Onward

The blogosphere has been run amok the last few days with proposed goals for the new year. The holiday season is over. We have returned the sweater Gramma bought us in exchange for a cheap bottle of wine, drank it on the last day of 2012, and spent yesterday wallowing in the regrets of the year passed. The changing of a year means nothing to one's motivation, we simply choose to dramatize what was and what can be. We look back on our failures with intent to correct them and cherish the past as our tails of success grow mightier.

The formula for success is simple: work hard, be smart, and persist where failure seems certain.

Something everyone can do....
There is a great certainty in your personal/professional development....excuses are readily available! No matter what your trade you can always come up with a reason to explain your lack of results. You will always find 10 people like you on bar stools across the world that will sympathize with your sob story. You know you could have worked harder and made better decisions. I'm sorry to announce that your lack of success is your fault.

In business, we are consistently surveying our effort seeking better productivity. We look at hours logged, how they were spent, and what we can eliminate. We examine new technologies and how systems can streamline results. We realign business lines to target markets. Good stuff!

All you really need to do is work your ass off! If you work 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, you will have dedicated 3,000 hours to your profession this year. You can do anything in that amount of time! It is easier to succeed if you have 10 prospective partners instead of 1. You can succeed if you know more than your competitors. Your customers will give you more business if you know their business as well as they do. You've got 3,000 hours to build a pipeline, learn your strategy, and research your target clientele. You can do it.

Be different...
I walked a convention hall at a major international conference last year. I was amazed at how similar every "vendor" made themselves out to be. One copied another...they all had a notable customer base, innovative technology, and a global footprint. They all spoke to me about how great they were. When asked what differentiated them from the 20 other companies with the same exact business model...they started on a capability dump that spoke to the same things everyone else does. Conference conclusion: all of the companies sucked so bad that they were simply trying to out-suck one another. Make sense? Of course not.

It would have been refreshing to have had a challenging conversation. I would have liked to learn something. Too often, we don't know the true essence of what we want to buy or the true intent of what we are selling. The cog turns, things are made and sold, and we all get donuts. An extraordinary waste of our valued time on this planet.

It's GO TIME!
What if we viewed 2013 as the year we quit making excuses, worked harder, and made daily effort to be better by being different. What if we challenged our assumed expertise? What if that thing that worked before stopped working? It is not enough to have one good idea. You have to have a good idea every single day.

Stop coasting and put the shuttle in over-drive!

Achieve the impossible...create...over-come...triumph...because you can!

Don't Forget to Remember!

Dave