Posts Tagged ‘success’

Did you ever stop to think that success and failure are all in your head? No, that doesn’t mean the Olympic medals Apolo Anton Ohno added to his collection at the 2010 Winter Games are a figment of his imagination. It means the champion short-track speed-skater had to make the decision to succeed or fail long before he took the ice in Vancouver.

It’s simple. If, in your mind, you believe success is possible, it is. And if, in your mind, you believe failure is inevitable, it is. You can’t necessarily ensure your success by believing in success, but at least you give yourself a fighting chance. You can, however, ensure your failure by believing in failure. If you believe failure is inevitable, your preparation will be half-hearted. Or you may stop preparing. You may stop trying. You may neglect to show up at all. Why bother? You can’t win.

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Not long ago, I heard the song “Live Like We’re Dying” by 2009 American Idol winner Kris Allen. As the title implies, it’s a message song about making the most of the time we have, which the chorus tells us is “eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds in a day to turn it all around or throw it all away.”

Did you know that? I didn’t either. Sure, the math is easy, but who bothers to find out that there are 86,400 seconds in a 24-hour day? Makes you think, doesn’t it?

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Rush hour. Great. The road I had to take home from the airport was crowded during light-traffic hours. At rush hour, it was a six-lane nightmare. Add to that a light drizzle, and the last 45-minute leg of my business trip promised to be the least pleasant of a long journey.

Seeing police cars near the traffic light about 100 yards ahead, I lightly tapped my brake. Though I was only going 30, it wouldn’t hurt to slow down well in advance of whatever commotion awaited. My car started to skid just a fraction and in a surreal instant slipped into the median, bounced once on the grass, and came hurtling up into traffic on the other side of the highway.

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These days it seems some people will say almost anything to get to the top. Then having gotten to the top, they want to make sure everyone knows they’re Top Dog. They fly in private jets, ride in limos, keep their own hours, and never do anything they consider beneath them—unless compelled by subpoena.

But the most successful leaders understand what it means to walk their talk. Take NFL Hall of Fame football coach Chuck Noll.

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Feeling alone in the world? Maybe you should spend more time online.

Sound crazy? That’s what I thought. But it looks as though our gadgets may not be as isolating as previously thought. According to the Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey, modern technology actually may help us broaden our social circles.

Although a 2006 study argued that in the last two decades, people have become more socially isolated, the Pew study found that people who reach out through cell phones and the Internet have larger and more diverse social networks than those who don’t.

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We’ve all been stuck in a boring meeting where someone was droning on and on while we thought about all the things we could be accomplishing if we weren’t stuck in a boring meeting. When called to a faculty meeting, college ecology professor Robert O. Lawton had the foresight to bring his manuscript. As other participants debated tenure issues, he quietly worked on his book about trees. The last thing he expected was that another professor would end the boredom by pulling an automatic weapon and opening fire.

When the shooting stopped, three of Lawton’s colleagues at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were dead and three others wounded. “It was an ordinary faculty meeting,” Lawton told reporters. “And then it became unordinary.”

Unfortunately, Lawton’s “unordinary” experience isn’t all that unordinary.

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For many of us, the mountain we’re trying to move involves our own feelings of self-worth: Why am I here? And, as Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant first sang nearly four decades ago: “If I leave here tomorrow, would you still remember me?”

Van Zant’s death in a 1977 plane crash gave answer to the eternal question of the “Free Bird” lyric: Yes, we remember—because of the music. But what about those who lack Van Zant’s gifts? Will anyone notice they were here?

That’s what plagued factory worker Ken Swyers.

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The good thing about growing up in the American South is we learn early to love our vegetables. The bad thing is we learn to love them in the worst possible way. Our favorite veggie dishes include fried squash, fried okra, fried green tomatoes, asparagus or broccoli drenched in cheese, and anything swimming in butter. By the time we Southerners finish tinkering with our veggies, they have nearly as many calories as any of our signature desserts. And they taste just as decadent.

Once you’ve learned to love a mushy, butter-slathered veggie, it’s mighty tough to like it any other way. So when I’m trying to eat healthy, I have to fight the temptation to skip veggies altogether. One way I do that is by eating a lot of salads with light spray-mist dressings.

But just as I have to guard against butter and cheese contaminating my veggies, now I find I have to take extra precautions against winding up with unwanted bacteria in my salad.

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You’ve probably heard the line from the movie Apollo 13: “Houston, we have a problem.” Tom Hanks, playing Commander Jim Lovell, was informing Mission Control about a catastrophic failure aboard the space craft. The film is based on actual events, and “the” catastrophic failure turned out to be a series of challenges that threatened to leave three astronauts stranded in space.

Faced with these challenges, the real-life astronauts and ground-control experts could have thrown up their hands at the unfairness of life, decided the problems were insurmountable, become overwhelmed and panicked, focused on their inadequacies, or gotten caught up in any of the dozens of excuses we all use for failing to work our problems. Instead, they maintained their focus and pulled off a miraculous save.

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After its release by the Animals in 1965, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil’s song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” became an anthem for American soldiers in Vietnam—for obvious reasons:

“We gotta get out of this place!

If it’s the last thing we ever do.

We gotta get out of this place!

Girl, there’s a better life for me and you.”

But the song isn’t about soldiers stuck in a war zone. The verses lament being trapped in a dirty city, in a dead-end job, and growing old before your time. No wonder 45 years after its release “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” continues to resonate with workers around the world.

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