Life Lesson

When you’re concerned about getting credit for a project, you’re bound to deliver sub-par work. There’s not much arguing it, unless you’re totally fearless.

When you want your name on work, there’s the initial thought of all the possibilities, of the spotlight, of the recognition.

Then the fear sets in. What if it’s not good enough? What if you don’t know how to complete part of the project? What if you can’t over-deliver like you dreamed of doing?

Better to focus on the big picture, the why of the project and care less about the names on it.

 

Stay Positive & It Helps To Have A Team Too

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Trial and error is a mentality as much as it is a strategy.

When you take a stab at a project for the first time, you expect to hit road bumps, you expect you’ll run into the unexpected, you expect you’ll learn things you didn’t know before.

Moreover, fear is absent, so is worry, and concern and guilt.

With trial and error, you’re too focused on failing fast and getting better than before.

What if we viewed all our efforts as trial and error? Aren’t they?

 

Stay Positive & What A Powerful Mentality

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There are a lot of tough questions that we ask ourselves.

Often times, we do something else so we don’t have to answer them. We blast music. We go running. We drink. We back down. We change direction.

Great leaders, I think, become so when they get tripped up by a question, but still answer it.

The experience they gain from doing so is what puts them ahead, makes them smart, and motivates them to seek more questions that trip them up. And that’s just it. There will never be a day they stop asking the tough questions because they know it’ll never get easier, but it will always be more and more worth it.

What do you do about people who get mad and disagree with you?

If someone can do it better than you, will you let them?

Are you willing to let someone else get hurt? How about get the credit?

 

Stay Positive & If There’s A Text Book Answer, Then It’s The Wrong Question

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Every action you take is a drip.

A drip to mediocrity or a drip toward excellence.

A drip to above average or below.

A drip to overcoming fear or surrendering to it.

 

Stay Positive & Careful Which Pale You’re Filling

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The point of growing in the workplace isn’t to get to the point where you can have your cake and eat it too.

The point is to get to the balance of the one making the cake and the one eating the cake. Not at the same time, but a back and forth.

After all, if you eat all the cake all the time, you’re not much of a team are you?

This goes for grunt work too. Sometimes you’re the one setting up the fireworks for others to watch and sometimes you’re the one watching.

Not sure about you, but I like the back-and-forth of it all. It keeps one humble.

 

Stay Positive & And More Grateful For The Times You Get To Eat The Cake

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Whether you’re looking to build a successful partnership or a profitable business, you won’t get there unless you understand your target.

It’s a balance of giving and receiving, of asking and answering, of caring and giving a reason for them to care about you. Sometimes you’ve got to be selfless, and sometimes you’ve got to seek what’s in it for you (especially when it comes to asking for feedback).

There are many ways to understand your target. You can guess what they want. You can read their purchase history. You can scan their “liked” pages on Facebook.

Or…or…

You can ask them what they want to be.

Once you know what a person wants to be, you can ruminate what will get them there, then sell (or give?) them that. Nothing strengthens a relationship B2C or B2B more than providing what is already desired rather than attempting to convince people they want something you made.

The other benefit of asking someone face-to-face is you skip all the research that gets you to the same conclusion. I suppose you could do the research of a large group of people, but is the masses what you’re really after?

Just as success happens moment by moment, so does business, only person to person to person.

 

Stay Positive & Treat Different People Differently (And Everyone Is Different)

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