Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
Opportunity, go, job, strife, success, thrash, goal, results, guarantee, safety, new, change, acceptance, stress, cheers, struggle, beautiful…
These are all words that have as much meaning as you’ve put into them. For some reading this, they are empty words. For others, they need more letters to hold all the meaning. Luck, experience, chance, love, work… they are all just words, that is, until you give them meaning.
Stay Positive & How Will People Feel Flipping Through Your Dictionary?
1. The secrets of successful website content (read)
2. The oracle of ice hockey (long read)
3. The future of journalism just got a little more robotic (read)
4. Do 11 percent of Americans really think HTML is an STD? (read)
5. New school lunch policy (read)
What can you make from this chart?
There are businesses, writers, artists that start when they still haven’t perfected their craft. They create crap art and develop sketchy business models. They write well but make countless grammatical and mechanical errors. But according to this chart, there’s no correlation of where you start in terms of a perfect craft to how successful you are down the line.
What about those who are perfect at their art when they start. What about those writers who practice in the shadows and refuse to come out until their novel is perfect? How about those businessmen and women who study model after model before they develop their “perfect” model. Is there any guarantee of success for them down the line? Nope.
Where you start doesn’t matter much down the line.* What matters is that you start.
Stay Positive & Go Start
*If you’re looking for a short-term investment or if you’re looking for a place to perfect your practice before you truly launch yourself, where you start matters very much.
Words made famous by almost everyone.
Consider this by Michael Ferber, there were about 350,000 new titles or new editions published in the U.S in 2012, of which perhaps 75,000 were in adult fiction. The number of self-published books and print-on-demand books form extensive backlists. Britain published more than 200,000 books. Add Canada, Australia, and so on, and we can safely assume that about 1,000,000 new titles in adult fiction appeared in 2012 in English alone.
What does this mean for reading and becoming successful? It means that if you spent all of your time reading, you wouldn’t have any time to act on what you learn to become successful.
I’ve met so many people who think they need to sit in a library every day and read up on all they can. Alert! Here’s a cool chart that reflects what happens to your likelihood of success the more you read.
Malcolm Gladwell covers the inverted-u concept. Zig Ziglar and Seth Godin tell their audience if they want to become successful, they should read a book a week. It might work perfect for them, might even work perfect for you. It doesn’t work perfect for me. I’m a two books in a day then no books for a week kind of guy. I don’t advise this for you. What I advise is you try to find how many books a week you can read to get you at the top of the inverted-u. Success.
Stay Positive & I Know You Can Do It
Someone who is always quiet will finally speak up.
Someone who never writes about anything will blog about it.
Someone who knows nothing about the design behind the new trend will then seek out to learn it.
Someone who never read a book cover to cover will now.
With every new trend.
Stay Positive & Someone Perhaps You
I’ve had to work with my fair share of bad leaders. Like most, I started out by complaining about it. I was too nervous to speak up. In fact, I had no clue who to speak up to. It’s sort of stupid to go up to a leader and say they’re doing a bad job. Ignorant, actually.
There is a way to work with bad leaders, though. (Because in this world, some bad leaders, stay leaders. It’s up to you to make the most of it.)
The best way I have found is to ask them if they’ve done the things you would do if you were in the their position.
These are positive examples. What you’re doing is making the task more salient to the bad leader. I’ll tell you why this is a good thing after I mention a few don’ts.
What not to do:
Most bad leaders don’t want help, most bad leaders hog their positions, most bad leaders just don’t care enough to take you up on your offer. They will, however, be happy to dish something out to you if you handle it right, say, maybe, by asking them if they’ve done something that you think they should have already.
When a bad leader faces more and more tasks they simply can’t put off, they’re more likely to either delegate those tasks (especially to the person who “reminded” them of the tasks in the first place) or they’ll be more prone to step off their throne and give up.
Poor leadership is something we all have to prepare for and know how to deal with it.
You may be an expert in leadership, but, trust me, a lot of people aren’t. And sadly, don’t care to be.
Stay Positive & It’s Not Your Job To Help Them
(It’s your job to help the company, the business’s clients, your team and your self)
I went to a poetry slam tonight. If I had to guess, I would guess few who attended the slam have actually written any poetry. They were all there “to check it out.”
So it goes with poetry slams, the audience judges the poetry using their own perceptions of what’s good and what isn’t. The diverse poetry and diverse audience (along with the fact that few were expert analysts of poetry) made the rating of each slam poem to be fairly objective.
The rating results for all the contestants? Exceptional.
The few low scores the audience gave to the slam poets got boo’d.
It just goes to show, there are more people out there that love your work more than you know.
Stay Positive & Sometimes The More Different You Are, The More People Will Come To Snap Their Fingers
