition of course.  Without it, your life is nothing. But chasing external achievements exclusively will not turn out well over the long term.  Ambition to become a bigger, better, more productive, able, dynamic, happy, healthy, valuable person who means more to others is a higher path.  

External achievements and material possessions come with it, but they are the side effects, not the target.

Personality Soup

A team is a collection of personalities.  You can tease the best flavors out of the ingredients with leadership, but there is only so much you can do with strong, bitter ingredients.

Replacing garlic with sugar can change the soup in a substantial way.  One position, two changes – remove X, add Y.

The leader is the chef. 

Goals – Who knows them today?

Leaders and Managers – When is the last time you talked about your goals to your people?

How about today?

How to impress a customer

You can’t impress a customer with technical competence, because they expect technical competence.

You are far more likely to impress a customer with people skills – courtesy, rapport, follow-up, personal attention, and special consideration.

How much do you train your people on that?

Controlling your time

A random or unproductive email sent to you, someone poking their head in your door to say “How ya’ doing?”, and junk mail and jokes – it could go on all day long.  They are taking bits of our time and stealing our focus, and we are letting them. Perhaps we like it and perhaps we like that it allows us to procrastinate more difficult mental work. 

People are social, and need to be. Some jobs are all about interacting with others. But high performing achievers put themselves in positions to focus, and spend a much higher percentage of their time applying themselves to high value work uninterrupted. They make this time, and make other time for interaction with others.  They have control of their time, not others.

Are you in control of your time?  

Relationship before opportunity

People offer opportunities to others they already know (character) and like (agreement).  Therefore, the more people you have good relationships with, that know your good character and abilities, and that you have made friends of, the more opprtunities that will come your way.

How many people, and what kinds of people, know you like that?

Borrowing Experience

Experience is one way to learn.  You never forget hard and painful lessons.  But what if you could get the benefit without the pain – and in a fraction of the time?  

If you are in business, study business.  Read trade journals, business magazines, online research and talk to others who are doing what you are trying to do.  Learn from others, you’ll never live long enough to learn it all yourself.

Breaking up is easy to do

Firing someone is easy.  It takes seconds.  The problem is you no longer have an employee – and you need people on your team. The next employee will be imperfect too – in a different way.

Far better to lead them in a way that brings out the best in them.

It’s no as much the follower – it the leader that makes the employee.