Why you should love your everyday life
Do you admire people for their success? Have you ever wondered why these people are successful? The secret usually lies in the hidden and everyday, as our new success impulse shows.
There's a nice saying from legendary motivational speaker Zig Ziglar: "Commitment means doing what you set out to do long after the mood in which you said it left you." The point is this: If we really want to achieve excellence, it's not enough to just be enthusiastic at the beginning.
From the hardship in everyday life...
The big difference in the success of people and teams is not so much how you perform in the spotlight - although that does play a role, of course - but rather what happens when no one is looking, when there is no roar of applause, when it's tedious, when you have to worry about the most mundane things.
I think it was boxing champion Muhammed Ali who once said, "The fight is not decided in the ring, but in the weeks and months leading up to it." How true: It's decided at 6 a.m. in the training room, how you act on bad days, how you do the work when it's tedious, how you're there for others when they need you. Because what you do in the dark shines in the light.
...into the light of success
Almost all "overnight successes" have worked 10 years or more in the dark to achieve this success. If you want to be as successful as the person you secretly admire or envy, you simply have to answer one question: Am I also willing to pay the price? And do I pay it up front? And that price largely consists of doing the mundane work even when no one is looking. And not to be distracted from the goal.
Here are 3 examples of what that can mean for leaders:
- Work on the vision and strategy for the team, even when there is already more than enough to do operationally
- Address uncomfortable "people issues" and remove people from the team if their thinking and behaviors do not reflect the team identity of the future
- Continuously developing oneself and having the discipline to read a good book for 30 minutes a day, for example.
These are all activities "in the shadows", sometimes long before the big successes occur. But just - without such activities success becomes very unlikely.
To the author:
Volkmar Völzke is a success maximizer. Book author. Consultant. Coach. Speaker. www.volkmarvoelzke.ch
