Clinton Skakun

Photo Credit: ACME-Nollmeyer
I can often type with my eyes closed. I guess I’ve been using computers for so long that it just happens without me thinking. As soon as I try to think about where the “R” key is or the “L” key is I all of a sudden I cant do it without messing up. It’s kind of a shitty example but demonstrates a good point when it comes to excellence and building skills. I can do it out of reflex, I don’t know how to do it though. I really don’t need to.

Most of the things you want in life usually has something to do with your day to day habits and disciplines. If you think I’m full of crap hear this:

90% of ALL you behavior is habitual!

So it seems like the answer to your personal excellence is in the habits you create.

“There’s no overnight success involved in excellence! The cost of overnight success is overnight failure—when you find that your success outweighs your capacity.” – Clinton Skakun

How many times have you heard of the guru who went from being broke to being a millionaire sitting on the beach with a bunch of hot blond chicks in red bikinis. Yeah it happened really fast! These stories are often very rare lucky breaks or a misrepresentation of what the person had to do in the first place to get there. They often don’t mention all the shit the person had to go through to get there. How many times did he fail, how long did he practice? Etc etc. It’s true that there are ways to skip a lot of the pain and roadblocks that others experienced by studying other people who have made it to the top. Modeling their mental syntax, physiology and belief systems. It’s NOT true however that success comes easy. The hardest part(I’d have to say for me) is being persistent, and doing the right things on a regular basis.

Persistence is the common factor of almost ALL real successes. Techniques tried ONCE seldom ever work.

I’m sure we can all relate to this. Most people have a very bad habit of doing something for a little while, then complaining it didn’t work. “I already tried that and it didn’t work” WELL no shit Einstein! The price for success is pure sacrifice, you must be willing to do things failures DON’T. Remember, “For every disciplined effort there is a multiple reward.” – Jim Rohn. You need to put your faith in disciplines and character building habits and then have the patience to follow through.

Make Routine Your Slave

If you’re anything like me you probably hate routine with a passion. Your daily routines really have an effect on your ultimate outcome. Think of it, if you could turn 2 hours a day of negative or boring routine into building empowering habits, what could you accomplish in 2-3 months? And if you continued who would you be in 10 or 20 years from now? Do you think changing your habits could have SOME kind of effect on your life within that timespan. I think so. What if you made a habit to have a balanced life, and made sure everything that was important to you got sufficient attention?

Try something every day for 21 days

Most people have their little daily rituals, like making their bed and brushing their teeth and then having breakfast. After years of doing this you don’t have to make an effort any more, it just happens every day and feels unnatural to go against this flow. The behavior eventually becomes a natural part of you. Almost as natural as eating or sleeping. The funny thing is it only takes 21 days to create a new habit. You could spend your whole life trying to become an overnight success and miss this concept completely. So why doesn’t everyone do this? Maybe because it’s too simple or maybe because there’s “not enough time” or something like that.

So what habits could you develop you may ask? Anything that would improve your performance in your day to day life. Something that would stamp out procrastination would be a good example. (e.i. I have something called the 1-day-rule, get it done now!). When we link pain to a task we tend to put it off, it causes us anxiety, the task gets bigger and harder to approach, late penalties occur or we miss the boat and then we have an even BIGGER problem on our hands, until we link more pain to not doing it and force ourselves before it kills us. Or maybe you have the bad habit of getting to meetings late, or slumping all the time(physiology controls your emotions). Or maybe you have a bad habit of not paying yourself first, or going on a spending spree and ending up with nothing to pay bills. Don’t ever fall into using excuses like “it’s the way I am” or “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”. That’s a load of BS. You can change almost anything about yourself if you try hard enough to change it. I understand that some things CAN’T be changed, like mental problems or physical problems or genetic disorders etc etc. But from all the impossibilities, there are more possibilities than impossibilities.

Most habits can be broken and created in around 21 days. For more serious things like smoking or drinking may take months or even years to break. But most habits are very simple. It seems to be the answer to everything you want to become. Tom Hopkins said: “You don’t determine your future, you choose your disciplines and your disciplines determine your future”

Here’s how you change your habits: Practice them EVERY day for the next 21 days. If you slip once, start over. Just keep your mind on that short amount of time, 21 days, 3 weeks. It happens in no time at all and it beats 10 years of suffering because of a habit you cant control.

Here is how you do it:

1. What is the negative habit? (Procrastinating)
   
2. What are the consequences? (Overloaded with problems)
   
3. What is the positive habit you want to develop? (Eliminate problems instantly)
4. What are the future benefits? (A life free of problems that don’t really need to be there)
   
5. What are the 3 things you need to do to change this habit? (1. Take care of the problem the day it arises. 2. Think of the HELL you’ll go through if this problem persists. 3. Plan ahead and anticipate problems, be there to take care of them when they arise and work on prevention)
   

Life’s too short to be controlled by behaviors that work against you every day. Think of what you can do once you get over, for example, public speaking, or teaching people, or a fear of heights etc etc. What if you worked on changing 4 habits a month, in 10 years that would be 480 new habits. Would that make a profound difference?

Photo Credit: 3abbas

This is actually a post I planned on writing a few months ago but for some reason put it in draft and never got around to posting. Finally, I’m writing it.

If you were to ask why leadership is important and why you should become a leader or strive to develop your leadership abilities this is what I’d say:

The word “leadership” has become more and more predominant with the change in the times and the need for new and better strategies in business. In the industrial age workers were seen as … well … just that, workers. Employees were treated like machines and corporations were run in a military like fashion. Business that weren’t run like an army barely ran at all. And then, at one point in time, things started happening. Companies overseas started doing things differently and as a result started doing better. They were leading people to do their best and to perform at a higher level and more efficiently than the American corporations who continued to “manage” their employees. It seemed as if managers had to learn to respect and communicate with their subordinates, instead of enforce rules and control. Or so it seems, doesn’t it?

People often misunderstand leadership. Leadership isn’t a title and it isn’t about manipulation or control(at least good leadership isn’t). It isn’t about having people listen to you or having people like you. There are a lot of things leadership ISN’T. This is my definition of leadership…

Leadership is about creating relationships and connecting to people, having the ability to influence and manifest true potential in an individual and motivating people to work together to achieve a common goal. At it’s root, leadership is about empowering others. As Covey put it, “Leadership is an empowering act.”

There are good leaders and there are bad leaders. Bad leaders lead by force. Anyone who enforces their policies on a individual is leading by force. Good/Real leaders have the ability to create an environment and influenced people in a positive way. To get people to do things because THEY want to do it. This is much more difficult to do. And it can’t be done with cheap incentives like a higher salary or a raise or “employee benefits” The reason is, you can’t get people to do something they hate. Even for more money. Leaders set the pace of the environment in a way that builds trust and that one people love and enjoy and challenges them. This is why leadership is so important.

Why would YOU want to be a leader? This is a question you may ask yourself. Why do all the work when someone could do it better than you? What do you get out of it? Well, there’s a lot of reasons WHY you should want to become a leader and lead people. I like this one reason I heard once, and I can’t remember where I hear this: Leadership is just so fun! Leadership is fun because it can be very fulfilling. You have the chance to influence people’s lives in such a powerful way. Even though you may not know until years later. But there’s another reason, and a much more important one than the enjoyment you may get out of it. Being a leader isn’t a hobby, it needs to be a commitment and it needs to be something you’re very passionate about. Think about it, it can be very gutsy…there will be times when you will be wrong, and need to admit it, and there will be times when you’ll fail, and you have to take the blame for it. Character is a crucial part of being a leader and if you don’t have it or struggle with it, you may have more of a challenge with yourself than anyone else. Bad leaders are proud, excuse-makers who need someone to blame to feel good about themselves. They manipulate in order to make gain for themselves. They often don’t care about character. They usually don’t last very long without strict enforcement and strong incentives. Good leaders are the other way around. They build lifelong relationships with the people they lead. They get people excited about a vision and motivate them to take action. They say the right things at the right time. And above all they understand that leadership is not about them but about others, and are always quick to give credit before taking it.

There’s another thing you should know about leadership: There are two kinds of leadership, personal leadership and the organizational type of leadership. Personal leadership is having the ability to empower and influence people around you. You don’t have to be a manager, CEO or trainer to be a personal leader. I like how Stephan Covey said it in his book The 8th Habit, “Leadership is a choice, not a position.” Because that’s what leadership really is. Many high ranking individuals with impressive titles don’t have leadership skills worth squat, they haven’t made a commitment to lead or they don’t even know what it is. This is why there are some people with the entitlement attitude towards leadership. They falsely believe that their hard earned position has gained them the right to lead the people in the organization. This is simply not true. You may know how to run projections and how business systems work but if you don’t understand the power of leadership, or worse yet if you haven’t built a leadership skill set, you will not have the pull and the trust and the strength you need to be successful in the organization. They have not understood the choice of leadership. The REAL leaders, the individuals who understand that leadership starts with a choice, despite their level of management or position in the company, are the ones who are awakened and have the abilities to influence those around them. Those types of people often have the strongest pull, even stronger than people in higher positions who really know nothing about leading or influence.

So how do you become a leader? Well number one is to make the choice and commitment to lead, even if you don’t know who you want to lead just yet. My opinion is that becoming a leader is a development process. You’re not going to get everything right the first time, it’s going to take some time and some mistakes to understand and cultivate the habits of a truly empowering individual. You must learn to grow and to change and have a unquenchable thirst for learning. There’s not a whole lot of room in this would for static human beings, people who don’t change or grow or admit their mistakes. In other words you have to be sharp a highly educated person(not exactly formal education), self aware and a person of responsibility and massive action.

And if you read a few books on leadership you’ll notice a common occurrence in your reading: to be a good leader you must first serve. Most of the time you’ll see that this is true, the greatest among us are the ones who give the most of themselves.

This is all I really have to say on the subject, it’s basically my little burst of inspiration. I would say: don’t become a, what John C. Maxwell calls, pop-tart leader. Someone who thinks he or she’s a leader but really isn’t. There is no one step in being a leader, just like there is no one step in building a boat. Also don’t fall for the idea that there’s such a thing as “born leaders” because there isn’t. Every leader has to incorporate their own natural strengths into their leadership, so there’s no such thing as a born leader.

Being a leader is really all about empowering and inspiring individuals to achieve, and as someone I know said “getting people to work together is truly magic.”

“Everything rises and falls with leadership.” – John C. Maxwell

My brother-in-law, who I consider to be a person of wisdom, once gave me a book entitled Rich Dad Poor Dad to read when I was around 15 years old. At the time I wasn’t that keen on reading but he seemed to set great store in this one book and seemed really excited about having me read it. I had never read books like these before so I started finding more books like it.

Once I started getting into reading really good books I noticed something. My outlook on life, my thoughts, my attitude and the compass of my future, very slowly, started shifting in a new direction. Until now I never realized the profound impact this has had, not until I listened to something John C. Maxwell said about how books have changed his life, the way he thinks, talks etc etc. Zig Ziglar said, “if you don’t like your output, change your input.” This means stuff you put in your brain, the things you say to your self and other people, how you spend your time, your contribution to the world and the people you listen to and who you hang around with.

photo credit: Raz City
Not too long ago I was speaking with a friend of mine who was laid off from his job as an engineer. He was doing his best to find work contracting for several firms, on top of that he admitted that he was collecting from EI as well. His overall impression of his job was that it wasn’t something he thought he was meant to be doing anyways. By speaking to this individual for a few minutes you could tell he had talents in things far beyond what he was currently doing. Now, I don’t want to make a judgment from my standpoint on what he should be or shouldn’t be doing. My point of view might be totally wrong, but it seems as if he was focusing time and energy on something that wasn’t quite allowing him to live a purposeful life and focus on things that he might be better suited for. Now you be thinking, welcome to life, most people are in the same situation or are quickly headed there! I agree, but lets look at it this way: most people hate their jobs anyways and were brought up thinking that is the way it has to be.

I was recently reading a book called the Power of Focus where they talk about focusing on your strengths and delegating your weaknesses to people who are better at them then you are. This is what wealthy people do every day and is the reason why many of them can enjoy a balanced and fruitful life. (Lots of wealthy people are burnt out and miserable but I mean the ones who live good lives). This is often why the jack of all trades who works 18 hours a day doing everything, wearing all the hats, can never move forward unless he allows himself to let go of a few parts of his business or management. Those people that view the “do it yourself” approach from everything like fixing a cars to spending hours with bookkeeping and transaction records miss out on a very important concept: PEOPLE who can do it BETTER than you SHOULD BE paid to do it. Don’t be afraid to let other people take over certain tasks, tasks that take your focus off of your strengths and that if delegated would save you time.

If you still don’t get it, here’s something to think about. Do MILLIONAIRES spend time on things they suck at, or do they get other people to do it for them? Because here’s the deal, if you’re worth 1 Million Dollars a year, that plays out to $390/hr(say you work 320 days a year, 8 hours a day) and that means anything you do MUST be worth your time or more. Is doing something you suck at worth $390/hr or would you pay a professional (probably less than $390/hr) to do it better than you can? How many mechanics do you pay $390/hr to fix the transmission on your vehicle? Not too many! So HOW, may I ask, are you saving money by doing it yourself?

“The key is OTHER people’s TIME, OTHER people’s MONEY” – R. Kiyosaki

By focusing on your strengths you save your time and money, you spread wealth to honest hard working people who can do it better and have dedicated decades of experience and you live a more balanced and free lifestyle because of it.

There are people who are worth economically LESS because they perform at jobs that are not worth a lot to the economy and don’t provide a whole lot of value. People who provide massive sums of value DO because they perform at a different level than people who provide LESS. If you want to maintain your standard of living you have to increase or stay at the same level that you have been. This only makes sense. This is why you pay people who don’t perform as well as you, or have different talents, to work on tasks that you either aren’t talented at or would go broke doing. Take for example the Rolling Stones, the reason why they’re so good at what they do is because they’ve spent ages focusing on music and practicing their craft. You don’t see them setting up the stage and the lights before a performance! Why? Because it only makes sense that if you want to perform at a higher level, you have to cut garbage from your life that drains time and money and delegate crap that doesn’t have anything to do with you in the first place.

“One man cannot practice many arts with success.” – Plato