Lessons from my first Triathlon

I always enjoyed exercising, but during the past summer I took on additional workouts as I prepared for the 23rd West Point Triathlon. Unlike an Ironman triathlon where the distances are extreme (swim 2.5 miles, bike 112 miles, and run 26.2 miles), this was comparatively “short”. The segments were an 800 meter (.49 mile) swim, 13 kilometer (13.7 mile) bike, and a 5k (3.1 mile) run.

While I was not concerned with winning the event, I did want to test myself. In fact, my first great realization was that I am not well-adjusted. At first, I thought it was about completion, not competition. That is what I told people. But as I started to get better during my training, I realized that I wanted to fight like hell out there. On race day, I was NOT allowing anyone to slow me down.

Many times I would think about the “life lessons” that are analogous to training or really hard work and dedication of any kind. So, here are my ”lessons learned” form my first triathlon:

You have to do the work (miles) yourself – some days during my training, it was rainy and miserable. Other mornings (I train very early), I just felt lazy. However, as with any worthwhile goal, I had to get out there and put in the hard work to get the desired results. If you are trying to make that sale or trying to run 3 miles for the first time, it’s not always easy or pleasant. By being persistent and doing the work or running when you don’t feel like it WILL payoff in the long term.

When it gets hard, put your head down and take it one step at a time –Most training days, I was either running or biking and I would always come across hills of varying magnitudes. There is one hill in particular on my route that begins with a tough grade and gets steeper and steeper over the course of a mile. Invariably, I put my head down and keep telling myself to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and before I knew it, I would be at the top. Have you hit any rough patches in life lately? Even though it is not always the solution sometimes you just have to put your head down, take what comes, and plow ahead one-step at a time.

Find YOUR sources of inspiration – I like to exercise and workout. But there were stages where I felt done. During those times, I would frequently read about people who really had it really tough. Most likely, whatever your goals, there are people out there who have overcome and triumphed in the face of adversity and have done what you would like to be doing. Learn from their stories and lessons when you are feeling overwhelmed.

There are countless other lessons to be taken away from extended periods of hard work, dedication, and commitment. Ultimately, if you are determined, have a clear, well defined goal, and a positive mindset, you can accomplish almost anything that you set your mind to do.

“Chance favors the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur

I don’t believe in “luck”. If you care to look closely, you will find that people who are “lucky” are those who are best prepared when opportunities arise. To increase your “luck factor”, there are two things you should do:

1. Prepare yourself for opportunities so that you can take advantage of them when they come.
2. Put yourself in a position that makes it easier for opportunities to come.

While both are important, the first is more important because it is what makes the difference. What’s the use of getting a lot of opportunities if you can’t take advantage of them?

At this point, most of the world knows that U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps broke the all-time record for most medals won by an Olympian. And, there is a very applicable lesson about preparation we can all learn from Phelps. You may recall that in Beijing in 2008, Phelps won one of his medals while swimming with his goggles full of water. He couldn’t see a thing and still won gold. After that race, Phelps said that while he had never competed before with water in his goggles, he had practiced that way. Bob Bowman, Phelps’ coach, made sure he had the water in the goggles experience to prepare for that scenario in Olympic competition.

When it happened in real time, Phelps’ preparation enabled him to stay calm and start counting his strokes. He knew how many strokes he needed to touch the wall and didn’t stop swimming full out until he did.

So, how can you prepare yourself for opportunities? Here are three ways to prepare yourself for future opportunities:

1. Be curious

Curiosity makes you eager to know more about the world out there. If you are curious, you won’t be satisfied with what you already know. You will want to know more. As a result, you will see more potential opportunities. It’s like being in a building with windows. The more windows the building has, the more you can see what’s out there.

2. Educate yourself

When you find something interesting, start educating yourself about it. Don’t worry if you can’t do anything about it right now. Remember, you are preparing for the future. Educate yourself in whatever it is that you find interesting. Read blogs, subscribe to magazines, watch videos, read books. Build a prepared mind that “luck” favors.

3. Build an “opportunity fund”

Warren Buffet makes sure that Berkshire Hathaway has at least $10 billion in cash in reserves. Why? So that when the opportunity comes for an attractive deal, Berkshire can immediately act on it. If they didn’t have the money, the opportunity could be gone forever. Similarly, you should prepare an “opportunity fund.” Prepare a certain amount of money that you can use to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. Don’t let opportunities slip by just because you don’t have the cash to act on it.

So that’s how you prepare yourself for future opportunities. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Prepare yourself early and years from now people will be amazed at how “lucky” you are.

Everyone is in Sales

Reading this, you might be making some assumptions. You might be thinking, “Wait, I’m not in sales”. Salespeople make “cold calls” and “pound the pavement.” You might think ‘sales’ is a word in a salesperson’s title and believe that “they” are supposed to develop business for the organization.

You may also think that sales is not MY job because “I work in accounting or operations”. If I am even somewhat correct about any of these assumptions, then you might find this article relevant.

No matter what your job title might be,  Everyone Is In Sales! Success in sales is not defined by how much you talk but how well you listen. It’s not about sharing how great your company is but how many solutions you can bring to your customer’s business.

Selling is a part of the fundamental communications process that human beings do each day. Sales is not about gimmicks or shortcuts. It’s not about new techniques, fast talking, or misleading others. The foundation of sales is about honesty, trust, strong communications and building relationships. It is about caring for others.

If you are in accounting, you deal with people to collect money or close the books. YOU are in sales. 

If you are in operations and a problem develops, you must communicate what is going on. YOU are in sales. 

When you are talking to your boss during your review or talking to your child’s principal about their performance in school, you may be trying to communicate a certain message or ‘sell’ your point of view. YOU are in sales.

Follow where I am going with this? Once again, from the break room to the boardroom, everyone Is In Sales.

Personal Innovation

Recently, the “BUZZ” in business literature has been about innovation. However, just as important is innovation for each of us individually. It is not only companies that must innovate, but also individuals must innovate. Here are two reasons:

We are living in changing times. We now compete globally even at an individual level. This is a dramatic departure from eras when only countries and companies were competitors on the global stage. If individuals must now compete globally, then individuals, like countries and companies, must innovate to succeed. Individuals who do not innovate suffer the same fate of companies who don’t innovate: they will be left behind by competition that consistently renews itself.

We must all differentiate ourselves to avoid commoditization. Up until recently, we may have felt “safe and secure” because very few people in our environment had the same skill set. Now, individuals with the same skill set may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Skills and knowledge can be transferred from all over the world rapidly and easily. This means that we all face the danger of our skill becoming a commodity. People around the world with the same skill set as you are suddenly within easy reach. No matter how far they are, they are actually only seconds away. They can very easily be selected to do your job, especially if they are cheaper than you.

If all this sounds scary, look at it in a different way: instead of only your immediate environment, the world is an opportunity – and what a great opportunity! But the ingredient you need to success is differentiation.

What’s so special about you that other people don’t have?

What makes you different from the others?

To answer these questions we have no choice but to innovate.

It's that time of year for thousands of Seniors across North America. Graduation!

It’s one of the greatest rights of passage and a cause for celebration!  It’s also that time when people we all know and some we have never heard of step to the podium and dispense wisdom and advice. 

 

Without question, some of this advice will be especially meaningful. In particular, consider Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech("Connect the Dots") at Stanford University and Randy Pausch’s 2008 address ("We don't beat the reaper by living longer. We beat the reaper by living well.") at Carnegie Mellon University.

This year, however, my favorite so far is Maria Shriver. Take a look.

While I have never been invited to give a commencement address, I have been asked for advice by both my students and young professionals.  Here is a synopsis of what I say:

1. The real key to success is not smarts. It comes from drive, energy, passion, ambition, enthusiasm, excitement, initiative, discipline, and the confidence to keep trying again and again.

2. Don’t worry about what to do with the rest of your life. Like everyone else, you will be a different person five years from now. Instead, think about what you want to do with the next three years. Most careers are a logical progression and in many cases, a series of unplanned, opportunistic choices.

3. Relationships are important. In a romantic partner, looks are nice, brains are nice and money is nice, but character is essential. Ultimately, the same is true in all our relationships: character is the most important thing you should look for in friends, partners of any kind, employees, clients or bosses.

4. The worst thing you can do if you want to get somebody to listen to you is to criticize. As human beings, when attacked we attack back, even when we are wrong. The goal is not to be “right”, the goal is to build a relationship.

Never give up

Dean Karnazes has run over 200 miles. At one time.

Take a moment to fully appreciate that: 200 miles in a single run. Think about the last time you went for a run, it was probably less than an hour.

It’s not because he has bigger lungs or stronger legs. It’s all in his mind. It’s not a physical thing. Now, it’s easy to say that people like Dean Karnazes are “freaks” and that’s why they can do the incredible things they do.

But isn’t that just an excuse?

Doesn’t that give us justification to not attempt the same things? We can sit back in our comfortable chair and say “well if I was Blessed with lungs like his then I would do the same, but I’m not, so I won’t”.

But we’re just kidding ourselves when we do this aren’t we?

Dean Karnazes is not a freak. He is a normal guy who has chosen to do some incredible things. He was nobody before he decided to do this. In fact, there are people with bodies far more suited to endurance running than his who haven’t done anything.

The fact is – anyone can choose to do something incredible.

And ‘anyone’ includes you…

The Importance of Hard Work

You do not come across success just by hoping for it. To achieve true success, you need the strength of mind and body to struggle and work hard to reach your fullest potential. You need the right attitude, self-discipline, and the ability to put your goal before all other desires if you are really driven towards reaching success. There is, after all no substitute for hard work. As Henry Ford said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get”, and the more successful you get!

The truly successful person keeps trying and struggling. Thomas Edison failed approximately 10,000 times while he was working on the light bulb and yet he never dreamed of giving up – this is the hard work and the determination that marks a true success. Indeed, success is not measured by the position that you are in today, but by the amount of hard work you put in and the number of obstacles that you overcome to reach your goal.

There are no short cuts to success. Hard work, complimented with a willingness to struggle to achieve success is the only way to reach your goals.

Remembering Steve Jobs

Like many, I respected Steve Jobs and his genius, and I am deeply saddened by his passing. The reality is that even if you have never owned an Apple product, Steve Jobs impacted all our lives.

There are many lessons we can all learn from Steve Jobs brief, but brilliant life. In particular, if you have not seen his 2005 Commencement address at Stanford, it is time well invested.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”

Take these lessons and apply them to your life–personally and professionally. Once you stop setting new goals to strive for, your strategy for your career or your life becomes timid and leads to stagnation and decline.

“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

You have today. What will your legacy be?

What can your organization learn from a mouse?

It's hard to imagine a place more magical than Walt Disney World. We are heading back to Disney and I’m sure we will have a great time!

On my first trip, I marveled at how clean Disney parks were and how friendly the cast was. How does Disney keep its cast members so motivated?

The motivation, the desire to perform well on the job, the feeling like they can make a difference is not just about training, it's about great leadership. Disney takes pride in having great leaders who create an environment where people want to do their best. Cast members want to do their jobs in 90-degree heat and 98-percent humidity, and keep on smiling while they are doing it because they feel like they are adding value and contributing.

The secret to Disney's success isn't magic pixie dust. It's a secret Walt Disney realized years ago: "You can dream, create, design and build the most wonderful place in the world but it requires people to make the dream a reality.”

Walt Disney's dream of creating a magic place where dreams can come true has obviously been fulfilled. What can your organization learn from a mouse?

Century Ride for Cancer

Like many of you, cancer has touched my family, many friends, and colleagues. To support ongoing research and new treatments for this disease, I will be riding 100 miles in the in the Century for the Cure cycling event on September 10, 2011, sponsored by The Cancer Institute of New Jersey.

Use the link below to go visit my donor page, and please consider supporting me.

Keep in mind the commitment I'm making to help end this disease. While I’ll be riding, I hope you'll be a part of it with me. Thank you in advance for your generosity!

Support me!

What I have learned from being a college professor

As the spring semester draws to a close, I realize I have learned a great deal as a professor, especially from my daily experiences with students. It is from these experiences that I made this list of things I have learned from being a college professor:

• Teaching gives me hope for the future. I am fortunate to work with some amazing students. Their dedication to academic excellence and the pursuit of truth often humbles me.
• I love the “aha” moment. When a student or class has been struggling with an idea and finally grasps it, the satisfaction and excitement is almost palpable. It is addicting.
• Teaching (like leading) isn’t just about the classroom or the lecturing; it is about being a model for your student. Modeling is another type of teaching that we do with students. Modeling is often times more effective than the lecture.
• Freshmen seem like they are getting younger and younger, and, no, it is not because I am getting older.
• It’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” Really.
• Don’t start a question with, “This is probably stupid.” or any similar self-deprecating statement. The only thing stupid is that phrase.

At Tax Time: Money and happiness

Many people associate money with happiness. However, thinking about money frequently is likely to make us less happy. With money always on our minds, we work more and spend less time with loved ones. To increase the richness of our life experience, time, not money, should be our focus.

A series of surveys and experiments examining the effect of focusing attention on money or time found that people who focused on money, no matter how much they had, were more likely to work more and socialize less.

This work was conducted by Professor Cassie Mogilner at University of Pennsylvania. She commented “passing the hours working (although productive) does not translate into greater happiness.”

On the other hand, focusing on time motivated people “to spend more time with friends and family and less time working; behaviors that are associated with greater happiness.”

Long work hours decrease happiness by cutting into time that could be spent with partners, friends, and family. “Simply increasing the relative salience of time (vs. money) can nudge someone to spend that extra hour at home rather than at the office, there finding greater happiness” says Cassie.

The Pursuit of Happiness: Time, Money, and Social Connection Psychological Science 21(9) 1348–1354, Mogilner, Cassie

Show Me Your Friends; I Will Show You Your Future!

Many people have various formulas for success in business and life. One lesson that I have learned (sometimes painfully) is “Show me your friends, I will show you your future.” The idea of this is not new. The notion of being guilty or successful by association has been around for centuries.

Over the years, this has led me to ask a question if my own friendships were propelling me forward and enhancing my life. Fortunately, I am now surrounded by a circle of friends and associates that challenge me. Sadly, this was not always true and it is not everyone’s situation. While some have a great support system, many do not. For whatever reason, there are people that do not want to see others succeed or accomplish their dreams. Many people have surrounded themselves with these people.

Most of us spend too much time holding on to bad or damaged relationships. If you are loyal to people who are not loyal to you, you must move on. If every time you share your dream and they kill it, you must move on.

I am not trying to influence you to end all your friendships. However, you should be asking yourself what your future will look like based on those you call friends. I (of all people) know that you can’t change your friends, but you can CHANGE your friends.

What are you thinking?

A study of twenty-one ultra endurance triathletes revealed that experts and non-experts think differently during performance. These triathletes were classified according to finishing times: experts, middle of the pack, and back of the packers. After competing, these athletes viewed videoed segments of their performance and asked to recall their thoughts during periods of high decision making.

An initial analysis found the athletes’ thoughts to be a) passive, b) active, or c) proactive. Expert triathletes reported a greater emphasis on thoughts related to their performance, while middle of the pack and back of the pack triathletes reported a greater number of passive thoughts.

Furthermore, experts were more proactive in their approach to performance situations than mid- and back-pack triathletes. Proactive thinking refers to the ability to identify opportunities and act on them to bring about significant change.

Compared with non-experts, it appears that experts are not only more focused on factors affecting their performance, but also are more proactive in making decisions to achieve greater results from their efforts.

REVIEW: The Way We're Working Isn't Working

Tony Schwartz, Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy have written a provocative book that takes a serious look at the one area in business that seems immune to change -- the human costs of doing business in the digital age.

Schwartz is also the co-author of The Power of Full Engagement. In this new work, he, Gomes and McCarthy provide a proven prescription for making positive changes in the way we work. The book is an extension of ideas that Schwartz and McCarthy introduced in a Harvard Business Review article Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time in 2007.

The premise is simple: “The furious activity to accomplish more with less exacts a series of silent costs: less capacity for focused attention, less time for any given task, and less opportunity to think reflectively and long term.” In other words, less energy. More importantly, less sustainable energy.

Like Dan Pink’s book, Drive (highly recommended), this book challenges the notion of what truly works in today’s business environment. While Pink focuses on motivation, Schwartz, Gomes and McCarthy challenge the idea of how to enhance the performance of employees -- and much of it is counter-intuitive to how we do business. “A growing body of research suggests that we’re most productive when we move between periods of high focus and intermittent rest. Instead, we live in a gray zone, constantly juggling activities but rarely fully engaging in any of them -- or fully disengaging from any of them.”

Within the first 10 pages, they make a persuasive case. “Most organizations enable our dysfunctional behaviors and even encourage them through policies, practices, reward systems and cultural messages that serve to drain our energy and run down our value over time.

They make a make a case that we’re at our best not when act like computers running at high speed for long hours, but when we pulse rhythmically between expending and regularly renewing energy across each of our four needs.

If you want to make positive change in your organization and want to move beyond the status quo, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working -- is a working blueprint for any company’s future.