Picture this (yes, I’m stealing this technique from Sophia on Golden Girls) – the place is a conference room, the year is 2010, and a sales support group and marketing group are battling over who will own the sales communications. Both sides present the reason why they should own the project, and verbally demean the capabilities of the other team with nice corporate words like – “I think the marketing team means well, but they’ve never written a sales communication that I know of and I don’t think we have time for a learning curve, do you?”

I think the economy is creating more internal competition. We’re all backed up in financial corners, growling at anybody that comes near our food, or home, or job. Clients are telling me about internal colleagues that are rabidly grabbing at their projects and assignments. Too few bones, too many  dogs. We’re all fighting for a place in the world right now.

So, how do you acknowledge the need to battle without reducing yourself to an Alexis and Krstyle catfight? Guy Kawasaki  (also the creator of Holy Kaw and Alltop) shares an approach, in Chapter 13 of his book “Selling a Dream” (still one of the best books in the market on selling and evangelism) that I find brilliant. His suggestion is to use mental Aikido.

He explains that Aikido is a Japanese martial art that involves deflecting an opponent’s force and turning it back against him–his will becomes part of your will. In contrast, karate involves meeting force with force by blocking blows and counterattacking–his will and your will confront each other. If you can’t ignore an opponent, use the principles of aikido, not karate, to defeat it.

This means acknowledging the soundness of the enemy’s cause and then turning this concession into selling points for your cause. It does not mean directly confronting or denying your enemy.

Guy goes on to reiterate a story shared by Mrs. Jessie Cartright in 1960. She was the home economist of the Norge Division of the Borg-Warner Corporation. She was an evangelist for better living for American women. Here, with a story from the Bible, she explains how to use Aikido:

St. Paul was a hunted man, and Christianity was the underdog religion. He never knew if he was going to be stoned to death or what was going to happen when he gathered people together for a talk on the outskirts of a city.

He went to Athens and stood on a little hill outside of town. He said, “Fellow Athenians, it’s nice to be here. You have a beautiful city. I’ve been around your city today. I’ve seen your million-dollar high school and your new railroad stations. I’ve seen all the sights, and I find it a wonderful city: beautiful parks, fine, outstanding-looking citizens, and there is something that appeals to me. I find that you are a very religious people. Every place that I went I saw statues of your gods and goddesses.”

He didn’t say, “I saw statues of your stinking, lousy Roman heathen idols.”

He said, “I saw statues of your god and goddesses. In my tour around the city I finally came to a statue that had an inscription at the bottom that said, ‘to the unknown god.’ Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s my god, so I’d like to talk about him, if you don’t mind, for a few minutes today.”

Things are tough right now, and that’s the reality. If you have an opponent internally or externally, try Aikido. Offer reasonable responses and promote your cause without a negative tone. Show respect for another perspective, and don’t invalidate the past. You might just get the change your need; at a minimum, you’ll get the respect of those around you!

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So many articles are written on the art of perseverance, I thought I’d add some of my observations over my lifetime. Here are ten reasons why you should always choose perseverance over quitting.

 Quitters never get to:

1.  Have a Lifetime movie made about them. When was the last time you heard about “The Life and Times of that Guy Who Quit Trying?”

2.  Laugh in the face of the people at their job who have been waiting for them to fail. Nothing is better than walking in a conference room, just when everybody thought you were down and out, and sharing a success.

3.  Be used as an example when teaching their children. How many parents have ever said “You know, the Hare could have won that race if that doggone Turtle hadn’t kept going.” Instead, it’s “the steady pace wins the race.”

4.  Have a quote about them put on a poster. When was the last time you saw a picture of somebody walking away from a race before the finish line with the quote “If at first you don’t succeed, quit” ?

5.  Live down the embarrassment of taking their ball and going home, only to turn around and see that somebody else brought a ball and the game is going on without you.

6.  Win a Lifetime Achievement Award. What would it read – “Best Woman who never finished anything?” or “Best Guy with Good Ideas that never made any of them work?”

7.  Be the rolling stone that gathers no moss. Instead, they are the stone that stops, gathers a bunch of moss, and ends up being a little slimy.

8.  Be used as the example of success at a family gathering. Instead, they become that “Crazy Uncle Jack” that everybody adores but that sleeps on the couch of family members while watching marathons of HGTV.

9.  Have a hit ballad that moves people to tears. I don’t think a title like “Try Climbing Every Mountain and Quitting in the first Twenty Minutes” would be quite as powerful as
“Climb Every Mountain.”

10. Go on a talk show and discuss how successful their quitting was. Think David Caruso on “NYPD Blue” or Shelley Long on “Cheers.” Both of them spent a lifetime saying “Maybe I shouldn’t have quit.”

Remember, it’s not what you do that you’ll regret in those last moments of life – it’s what you didn’t do. So, if you want to be a quitter, I have a suggestion. Quit quitting. Unless you’re dealing with some kind of addiction, I want you to hang in there like that little kitten that was always precariously posed as hanging from that tree. I want you to be tenacious. I want you to say “what, you want me to quit? Are you kidding? I quit quitting yesterday!”

Run that race. Be the Hare. Get your Lifetime Achievement Award. Be your own poster and become the greatest ballad of all time. Today is the day. Now quit your quitting and get moving!

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The following change story comes from Russell Simmons’ book Do You! 12 Laws to Access the Power in You to Achieve Happiness and Success. I find Russell Simmons to be refreshingly honest and forthright about his passion for business, and this particular story is something I really needed to be reminded of – that the result of hardwork should never replace the passion for working in the first place. This story is found in his fifth law titled “Never less than your Best.” I hope it helps you as much as it did me:

Not long ago, a woman working as a nurse approached me for advice on how to improve what she perceived to be her position in life. I can’t recall her exact situation, but essentially she didn’t want to be “stuck” working as a nurse her entire life because she was afraid she would never make enough money in that profession to be happy. She was hoping I could show her a way to make it in the business world instead . . .

The strategy I shared with her is the same one I’d like to share with you now: Always focus on your effort, instead of the results of that effort. That means don’t get hung up on the size of your paycheck, or the title next to your name. Instead, focus on the actual work itself, which is the process.

So in the case of the nurse, I encouraged her to simply concentrate all her energy on helping the sick people in her care. I encouraged her to do everything she could to bring comfort to those people and their families. Not to suggest she hadn’t been doing that before, just to do it now without any concern over the payment or perception. I told her that if she put all her effort into helping her patients, the results she was looking for would take care of themselves. They might not come in the form she was expecting, but they would come. I promised her instead of feeling like she was toiling in obscurity, she would start to feel noticed. That instead of feeling stuck, it wouldn’t be long before she could feel the momentum of hard work taking her closer to where she wanted to be in life.

Whatever profession you are in, when you get attached to the results of your hard work, you’ll be in for a rude awakening when those “results” finally do come. It’s happened to me several times, even when I received multimillion-dollar checks for selling Def Jam and Phat Farm. Now a lot of those checks went to my partners, but you’d still think I’d be jumping up and down for joy over my piece of those pies, right? Wrong. In both cases actually getting the money was a major letdown. Cashing those checks was anticlimactic. Because as soon as the money was in my hands, I realized the actual hard work that I put into those companies brought me much more happiness than the money ever could.

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Sometimes I am just a big ol’ quitter. I admit it. When I was eleven years old, I quit Girl Scouts because I was tired of walking to the meetings and I heard the next badge had to be swimming and I was scared of the water. My brother and sister will tell you that when I used to play board games with them I had a bad habit of quitting when I was losing. Not only that, I would also turn over the board and knock their pieces off of it as I left the room.

Therefore, I’ve spent the last twenty years learning how to persevere from people around me, but no one role-modeled perseverance better than my grandmother.  A minister’s wife most of her life, grandmom received her college degree when many women were going straight from high school to marriage. She was an involved minister’s wife, and she and my grandfather fought for the rights of women in the church and championed diversity issues in a time when it could have cost them their lives.

My grandfather died suddenly in his fifties, and grandmother was left without a driver’s license or a means to support herself. As her grandchild, I never remember her seeming afraid or sad. She learned how to drive, and although she was a terror on the road she drove with tremendous enthusiasm. She also walked into a place of business and demanded a job, and got it. She bought herself a car and paid for her own apartment

At the age of seventy-four, my grandmother was taken to the hospital — but not because of a heart attack or stroke. No, my grandmom had gotten hit by a softball playing on the youth softball team. She walked away with a minor bruise. Here’s what Loretha Eudora (seriously – how could you not learn perseverance with that name?) taught me about not quitting:

1. If you quit, you’re turning your back on life.  Amazed by the glory of each day, grandmom could not stand to see an opportunity squandered. She believed that every moment was filled with tremendous hope, and that quitting was a way of turning our back on a gift.

2.  Your purpose is greater than your circumstance. Grandmom always said that when granddad died she cried almost every night to let her grief sink into her pillow. But when she awoke, she held her head high because she had a greater purpose that day . . . as much as she missed him, her life’s mission was bigger than even her spouse. She had people to help.

3.  Quitters never win. Quitters made my grandmom sad, because she said they were miracles that didn’t believe in themselves. As children we were allowed to cry or be afraid in the presence of Grandmom, but  we were never allowed to quit.

4. Some days perseverance means putting one foot in front of the other. She always stressed that some days you might move forward slowly, but you never stand still. Life was always moving, and you  were responsible for moving too. She helped people every day, and showed me that giving to others got the feet moving faster than introspection and a “why me” attitude.

When I was six years old, we left Virginia for California. Grandmom was left behind, in a new life with a new driver’s license and job, and her support system was driving away. On that day, Grandmom drove my brother, sister and I to buy a small gift of our choosing (she gave us a monetary total but allowed us to buy whatever crap we wanted)  while mom and dad packed. All the way to the shopping center she had us roll down our windows and yell “Look out world, here we come!” She honked her horn and almost ran over a few people, but we loved it. I still remember the slimy feeling little brown and green mouse I chose as my gift, and how delighted Grandmom acted with such a ridiculous choice. When we drove off, she smiled through her tears and waved like a maniac. She let us leave with joy.

Years later, as I sat in a house sick while my parents and siblings went to Disneyland with the church, Grandmom flew in for a few days. On the day of Disneyland, she called a yellow cab that would take us to the grocery store.  She knew that neither my brother nor sister had ever ridden in a cab, and she made it such a magical journey you would have thought I was in Cinderella’s stagecoach. I didn’t miss Disneyland at all that day.

I know that she returned to a lonely apartment in Virginia a few days later, but she didn’t care. Because grandmother knew that life was about giving to others, and persevering one step at a time.  I think my grandmother would have been proud of Kerri Strug in the clip below, who reminded all of us that something perserverance is best attained one small, painful step at a time.

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Enthusiasm is the most irresistible force in nature. Period. Find a person who is enthusiastic about what they do, and you will find yourself absorbing some kind of kinetic energy. You walk away searching for the thing you can be that enthusiastic about.

Tom Peters, in his book The Little Big Things, makes enthusiasm the first of his nineteen “E’s of Excellence.” Why? Well, ask yourself, have you ever met a successful person that didn’t have enthusiasm?

This morning on the beach a Corgi was briefly walking with his master. Suddenly, he tore off towards the waves. As he got to the waves, he would run away with all of the energy he could muster. Then he’d tear off again down the beach, and I swear you could see him smiling.

His enthusiasm came from enjoying the moment he was given, rather than pondering what might happen later in the day. He had the sand, he had the sun, he had the ocean, and he had someone who loved him. And he celebrated it.

That’s the kind of enthusiasm we need each day. To achieve it, we have to be aware of what’s going on around us. Sometimes we are so focused on the future, and what we’re going to achieve, and how we’re going to pay our bills, and how we’re going to get out of a dinner appointment we don’t want, that we miss a smiling face, or a beautiful sky, or the inherent humor in a ridiculous situation.

Let me give you an example. I was walking downtown going to an appointment a few weeks ago, and a very classy man in an elegant business suit was passing me on the left with a tremendous amount of speed. H e must have been 6’2”, and as he passed he took the time to nod his head in a greeting. I noticed that his eyes sparkled with a certain joy.

Just as he tried to pass his foot hit an uneven point in the sidewalk. Well, that threw him off balance. With all of his elegance tossed out the window, he proceeded to windmill his arms for about a block trying to regain his balance. He finally did, but not before he passing about ten people. Once he stood up straight, I saw him start to laugh, shoulders shaking, head thrown back. I joined in, because it was hilarious. But I looked around me, and everybody else had their heads down, eyes on the sidewalk, joy turned off while they pondered their problems. They missed the moment.

Enthusiasm is not just about achieving a goal. Enthusiasm comes from the ability to look around you every day and say “wow.” Wow, look at that sunset. Wow, I love what I do. Wow, look at my family laughing. Wow, I just almost busted it in front of a lot of people. Wow, that little dog is hilarious. Wow, we get to breathe in and out today. Wow.

So, today, I hope the Force of Enthusiasm goes with you wherever you go. I’m going back down to the beach tomorrow morning, hoping my Corgi friend is there. Maybe I’ll run around like crazy with him. The guy below isn’t the Corgi I saw, but he has the same spirit.

May the Force be with you.

Dog Running On Beach

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My internet was down, again. No big deal, I only rely on my internet connection for my livelihood, and this was the third time in a week that it had gone down. Our phone lines were also down, which was not a surprise since we had lost phone lines at least six times in the last two months.

I screamed at my computer screen, but to no avail. As I swept my arm around dramatically to call a technician, I hit my Diet Coke and sent it flying across the office. So, I tried to be more Zen and less Zany and called my internet service provider. Of course this happened on a Friday afternoon, but I decided to be a crazy optimist and called anyway. My partner and I were told a technician would arrive Saturday before noon.

So, I got up on a precious Saturday – you know, the only day small business people tend to take off – and went into work. I sat and waited from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., listening to the crickets and watching tumbleweeds roll by. Around 1:00, I picked up the phone and called the dreaded 1-800 number (which I remember as 1-800-into-the-abyss), and entered the service number given when we first called.

The automated machine said someone was within our vicinity and would be by within the hour. I celebrated with a real Coke and waited. At 2:30 steam began literally coming out of my ears, so I called again and waited for an actual person. They informed me that I had no service number at all – that our entire order had never occurred. I had been bumped out of the system, and since I was talking to a new person it was as if I never existed at all. I pinched myself to be sure I was still alive, and then asked for them to input a new order. A technician could not come out until Monday. I refrained from dramatics lest I send my real Coke flying across the office, and simply went home.

The technician did show up first thing Monday morning, and looked very sharp in his Oakley glasses. He walked in with the profound statement “What do you need?” Nice entrance, I felt so valued as a customer and certainly felt the sincere concern about the delayed response.

“Well, our phone lines have been down since Friday, and our Internet is down as well. This has happened repeatedly . . .”
“Yea – the guy next to you has had his line go down a bunch. I’ve been out here at least ten times for him.”

Nice, now I feel much better. Why would I ever doubt my internet service provider when their technicians provide this information as if it’s just part of their job? The service technician asked where the phone lines were (something I have to repeat for every new guy) and strutted to check them out. He came back in look mighty proud of himself, and said, “Well, I just unplugged and plugged the lines back in and they seem to be working. I don’t know what happened or why. Just weird, I guess.”

Okay, maybe this would be easy after all. “Could you check the internet, please?” I thought maybe the “weirdness” could be as easily fixed there.
“Do you know where your modem is?”

Of course I did, I’d led a multitude of their technicians to it. So, I took him to modem land and went back to my office, filled with false optimism. Suddenly, I sensed someone was staring at me, so I turned in my office chair to see stylish ISP man holding his clipboard, ready to deliver his profound diagnosis. “This isn’t our modem, m’am. I don’t know who put this in here, but it’s not ours.”

“Well, that’s weird because you are my internet service provider and your guys set it up.”
“Is that a new copier?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, if you guys are networked this could be a copier problem, not a modem problem.”

Ah, he was a tenacious sleuth. With that shallow solution, our guy left as quickly as he could, looking equally as stylish in his Oakley glasses as he was useless as a technician. I beat myself up immediately for simply staring, mouth open, when he left. I should have tackled him in the parking lot and forced him to return.

Instead, I called the copier company, and talked to someone who actually wanted to help. He led me through a series of diagnostics, at which point we realized it was a modem problem. Rather than dealing with this internet service (said with sarcasm) provider, again, we played with the modem until we got it working.The result? My phones work for now, my internet struggles along taking brief naps, and we’re swit
ching everything we can to another service provider in the first of September.

P.S. Today, when I came in to post this article, my internet was down – AGAIN. The technician is supposed to be here between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. This time I have on my football gear. If he tries to leave, I’m going for a chop block.

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The following is a story from one of my favorite books by Diane Conway called “What Would You Do If You Had No Fear? Living Your Dreams While Quakin’ In Your Boots.” The title alone grabbed my attention, but the picture of a woman (I believe it is the author) gleefully jumping out of plane and doing a split in the air made me pick it up. Not that I’m going to jump out of a plane any time soon, and if I did the split would be unintentional, but I realized that this woman was overcoming fear and loving it, and I wanted to do the same. 

If you want a boost of energy, a lot of humor, and tremendously inspiring stories, read this book. One of the chapters shared a story that seemed especially poignant based upon my series on No Fear, so I want to share it with you. The chapter is titled “Permission Slips.”

Brad said, “I have a good voice and I love to sing. For my whole life, forty years of it, every time I thought of something bold I wanted to do, immediately a voice in the back of my head would start, ‘You can’t do that, you’ll look stupid, you’ll embarrass yourself, forget it!” Like a reverse abracadabra, the desire would be wiped away, stuffed down, and stomped. The voice might as well have been on a PA system like the old air raid signals squawking a warning: ‘Duck and cover, he’s dreaming again!”

One day Brad finally had the nerve to declare his independence from fear long enough to call the San Francisco Opera for an audition. Today he sings in the chorus. In one moment Brad gave himself permission to take a risk, and the desire spoke louder than the fear. We don’t have to wait for fear to vanish altogether because that moment will never come; all we need is a moment of daring that can change a whole lifetime of waiting.

Life Challenges:

Write yourself a permission slip.

Give yourself authorization to succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

Look for moments of inspiration and act then.

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