Life Lesson

Having foresight around tomorrow is as important as having foresight around fifty years from now.

What happens if what you’re working on is a success and continues to be? Where do you plan to take it?

There’s a mixed use facility that’s wanting to make a massive addition to it’s grounds in the neighborhood. The largest block that’s in their way? Their original master plan didn’t nod to eventually having such an addition–it was never part of the plan, and now that’s being held against them.

Yes, it’s far more important to ensure your idea will succeed tomorrow than fifty years from now, but that’s no excuse not to imagine it up, get it in writing and help future you out.

Stay Positive & Plan For The Worst (And The Best)

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Being prepared isn’t an internal state.

We can’t will ourselves prepared or think it.

We can only act ourselves into a state of prepared.

We can be prepared for a speech by giving it, prepared for the work by doing it, and prepared to face the next adversity by having faced one yesterday.

Preparation is an actionable state.

It requires forward movement, leaps and, yeah, the feeling of risk.

Stay Positive & Prepared

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If we could measure consistency, we’d find it helping in the long run.

Consistency in some scenarios seems like a given: You want your food experience to be consistent and you want to wake up to someone who loves you the same as they did yesterday.

Consistency in other scenarios gets thrown out the window pretty quickly: You want your logo to be different after eight months and you begin only working out in the mornings that you happen to wake up early on.

Those sporadic workouts and logo changes might feel like they’re powerful, but they’re not. They’re shiny, but not moving.

What matters is that we treat areas outside of where we dine and who we date with the same care and intention around consistency.

Stay Positive & If Anything, How Can We Add More Consistency?

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Your way might not be right, but at least it’s yours.

Whether it succeeds or fails, it’s on you and you can grow from it.

You boldly chose yourself when you did it your way instead of waiting to be picked.

There are a thousand others ways than the high way that are not your way, but your way is the only way it can be yours.

If you think about it, all the others ways are taken by someone else. That’s their way. What makes this way special is that it’s yours.

Stay Positive & Here’s To Your Way

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Being smart or having money certainly helps you on the path of getting what you want.

Practice and care and intention do, too.

But nothing helps get you there more quickly and more meaningfully than people.

Connection is your most valuable resource. To make the change in the world you seek to make, you will have to engage with hundreds (maybe thousands) of people.

People who help with your idea and people who will criticize it. People who will be changed by it and people who will change it.

It’s a lie to tell ourselves we can get along just fine without vulnerably getting in front of people. Sure, there’s a minimum viable audience, but there’s still an audience.

If there’s a meaningful event that takes place and no one’s there to experience it, did it even happen?

Stay Positive & It’s The Connection Economy, Baby

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If you wait long enough, a better opportunity might present itself. There’s no arguing that.

There is, however, pointing out that waiting comes at a cost.

The best a leader can do is to act on the opportunities that are present and invest the time in making the most of them rather than waiting for “better” ones to arrive.

You could hire someone who qualifies for the position and train them to be the most remarkable hire you’ve had in the same time (probably less) than what it takes to wait for a better application to come in (all the while the team is being dragged down trying to handle the work load of being one person down while you wait).

There’s opportunity in action and cost with inaction.

Stay Positive & More Opportunity And Investment, Please

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If your goal is to offer someone a remarkable experience with your product or service, there’s only so much that can be done to continue meeting those expectations.

At some point, the rising expectations of those you seek to change will lead them to disappointment. Linearly, better is not infinite.

Different can be, though.

So, go ahead and deliver beyond expectations, but notice when you’re at the point of nearly over-extending yourself, when the expectations have risen too high and then rather than trying to zig harder than ever, zag.

Stay Positive & Better Then Different, Repeat

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