Next Foundation Blog

I don’t believe in luck.

What most people call luck is actually the success that visits people when opportunity meets preparedness.

If we define success as the passionate and active pursuit of a worthwhile goal, then as we prepare ourselves and make ourselves ready, somewhere along the track, we are presented with an opportunity. Luck, or the Roman goddess called Fortuna, has nothing to do with it.

Luck doesn’t get you out of bed at 6:00am to study.

Luck doesn’t take you out the door even when I wasn’t feeling quite right.

Luck doesn’t make you walk 45 minutes in the rain to meet a client when my car broke down.

Dedication does.

Preparation does.

Passion does.

I don’t believe in luck, but I do believe that preparation, passion, and dedication are essential components in the recipe for success.

In their book Extreme Toyota, Emi Osono, Norihiko Shimizu, Hirotaka Takeuchi, and John Kyle Dorton summarize the 5 values that have caused Toyota to become one of the greatest influences in the modern automotive industry.

• Value 1: Taking Decisive Action. The mind-set of experimentation requires a willingness to take decisive action to produce results. Toyota employees are constantly encouraged to get their hands dirty with the motto “If you’re 60 percent sure, take action.” Taking action and not succeeding is considered OK, because doing nothing is worse.
• Value 2: Tolerating Failure. Toyota has a high tolerance for failure. In fact, failure is viewed as an everyday event at the company, a sentiment originating with the founders about learning the hard way. Toyota does not just tolerate failure — it embraces failure as a mechanism for learning, recognizing that you have to fail to progress. When something goes wrong, it is viewed as an opportunity to take corrective action and learn from that experience.
• Value 3: Being Honest. Toyota relies on the results of experimentation to learn what works and what doesn’t, but this process cannot succeed if employees feel they have to hide bad news or fabricate positive results. A unique feature of Toyota’s work culture is the way it encourages all employees to admit that problems exist, to make them visible, to see them as opportunities for improvement, to identify their root causes and to take concrete countermeasures to prevent problems from recurring over the long term.
• Value 4: Doing Good. Trying new things and staying ahead of the times form the basic rationale for experimentation. At Toyota, these practices are not only a motivating force, but also the duty of employees, enabling the company to be of service to humankind.
• Value 5: Never Giving Up. Even though Toyota is highly tolerant of failure, it is still not easy for employees to initiate the experiment, and even more difficult to shut down an experiment that is ridden with setbacks. The key that determines whether worthwhile experiments will have a reasonable chance of any measure of success is the determination and commitment of project leaders, who never give up in the face of adversity.

Mistakes are the currency of progress.

Nothing is perfect in life….including you!

If you want to move forward, you’re going to make mistakes.

If you want to reach your potential as a leader, expect to fail.

Failure is the price of learning and education is something you pay for….learn quick, read often and dont repeat your mistake - that is how your education can bankrupt your progress.

Success is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

No matter at what stage you are in your career, be it an intern with a dream or ‘the man with the plan’ the more you work in your ‘zone’ the more successful you will be.

You don’t become a leader by default, you become a leader by design. No one is ever meant to nor are they called to do something that they have no talent for. The three measure of a successful life growing to your maximum potential, utilizing that potential to fulfill your purpose and living and giving of your life to benefit others.

You can not become all that you can be if you are continually working outside of your strength zone. Improvement is always related to ability, the greater your natural ability in a given area, the greater your potential for growth and fruitfullness.

Here are four things to ask yourself to help you asses whether or not you are in your ‘zone’.

1) Listen for what others praise.

If other people are talking about a particular strength or you are being complemented on something continually, then odds are, you are good at it, so start developing it.

2) Ask the right question.

Often people, out of fear, insecurity, desire for the approval of others, ask themselves the question….”What am I doing right?” The question needs to be….”What am I doing well?”

What am I doing right is an issue of morality, what am I doing well is an issue of talent. The adage that your talent can take you places that your character can not sustain you, is true, but not relevant for this discussion.

Work on your talent, prepare for your opportunity so when it comes you can seize it with both hands.

3) Get specific.

Make a list and check it twice!

The more specific you get about your strengths, the things that you are passionate and good at, the more you will find your zone and be able to stay in it.

4) Are you really that good?

This is the humbling question. Remember years ago when William Hung went on American Idol and become famous (def: briefly, widely, popularly known) for being the worst at something….you want to avoid that.

If you dont have the talent to do something better that the competition, place your efforts elsewhere, focus on becoming the best you, not the best echo.

Early on in my career I heard myself respond to my to a co-worker who had asked me to help them with something with the phrase: “I am working on it.”  Immediately I stopped and asked myself,  “What is the ‘it’ that I am working on?”

You see, I was always “working on ‘it’,” but it was always someone else’s ‘it.’

It was someone else’s agenda, or it was not important to my mission, my responsibilities, or my job profile.

A lot of leaders and organizations get overwhelmed by the urgency of the now and lose sight of the mission.

A simple way that I developed years ago to help me focus was to continually ask myself, “Am I working on it?”

What is the ‘it’ you are working on today that helps build your tomorrow?

You have to determine that the main thing is the main thing.

Here are five things I find useful in staying focused on the mission-five things many leaders have to learn:

1) Be in control of what takes up your time.

You can not fulfill your purpose if you are always trying to fulfill everyone else’s.  Don’t be afraid to put yourself in charge of your calendar, your daily appointments, and your time.

One of the hardest things for a leader who loves their job and loves their people is to not justify themselves in how they allocate their time.

2) Know the difference between the urgent and the important.

Anyone who is trying to achieve anything will always have to balance the pressure of dealing with the urgent, and it is always at the sake of the important.

The important things are those that take us toward the mission.

The urgent things are those that come up either becasue we didn’t focus on them when they were important, or things that we have taken on without thinking of the impact on our time and resources.

3) Build on your strengths, don’t work on your weaknesses.

If you take a great football player and ask him to work on his below-average basketball game, what do you get? An average footballer and an average basketball player.

Strive to stay in your strengths. Develop those gifts, talents, passions that will keep you moving forward.

4) Be comfortable not knowing everything.

As a leader, you don’t have to know everything, you just have to know people who do.

If you are a good leader and you don’t have a good assistant and a good team, then you are in trouble. If you take the time to get the right people in the right place with the right skills, then you can keep your mind in the game and on the ‘it.’

5) Be comfortable being the last to know.

This is a tough one for most passionate leaders.  In most cases, though, I actually like being the last to know when things go wrong.

If every problem has to come to me first to be discussed, analyzed and a course of action taken, then solutions would take forever.

You must build a team around you who are skilled enough and confident enough to come to you with the issue and the best three ideas that they have to address it.

This take the power of problem solving beyond one brain, and gives your team permission to own the problem.  It also gives them the reward of implementing their solutions.

It is perseverance that outlasts difficulty, not spasmodic performance.

I tell all my leaders when they’re faced with failure to do this: shut up, dig deep, and go again.

I tell them to die fighting; the view is much better than living on your knees.

I refuse to hear the excuses from people who tell me why they can’t.

I can’t do this.
I can’t come to that.
I can’t be there.

Inevitably, those same people call me and say, “I can’t go on any more.”

The problem is that they have wasted so many years practicing the “cant’s,” they have never trained themselves to “can.”