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

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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.

The Short Straw of Failure

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One Simple Thing

For years I’ve been hunting down reasons why people are successful, or why they aren’t. In the last few weeks an over-arching single reason seems to be forming for me.

The Long List of Success Attributes
If you break it down to the smaller reasons, there are so many why people succeed – clarity of vision, solid values/beliefs/principles, speed of execution, commitment (never giving up), discipline, getting back up/bouncing back, taking good risks vs bad risks (& knowing the difference), being organized, optimistic, being flexible, embracing challenge, seeing the big picture, rising above offense, seeing yourself as successful, being willing to be wrong often…

…and so many more.

The One Big Success Attribute
But as I look at the long list of things that make people successful or keep them stuck, they almost all seem to roll up under one simple, over-arching reason. I’ve been testing it against all the other reasons for weeks, and can’t find one that doesn’t fit under the one big one.

The reason we get where we want to go or don’t is simply this:

Short-term vs. long-term decision-making.

Not very glamorous, but absolutely transformative if you embrace it.

People who make their decisions based on what will help in the short-term are almost never successful. People who make decisions based on what will be best in the long run are almost always successful. Is it that simple? Let’s test it and see.

Testing It Out
Take a look at the list of success attributes above (or any of the dozens I haven’t mentioned) and ask yourself which ones are based on short-term gain and which ones are based on the long-term gain. Success attributes are all about the long-term.

In stark contrast, the following reasons for failure all help us address short-term symptoms, but keep us right where we are:
– survival: I have payroll to make
– feelings: I don’t feel like doing that right now
– fear: I’m afraid they won’t like me, or I might fail
– lack of discipline: shiny object syndrome – oooh! – let’s do that, TOO!
– being tired: the #1 reason businesses fail
– lack of learning: we’re too busy DOING to be learning
– inflexibility: change is messy, we’ll just row over the falls
– lack of vision: I’m too busy making chairs for that woo-woo crap

…and on and on. We do them all for one very simple reason. We are short-sighted and not thinking about how we will ever get to where we want to be.

Ask yourself two long-term questions:

1) What would I be doing right now if I weren’t (in survival, afraid, undisciplined, tired, etc – put your own short-term problem here)?
2) Am I making decisions based on where I am, or where I want to be?

Decisions based on what helps me now, create long-term failure. Long-term success is based on a life pattern of making many small, daily decisions, one after another, that stack up to success down the road.

Our VALUES determine our thoughts
Our thoughts determine our actions
Our actions determine our habits
Our habits determine our character
Our character determines our DESTINY.

Do you value being on the treadmill the rest of your life, making decisions that address short-term symptoms but never solve the long-term problems? Or do you value getting off the treadmill and living a life of success and significance?

You Are Not a Victim of the Short Straw
In business and in life, the short straw is not a guessing game. Nobody’s fist is hiding it. The long straw and the short straw are both laying on the table right in front of us. If we want to be successful we will see clearly that short-term decision-making is just willingly picking the short straw instead of the long one.

Make one decision today that will make you more successful later. It likely won’t make you any money or save you any time TODAY (short-term). But it just might change your life down the road.

Choose the long straw.

Sorry, but failure is NOT the road to success.

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Practice instead.

The books are all wrong. The standard claptrap in the shelf-help books is that we fail our way to success. Nobody fails their way to success and you need to stop listening when experts tell you that you will.

The whole Failure-Success model needs to be revisited anyway. As the old tome goes – “treat both failure and success as the impostors that they are.”

Failure enters the picture when we think we have to do things “right” the first time. We’ve been taught all our lives not to make fools of ourselves in public by doing something stupid, and that the cool kids with perfect clothing and big houses whose lives look perfect on the surface are our example of how to make it in this world. Just pretend you and your business don’t have any problems and make sure nobody ever finds out you’re not perfect and you’ll be fine.

The problem is that the solution we’ve been given to this by the gurus is to embrace “failure as the road to success”.

Failure is NOT the road to success! There is plenty of research that shows people who chronically fail will continue to do so. I believe many of them have actually drunk the kool-aid that all they need to do is keep running into brick walls until they find their way out of the maze. They’ve been sold a bill of goods.

Failure is not the road to success – PRACTICE is the road to success. People who succeed do not fail over and over again. Instead they commit to practicing their craft every day, learning from what they did every day, then taking that daily feedback and using it to practice better the next day. The only way to succeed is to be totally and fundamentally sold out to practicing every day until you get good.

Failing is not practicing. Failing is just failing. Practicing is the art of understanding that you will not be good at something the first few times you do it, and the only way to become good is to constantly take the daily feedback from your practice sessions, learn from it, incorporate it into the next day’s practice, and take the long view that diligent practice will make you the best.

A classical musician doesn’t fail their way to a solo career and a recital at Carnegie Hall. They practice 4-6 hours a day for years and build on every day of practice by improving the next day. A world class runner doesn’t get to a 4 minute mile by failing to run well, but by diligent and disciplined daily practice, and getting better at running every single day. A great business owner doesn’t magically find success by mucking around at dozens of bad ideas and failed attempts, but by fundamental ongoing commitment and focus on their craft and to getting better at it every day.

You won’t be successful by fishing around for magic products and “moving on” every time you hit a roadblock, or by changing out your marketing for the next “secret” process. And you won’t become successful by failing over and over at different things, or by attending all the varying get-rich quick schemes until you “hit it big”.

You will be successful by putting your hand to something, committing to it, practicing it every day and knowing that you will be lousy at it to begin with (that’s not failure, that’s how you start). The only way to get better is to stick to one thing, take the daily feedback, and use it to get better tomorrow. You will become successful by stacking one great day of practice on top of another and building a lifestyle of getting better all the time.

Stop trying to fail your way to success, put your hand to one thing, practice it daily and become great over time. Failure is not the road to success – focused and committed PRACTICE of the same thing over and over is the road to success.