Playing Favorites By Marshall Goldsmith There’s a reason I devote...
Over my decades as a coach, I’ve identified six considerations for success. These are motivation, understanding, confidence, support, the marketplace — and ability. One doesn’t suffice for fulfillment, for success — for earning a good life. They are complementary and build on each other for you.
These are the factors you must check off to gauge your chances of success at any challenging task or goal.
A checklist is essential. For example, a good home or professional chef will tell you that the first crucial consideration in cooking is the mise en place: having in place all the ingredients for a dish, already measured, cut-up, at hand, and set to go. You chop the vegetables, have the spices at hand, and start. If you’re baking, you’ve measured the flour, sugar, spices, other ingredients — and you can start. Once all of that is done, the cooking or baking begins.
Like most checklists, the mise en place seems like a quite simple organizing system, but it is also a mindset that anchors the chef or baker’s motivation, ability, understanding, and, most of all, confidence. With everything in place, the chef is liberated to create and do what they do best: turn ordinary ingredients into something extraordinary.
Candidly ask yourself: Am I motivated to do this? Am I able? Do I understand how to harness my ability to get the job done? Do my past achievements make me confident that I can do this? Do I have support? Is there a marketplace that will appreciate the effort?
Understanding: “No one is born knowing how to do a start-up. You learn it as you go. I follow the Rule of Fools: ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’”
Confidence: “I’ve created three distinct products—we call them SKUs—for the brand. It’s not foolish to expect a fourth idea and a fifth to show up. It’ll happen.”
Support: “We entered an accelerator contest last year, and we were one of five small companies chosen to be mentored for six months by experts in the food industry, mostly for the purpose of attracting investors, which doesn’t interest us yet. When I don’t know something, I call my mentors.”
Marketplace: “People will always need ready-made sauce to put on their pasta and pizza, to stuff their peppers, to make chili. Our niche is the high end. We don’t need everyone to buy, just the right sliver of the market, and those people are finding us.”
Then I asked Marie if she felt aligned. “Alignment is something I felt right away,” she said, “because I was enjoying myself. Two years into it, though, when we were showing a little profit, I started wondering what was the purpose of all this work if I wasn’t taking a salary yet. What was the endgame? One of the mentors told me that start-ups aim either for steady profit growth or being bought out. I decided our goal was getting someone to buy us, after which we could keep at it with more resources or move on. That gave me clarity and purpose. I felt aligned again.”
Marie had all the right answers. Can you say the same about the life you’re living right now?
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My mission is simple. I want to help successful people achieve positive, lasting change and behavior; for themselves, their people, and their teams. I want to help you make your life a little better. With four decades of experience helping top CEOs and executives overcome limiting beliefs and behaviors to achieve greater success, I don’t do this for fame and accolades. I do this because I love helping people!
As an executive educator and coach, I help people understand how our beliefs and the environments we operate in can trigger negative behaviors. Through simple and practical advice, I help people achieve and sustain positive behavioral change.