Contentment is dangerous.

/in /by

Pursuit, Not Acquisition

We work so hard to achieve contentment. Be careful, it could be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Since the early 1900s we have been taught to pursue the three S’s of the Industrial Age; Safety, Security, and Stability. The three of them together can lead us to contentment, which at first blush seems pretty cool.

The Contentment Fence
But contentment is a kissing cousin of balance, and both of them are like sitting on a fence; you can’t stay there very long. Pretty soon you’ll either fall off or jump off, and the question is, on which side of the fence? Falling off one side begins a downward spiral to victimology. Making the decision to intentionally jump off the other side leads upward to better things, and the fourth S of the Participation Age, Significance.

How can contentment drag us down? Living in contentment (and balance) could very quickly lead to boredom, because you have no vision for how to challenge yourself to take your life to the next level. Boredom is the first step down and it breeds pessimism, doubt, worry, blame, anger, insecurity, and eventually powerlessness – I’m a victim.

If you find yourself content, the best thing to do is proactively get the heck out of there by figuring out the next challenge and chasing it with everything you’ve got. Contentment can be a great springboard to the next challenge. If you get a solid picture of the future and what you want next, then contentment will lead right into optimism, hope, powerful expectation, enthusiasm, and passion for something new.

Jump Or Fall Off
Contentment is fleeting. You are either going to fall off or have to jump off. You can fall off on the side of victimology, or you can take control of your life, and intentionally jump off on the side of chasing something worth catching.

Have you “arrived”? Are you on cruise control with your business or your life? Be careful. It won’t last, it never does. So take charge, jump off the fence, and intentionally run toward something. You won’t be content while you’re chasing it (or balanced), but that’s ok, because the joy is never in the acquisition, but in the pursuit.

A goal realized is no longer motivating.

What’s the next thing you want to pursue? Jump off the fence and go catch it.

Sorry – College Won’t Make You That Extra Million Dollars

/in /by

Then what does?

Which one is true? A) Going to bed with your shoes on gives you a headache. B) Ice cream increases your chance of drowning. C) College will make you a million extra dollars over your lifetime.

The answer – none of them.

False Correlation – People who go to bed with their shoes on, have the greatest risk of waking up with a headache. However, most people who go to bed with their shoes on are drunk. Drinking gives you a headache, not shoes.

False Correlation – Every year, drowning deaths and ice cream consumption both dramatically increase and dramatically decrease together in a very tight pattern. The real correlation? Ice cream sales go up in hot weather, and so does swimming. Swimming increases drowning, not ice cream.

False Correlation – Kids who graduate from college make a million dollars more on average than those who don’t’s missing from the correlation? Kids who go to college are motivated to succeed. Personal motivation causes success, not college.

All three of these false correlations can be disproven because lots of other things could lead to the cause. Headaches are caused by all kinds of things. People regularly drown who had no ice cream. And people are happy and succeed in life all the time without going to college. A true correlation to make would be, “Motivated kids are more successful than unmotivated kids.” That one would stand up universally.

Correlation Is Not Causation
To correlate success of any kind, monetary or personal, with college, we have to identify a cause that can be attributed to college. Colleges are very careful about how they word the million-dollar thing. They NEVER say, “Graduating from college will CAUSE you to make a million dollars more than if you just got a high school degree.” Why? Because the correlation doesn’t exist, and they know it. They’re just hoping you will draw a false correlation because they put the words “college” and “million” in the same sentence, like headache with shoes, and drowning with ice cream.

In my new book, Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea (out in 6-8 weeks), I debunk the million dollar myth. At the VERY best it’s a couple hundred thousand, but it’s more likely a minus hundreds of thousands. But if that distracts you, then for now, go ahead and assume college kids make TWO million more, because the correlation between the money and college just isn’t there.

If there is any advantage a college kid has over a high school graduate, it wasn’t because of college, but because of the kid. They were more motivated and that is what made them more money. College had nothing to do with it. The kid would have been successful no matter what path they took.

What Causes Success?
One out of five millionaires never finished school. More Fortune 500 CEOs never got a degree than from any one university. The richest cohort in America (one out of seven billionaires) are non-college grads. 23 to 25 year olds who did vocational training are happier than 23 to 25 year old college grads (recent study).

If the correlation was between college and success, then we wouldn’t see such ongoing, regular success with no college degree. These people aren’t statistical anomalies, freaks or exceptions. Nobody can explain away one out of five millionaires, one out of seven billionaires (and the richest of them), or the biggest group of S&P 500 CEOs, as anomalies.

Want to be successful?
Then be motivated. You can go to college, too, if you want. Or not.

The 2nd Most Important Business Word You’ve Never Heard

/in /by

Wouldn’t it be great if…?

All too often I hear people say, “I got it”, when everything about their actions says differently. The process of truly getting it is much deeper.

Today, education means getting something into your head. Learning, in it’s traditional form, means doing and being. Education is what a PHD gets. Learning is what an apprentice does.

Notice the difference – you “get” or obtain the first one, you “do” or become the other one. One fills your head, the other one fills your heart, your hands, your life and your wallet. Learning takes four steps, but education is set up to take us through only two of them.

Step One – Hear
William Glasser says 10-20% of what hits our hearing actually gets to our head, and almost none of that gets any farther to actually change something. Hearing is the worst way to learn anything, but is the most common form of education. For college students, itting through canned lectures is what makes Thursday night drinking attractive.

Step Two -Head
Cognition rarely becomes conviction. A very small percentage of what gets into our head actually makes it to our heart as information that we believe can actually make a difference. Most of college is set up to get things stuffed into our heads, and almost never are we challenged by the orators/professors to build a conviction around the information and go do something with it.

Step Three – Heart
A small percentage of information that goes into our head actually stirs our emotion and creates the desire or conviction that we should do something about it. Who challenges us to take the information and use it to be transformed? This is the kind of thing that happens in life, but almost never in education.

Step Four – Hands
While information is rummaging around in our heart, we’re all excited about applying it to our business or our life. But then we get back to email, the phone and the ongoing Tyranny of the Urgent, and the “feeling” goes away. Nothing has changed. Only when we hear something and the information goes from our head, through hearts and out our hands, will it ever make a difference in our lives. Which bring me to velleity.

The Second Most Important Business Word You’ve Never Heard
Velleity is the 2nd Most Important Business Word You’ve Never Heard. (See the first here – http://chuckb.me/x2) Velleity means, “The desire, with no intention whatsoever of doing anything.” Velleity is at the root of the common wishing and hoping phrase, “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” Velleity is something getting all the way from our ears through our head into our heart, but never coming out our hands. We get excited, but never doing anything about it except wish…”Wouldn’t it be great…?”

Doing vs. Knowing
The Greeks (and our education system) were both wrong. We do not think our way to a new way of acting. We ACT our way to a new way of thinking. Want to change something in your life? DO something different. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of velleity.

From our ears, to our head, through our heart and out our hands. Step Four is what creates success. Before that it’s just wishful thinking.

If You Can Plan a Vacation, You Can Plan a Business

/in /by

The Random Hope Strategy Doesn’t Work

What are the first three things you have to decide to plan vacation? They are the same three questions you should have asked when you started your business. You’re where you are because you didn’t.

  1. – “Where are we?” If you don’t know that, you can’t begin to plan your vacation. Where you are right now determines everything about how you get where you want to go. Almost no business owner has a “sane assessment” of where they truly are – their leadership abilities, their staff’s capabilities, their finances, their true target market, why their product or service is actually selling. We’re too busy surviving to ask those hard questions. Yet without knowing where you are, you’ll never get where you want to end up.
  1. – “Where do we want to end up?” If you know you’re in Cleveland, then you can ask where you want to go. If you say, “We will vacation at the beach in Florida”, you can begin to picture what it will take to get there and what you need to take with you.
  1. – “When do we want to be there?” Only after you answer this question can you know whether you have time to drive, or are taking a plane.

Once all three questions are answered, you can finally know how to pack.

What if you didn’t answer any of the three? What would you pack? When would you leave? And where would you go? Nobody would plan a vacation without answering these three questions first. Yet just about every business owner goes into business without answer any of them. They just starting “packing” their business with “stuff”, pull out of the driveway without even knowing where they are, and then drive their business around aimlessly because they’ve got no clue where it is supposed to lead them, or when it should arrive there.

The Random Hope Strategy
This is the Random Hope Strategy of business, and is the most common strategy business owners follow. But there is hope. You can ask these three questions any time, and in fact, you should re-ask them all the time.

Get a sane assessment of where you are, figure out where you want your business to take you (how much time and money should my business provide for me?), and by when. If you take the time to answer these three questions, and re-ask them regularly, you’ve got a great shot at success. If you don’t, expect the same result you would get by not asking them to plan a vacation.

Clarity. Hope. And Risk.
Stop everything you are doing, and get Clarity on these three questions now. Clarity brings Hope, and Hope allows us to take the right Risks.

Clarity. Hope. Risk. The answers are worth the questions.