For a successful life in business and anything else, a major requirement is that you are not just happy, because happiness is a momentary thing that comes and goes with circumstance.  No, what is needed is that solid, immovable, inner quietness -more even than peace, the only word that works here is…Joy.  Mot people, (myself included) don’t really have a grasp on what the word means, we throw it around in our speech, but usually we are talking about some aspect of happiness, and not true joy.

And then we hear some o-jumbo “mystical” explanation of joy and never really understand it,but we nod our heads because while we know we don’t know…we also feel that there is something about joy that is bigger than us, something really important – something we really need to look at.

So of course we try to run away from it as fast as we can.  We are only human -you can’ really expect us to have Joy?

Now, because this blog is about success in life and business I usually tend to stay away from what you might call the “spiritual” aspects of life (at least overtly), but the problem is human beings (regardless of what some might say) are spiritual beings.  Joy is made from spiritual stuff.  And I hate to break it too you, but if you were actually completely without any joy whatsoever, you would be dead – yes…physically dead.

At the bare bones level you have something that motivates you to at least breath, so that your heart pumps blood, call it the “spark of life” call it “motive force” but at some level you are alive – when you die and the doctor calls time of death – whatever that spark was, is gone.

That spark is the essence of joy.  Through pain, through pleasure, through agony and ecstasy, Joy exists as the motive force.

As as such, you must have it to succeed in life.  So, what do we do to increase our joy? How do we understand what it is, where it is, and how to separate joy from merely being happy?

Well, I got the answer today from the young man with the crazy hair (sometimes it’s black, sometimes it’s blond…) in the picture here.

Well, actually he just passed the message on to me from a …”higher” source

Stop complaining.

Pastor Steven Furtick

That’s it. Just stop complaining about how bad you got it, stop worrying about what you don’ have, take what you do have and use it with what you do know.  Joy is the fact that we are alive and we can move.  Choose to move forward.

The man in the picture, by the way, is Pastor Steven Furtick of Elevation Church (www.elevationchurch.org), my church, in Charlotte NC.  It was the second fastest growing church in America last year with three campuses – the man knows what success is, he is only 28 years old!  Now he would tell you that success, real success, is knowing who you are in relationship to God, and that is true.  But I want to focus on joy for the moment.

Without that quiet, strong supporting foundation of joy, you will not have the power to overcome the difficulties to succeed in life or in business, or anything else.  You have to at first recognize that every moment of life is a gift and be willing, despite your circumstances, to use that gift to move you toward some goal.  Life is movement, and Joy is the engine that life uses to move forward.

So this is going to be hard, good stuff usually is… To stop complaining both on the outside, and on the inside.  What do we have to complain about?  How many of us have food to eat every day? how many have a place to sleep, cloths to wear.  You have heard all of this before, but this time I want to you to understand that our complaining actually lowers and limits our joy – bringing us to a lower level of success.  Our ability to think intentionally about those things we want to succeed in is directly in proportion to the inner joy that transcends all feelings we have.

Joy is the stuff our true success is made from.

David T. McKee

Should I buy the micro-brewed Brouwerij Van Steenberge? Or the Primátor Maibock. I can’t take it! I guess I’ll just buy the Budweiser…

Options. Most people and most marketers mistakenly think more is better, but recent studies and some published books have shown that it can be a demotivator at a certain point, actually causing real sales to plummet.

Too Many Choices - In Jelly or Beer

Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice.  For her research paper, “When Choice is Demotivating”:

They set up a free tasting booth in a grocery store, with six different jams.  40% of the customers stopped to taste.  30% of those bought some.  A week later, they set up the same booth in the same store, but this time with twenty-four different jams.  60% of the customers stopped to taste.  But only 3% bought some!

What does this mean for Success in our marketing efforts, in deciding between tasks we want to accomplish? In deciding in goals we want to achieve?

It means we can be paralyzed by choice. The human mind is capable, on average, to hold up to seven things at once. We can only truly focus on one thing, but we can keep track of about seven max (for the best of us). Probably between 4 and 6 is more realistic for most of us. What this means is that when we are face with choices that are very much greater than this, we face a dilemma where we are not sure what the best choice is because we cannot analyze all of the choice data, so we get internally frustrated and ultimately make no choice.

This is statistically significant – in fact if we know exactly what we want, or have a pretty good idea, we can eliminate most of the multitude of choices and focus down to the few we really need to look at. This accounts for the three percent who actually bought jelly in the example. So what occurs when we have even a partial focus is we are able to “recreate” the situation with fewer choices. But when we are completely unfocused on what choice we want, and when we are faced with too many options, we don’t make a choice. This is a general principle that needs to be applied to our marketing efforts.

How many times have you seen a website where there were a dizzying array of possible options, links, videos, audios, banners, pictures,etc. and you simply did not know what to do. Perhaps you felt like you wanted to click something, but you had that frustration that whatever you clicked on would take you away from a possible better choice that led somewhere else…

How many times do you think sales have been lost at websites like that because of the issue of over-complexity and too many options? Probably more than most think, because most people assume that more options is better.

The solution to this dilemma is to find ways of presenting large quantities of choices in a simplified fashion. Splitting the choices using hierarchical trees, breaking data into related chunks, pulling together links into blocks that hide the details so that focus is regained. This is an essential tool in designing a website with many choices.

An excellent example of this is Google – a plain white field with a single logo in the center, a box to enter search terms, and two buttons. That is all. How is that for simplicity? And this engine can bring you the complexity of the entire web. This is the kind of forethought that needs to go into any sales page or product display, etc. It’s nice to have many options, but if you don’t present those options in a way that is digestible to human brains, you could lose most of your sales.

This principle holds in most things, not just selling jelly (or beer) – but in the presentation of data in a slide show for your office, or in presenting a scientific paper – anything that presents objects to be considered in some way.

One option too many can make life just as colorless as one too few. In business, this is an important principle to understand.

-DTM

Time is a fluid you can never hold on to.

Time…

Many have tried to describe it, scientists still struggle reconciling it in the laboratory, Einstein found that it could not be separated from the very space around us, yet none of us really have a handle on what it is.

We say that time is money, time is life, memory is going  back in time…

Most of us would rather even not face the realities Time places in front if us, yet routinely we:

• Waste Time
• Kill Time
• Save Time
• Spend Time
• Run out of Time…

That last one is the kicker.  We all eventually run out of time, almost as if we are walking around with a count-down timer above our heads that one day, maybe even today, will reach zero… and then?

We look at pictures of ourselves or our kids and see how quickly they or we have changed, and as we get older each moment  becomes a smaller part of our total memory, making the time we have left seem like it is passing ever faster. We remember our grandparents telling us how much we have grown each time they saw us… to us it seemed silly until we saw our own kids or grand-kids grow so very fast.

No understanding of achievement or success would be complete without a fairly decent discussion of time and what we know and don’t know about it.  We need to understand how we can get the most out of every moment, as some sage said: “To squeeze every drop out of each moment.”

As the picture above demonstrates, time is something we are forced to spend, that we can never ultimately save, and that goes by at the same rate for every person (my apologies to Einstein here, as we are not talking about the Theory of Relativity).  So how can we use our time effectively?

You may have heard the analogy that compares life to a box.  The box holds a certain total volume – that is the sum total of your time.  Events, the things we do, the moments or hours we spend are spherical balls which we can place in our box, each taking up some portion of our total time.  Big events such as “a semester in college” might be compared to bowling balls.  Smaller events such as “a week at the beach” might be compared to a baseball.  Perhaps spending a day at work could be compared to a marble.

Eventually we fill our box, but wait!  There is still spaces between those bowling balls and base-balls and marbles.  There are moments between various tasks that may go wasted.  What about the time you spend in your car going to and from work, do you use that time for anything? Or do you just listen to music or scream at the person who just cut you off in traffic?  Could you get some books on disk or MP3, or a course in something like a new language or a success strategy?  Those moments could be compared to BB’s (those tiny little copper balls used in pellet guns).  You could still put a whole bunch of those in that box.

But can we go further?  What about all the spaces between the BB’s, and Marbles, and Baseballs, and Bowling Balls?  Are there little bits of moments that go wasted where you could write down ideas on a note-pad, or just hug your wife or child for no reason at all – but just to tell them you love them?  The analogy of the box goes on to say we can put grains of sand in the box, and then finally fill the box with water to fill in all the rest of the space.

So we too should try to observe how we utilize our time and then how we may fill those moments with things that help us squeeze the most out of it – even if that is just sitting at the beach, holding the hand of the one you love and listening to the waves pound the shore.  That is living.

Remember, those moments will never occur again, they exist only in your memory and the mind of God.  If you let them go by without ever using them, they will still be spent, but they will be empty and wasted.

How might we use our time most effectively?  Here are a few ideas you can try to help you recapture the moments that, up to now, you have been wasting:

As mentioned before, get a notepad and short pen/pencil that you can carry with you to capture ideas. This also helps you get those ideas down before they simply disappear, never to be heard from again…

Get some form of planner, whether it be a phone app, a Day-Timer, a software tool, etc. and use it to track what you are doing so you can keep your tasks “Top-Of-Mind” and get them done.

Learn how to prioritize your tasks, learn the four “Ds”: Do, Delay, Delegate, Dump and apply them to the four quadrants of the “Priority Matrix” (see my earlier post about the priority matrix here).

Spend some time thinking deeply about what is most important to you, what you would do if you only had one day left to live – because you do only have one day left to live – Today.  You “might” have tomorrow, but you are not guaranteed it, you might die tonight, you simply have no knowledge of how long you live, so if you live as if you only have a day, one day you will be right.  And you will have done the things that mattered most instead of dying with regret.

Time requires our careful management, and despite the fact it does not act like any other resource we have, we still must treat it with the utmost respect for it is the raw material all of our life is made from.

David T. McKee

Sometimes you have to remind yourself when the race is over...

I was having a discussion today with someone on the Warrior Forum about knowing when a product or service we have created or are promoting is “good enough” and how much we should service we should “over-deliver”.  In fact part of the discussion centered around what “over-delivering” really means.

You see, sometimes success oriented persons will try to please every customer to the point of giving away much of their time and products/services just because we have a mindset that we want to please them – but we really do them a disservice as well as to ourselves and our families.

I recently wrote a post about “Closure – 99 percent is not Done” but after you reach that 100 percent mark, once you have given a little bit more than you said (your “over-delivering”), then you need to say: “It is done.”

At that point, you need to manage your time, perhaps you charge a small fee for support, perhaps you write a FAQ for general questions and only respond to questions that have actual merit, or point out a true deficiency in your product or service where you have promised to deliver something that is not there.

You need to know when to draw the line, and say, “I have other obligations to myself, my family, my God, whatever.”  Because when you are Achievement Oriented, it is easy to consider every project, service, product, and area of your business as your baby – and it is! but sometimes we need to remind ourselves that in reality these things are THINGS.  As such, they do not actually deserve to exhaust us, and deplete us.  As in everything about being a Master Achiever, balance must always be sought for true success.

So by all means deliver products, services, performance above and beyond what you promise – but make sure you know where the finish line is, and when you cross it, be able to say to yourself and others: “I am done.”

David T. McKee

It's not done, until it is...

One of the areas that both Master Achievers, and those who are working to become a Master Achiever struggle with, is the area of closure. Closure is when a task, goal, or project is completed – both in time and in the mind of the one who is performing it.  It seems like a simple concept, but has been famously said before; the devil is in the details.

There are two extremes that a Master Achiever must avoid when setting about to perform a task or a goal – the first, the lazy mans excuse: “It’s 99 percent done, that’s good enough…”

No, if the job is not done, then you have not reached your stated objective – no matter how close it is, if you know in your heart that last little bit that should be completed to give a polished, professional result is not there – then you have failed in accomplishing the thing, at least to the most important person: you.

You see if you know in your heart that you have not really completed the task, then you will carry that with you, and the next time you have a task to do, you are more likely to subconsciously accept the notion of compromise.  You are more likely to give up earlier because you have established that pattern.  You are moving away from being a Master Achiever.

On the other hand, you can be a perfectionist – never fully believing that you are done, never completing the task because you keep tweaking.  This is the perfectionist conundrum: “I just need to do one more thing…”

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The perfectionist has gone too far into thinking that a task or goal needs more features, more polish, more bits of this or that, until too much time has gone by and the task or goal is no longer meaningful.

Both extremes are deadly to the Master Achiever because we all have times where we just feel like we have worked so hard that we cannot do another thing and want to throw in the towel, or we obsess over some minor thing and cannot seem to say “IT IS TRULY DONE!”

This requires balance, and takes practice and a good partner or mentor who can tell you that you are being lazy or you are obsessing over something.  Closure is when, in our own minds and hearts we know we have done our best, given our all, and have now closed the book on some task or project so we can move on to the next one.

And now, this post is done!

David T. McKee