There’s a Chinese proverb that is more relevant today than ever before: “If you haven’t seen a man or woman for three days, look them over very carefully when you next encounter them, for they will have changed dramatically during that three-day period.”
More changes are crammed into every day of our lives than our grandparents experienced in decades – and this process is just beginning. Every 15 seconds a new website is launched! Every 15 minutes a new technological breakthrough occurs! Every 15 days a new product or service is introduced, that didn’t exist before! Consider for a moment that the musical greeting card you ordered via the web has more computing power than existed on the planet when the first satellite went into orbit in outer space.
Consider the computer’s impact. Designed as a tool for managing complexity, it also adds complexity, just as freeways add more traffic. The computer enables us to sort, store, retrieve and transmit information with ever-increasing speed. But the faster data can be analyzed, the faster decisions are expected – and the greater the pressure to reach them. And the computer’s efficiency is hardly lost on our competitors. They utilize them to produce goods and services of comparable quality, for less money.
As this year comes to a close and a new year arrives, welcome change rather than try to resist it. Learn how to make change work for you rather than against you. Develop unique strategies and skills that enable you to create opportunities from challenges. In response to rapid change, introduce it in the form of new business systems, pricing, and marketing that increase effectiveness and efficiency; create new products and new services; lower costs and encourage ideas to enhance productivity.
In everything we do, there are more choices available today than at any other time in history. To become the “brand” or “person” of choice, give others what they want in a time-starved world. Save others time and money, and you will gain more time freedom and wealth.
This week embrace change and make it work to your advantage!
Problems are a Normal Part of Change
When asked, “How do you develop mental toughness in life?” my response might sound negative at first. I answer, “Always be prepared for a surprise. The surprise might be a negative surprise. Something is going to happen in your day, whether you are late because you got stuck behind a train or your car had a flat tire — something is going to happen. And the key is your ability not to take mole hills and look at them as mountains.”
Problems are a normal part of change. Things are changing so rapidly that there are going to be problems you face. So you must look at failure as an event, not as a person. I’m not a failure. Maybe I’ve had a failure or a temporary inconvenience. I’ve had a stumbling block, and the idea is to turn the stumbling block into a stepping stone, and step on it instead of stumble over it. So look at failure as the fertilizer of success.
Fertilizer stinks, it smells. You see that guy putting it on his lawn and you say, “Wow, that guy fertilized his lawn.” You fertilize your mistakes. You don’t wallow in them, lay in them, roll in them; you pick yourself up off your mistakes and learn from them. You try not to repeat that same thing again. But you look at it as a temporary inconvenience, as a detour — a detour in life — not as a failure.
Attitude is the Edge
At the world-class level, talent is nearly equal. On the PGA tour only a few strokes for the year separate the top money winners in golf from the rest of the players. In baseball, the American and National League batting champions hit safely about 20 or 30 more times in an entire season than those below the top ten. In the Olympic Games, the difference between the gold-medal winner in the one hundred meter dash and the fourth place, non-medal winner is less than two-tenths of a second.
What´s true in sports is also true in our business and personal lives. There is only a fractional difference between winners in life and those who merely exist. The difference is attitude under pressure. It’s the winner’s edge.
The Edge is not a gifted birth. The world is full of wasted talent.
The Edge is not academic degrees. Education is important, but the world is full of educated misfits.
The Edge is not luck. If it were, Las Vegas would be a ghost town.
The Edge is not capital. Many of today’s self-made, multi-millionaires started building their fortunes with under $5,000.
The Edge is all attitude. Attitude, not aptitude, is the criterion for success.
