Musings from the CU Suite

Written by Anthony Demangone

Earlier this week, I shared an article that discussed possible reasons that you aren't as successful as you wish you were.  A reader wrote me a note to say that she read the comments to the article, and she was bothered by how so many people tie success to money and things.

I couldn't agree more.  I consider my parents to be some of the most successful people on the planet.  You won't read about them in a magazine, but they raised five kids, sent us to college, and lived a balanced life centered around family, friends, their faith, health and community.  

But I'll say this: they had to work at it.  Success, however you define it, will take hard work.  This comes from a blog post I wrote a while ago on the fact that there's no such thing as a free lunch. The key, I think, is knowing, with clarity, what you want - what success means to you. 

There's no such thing as a free lunch. 

You want to be a top-level athlete?  You're going to have to spend time in the gym and forego late-night parties so that you can train the next morning... 

You want to turn around an organization?  You'll need many tough conversations and even more tough decisions.  And "tough" is probably not strong enough a word.

For every action, there's an opposite reaction.  I'm not sure it is always an equal reaction. But this much is true - any time you push in a new direction in your life, something else will push back. 

Given this "rule" of life, it might be tempting to stand still.  To maintain the status quo. To refrain from rocking the boat.

Ah, be careful, Kate and Briggs. 

There's no free lunch there either.  

You want to stand still in life?  You'll miss much of its beauty and opportunities.

 You want to maintain the status quo?  You'll rack up lost opportunity costs. 

You want to refrain from rocking the boat? That boat will never tip over, but it won't be much of a ride. 

So, it sounds like you're stuck between a rock and a hard place, eh?  Push forward, and prepare to face the headwinds.  Stand still, and you risk being lapped and becoming irrelevant. 

Not so. 

The key is to know what you want out of life.  What you want your business to be.  What you truly want to accomplish.  And let me be clear - you really have to know what you want.  With surgical precision.

Once you know that, the rest is easy. 

Once you know that, you'll happily pay the price for that lunch. ï»¿

With that in mind, the blog post from earlier this week can work for you, no matter what success looks like.  

***

I had a wonderful visit with a few credit unions yesterday. Sure, it involves 13 hours of driving in two days.  But I'm OK with that.  It gave me a chance to...think. No emails.  No phone calls.  Just me, some country roads, and my thoughts.  I'm not the only one who likes this.  This comes from Seth Godin. 

Fear is the enemy of creativity and innovation and of starting things. The resistance hates those things—they are risky, they might not work, so the resistance pushes us not to do them.

On the other hand, it loves the notion of to-do lists and favors and multi-tasking and yes, continual partial attention, because those are perfect hiding places, perfect places to avoid the scary work but still be able to point to a day's work, well done.

But if you have nothing else due, nothing else to do, no other measurable output but that thing you've promised yourself, if all your mental bandwidth is focused on this one and this only, then yep, you can bet that you will get more brave.

Before internet connectivity poured from the sky, I was able to get on a train, plug in my Mac and have nothing to do for four hours but write. And so I wrote. I once bought a round trip ticket to nowhere just to eliminate every possible alternative... pure, unadulterated mental bandwidth.

Plenty of places to run, plenty of places to hide. None of them are as important as shipping your best work today.

How I love Mr. Godin.  But on top of that, there's this: driving in the southern tier of New York can give you views like this....

 

The Chemung River