The "Greats" are not great at everything

Great people have focused their time and energies at being great at one thing.  

They don’t try to be great at everything.

What one thing are you trying to be great at?

Good to Great

Good to Great is a business book I read many years ago.  In it, the idea that “good is the enemy of great” is presented.

The idea is that if something is bad in your life, it’s easy to get rid of it, replace it, redo it, etc.

The problem comes when something is “ok”, or “good”.  We live with it because it’s not bad – but it’s not really great either. 

How can you have an excellent life when you put up with “good”.

What are you after – good, or great?

So are you willing to throw out, destroy, reinvent, and/or fix things in your life that are “good”?

You need this to succeed

Recently I messed up.  I had a week where I overdid it.  Working, speaking/training events (I call them “uptime”), workouts.  Not enough sleep or rest and catch-up time.  One big day after another.

After a week I felt sick.  I knew this feeling.  I wasn’t sick, but my body was saying “Ok buster, if you aren’t going to listen, then you’re going down.”  Flu-like symptoms.  I had no energy for four days. 

One night’s rest wasn’t enough to catch up.  I struggled through what should have been a great weekend. I lost productive time.  

To succeed we need our health and energy.  Energy to get through a high-performance day.  

We can mess up by not getting enough exercise, not taking care of problems in our life that bother us, not eating right, or by going hard too long and not getting enough rest.

I’ve learned this lesson before.  I need to remember longer this time!

Only the virtuous can be free.

“No people who have lost their character have kept their liberties.”

If people do not obey laws, or if the require laws ……

Success builds on success

Learning one thing makes learning the next more meaningful.  The more things you know, the easier it is to learn and to fill in some blanks on your own.

Developing a good relationship with one person makes doing it again with the next easier.  Eventually, you have so many good relationships that people you don’t know want to know and work with you.

Completing one project prepares you for the next, larger more difficult one.  You will use your accumulated skills for the rest of your life.

Success builds on itself.

When you win this day, it’s easier to win tomorrow.

The stock market doesn't always go up.

One of these days I’m going to have an “economics week” at Think Daily. But today I wanted to reprint something I read from my friend Evan McGoff who works at a small investment firm called Dock Street Asset Management. They do a great job helping people who have money, grow it.

“Nobody is born knowing anything. As a consequence, each generation tends to learn the same lessons as the prior ones, but under some different circumstances. 

Millennials just learned that the stock market doesn’t always go up. It mostly goes up, but that “mostly” smooths over some rather rough stretches. 

As the most recent generation to reach adulthood, millennials have been characterized mostly by how they’re different from prior generations. In debt earlier. Marrying later. Allergic to suburbs and in love with city life. 

But the pandemic changed a lot of that, and millennials finally started acting the way prior generations did. There’s probably no better example than the rush to buy houses. With crowded cities looking less appealing and mortgage rates at all time lows, millennials bought houses in suburbs in droves. Years worth of demand played out in a few months. 

And just as prior generations fell into investment manias, millennials are no longer an exception here either. For several years millennials bought cryptocurrencies, NFTs, meme stocks, speculative tech stocks and call options. 2022 has been a rude awakening for this cohort. “

Those were some of Evans comments. When you look at a chart, a chart of the stock market over twenty years for example, you get a big picture. But when you take any slice of said chart, you can get a whole different one.

The stock market does go up – on average over long periods. Some years are bad and some are amazing. The idea is to buy low and sell high. The most reliable way to do that is to invest in quality companies and don’t look at it for 20 years. Have someone like who is not emotionally attached to your money like you are and who won’t panic and sell low when things go down.

I’ll stop here for now.

This is not investment advice or a solicitation at all. Just context.

Explore. Dream. Discover.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn;t do than by the ones you did do.  So throw off the bowlines.  Sail away from the safe harbor.  Catch the tradewinds in your sails.  Explore.  Dream.  Discover.” – Mark Twain

Being clear minded

“It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.” – Simone Weil

How can you expect anyone to understand you when you are confused yourself?

If not, you have some learning and thinking to do and decisions to make.

Are you clear to yourself?

People who are given things are weaker

Argue and whine at this one all you want.

If you were shipwrecked on a deserted island with one other person and had to fight to stay alive, would you want it to be – 

A person who had an easy life, had things set up for them, and everything went pretty smooth, OR

A person who had a tough early life, struggled, had seen problems and disaster, and made it through – ?

Use your head, get tough (with yourself), be resourceful, and overcome your problems.

Things are seldom valued when they aren't earned

Imagine being surrounded by things you didn’t earn? What an empty feeling – that will not satisfy.

You could go to your friend’s house or a public place and be amongst things YOU did not earn.

But that’s not what we are after.

The struggle is part of earning it. 

The work, the time, the problems solved and obstacles overcome…the fact that it wasn’t easy – that’s what creates value in our minds.

Keep going – and earn it.