Thu 6 May 2010
THE POWER OF A DAY
Posted by Jim under Uncategorized , Adventure and Alchemy , Leadership , Health and Vitality , InnovationComments Off
THE POWER OF A DAY
How can you create a world-class career or a great life? The answer’s a strikingly simple one: Live Great Days.
Your days are your life in miniature. Just focus on making the day ahead of you your best yet. Then get up and do the same thing tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. These days will quickly become weeks. And the weeks will slip into months. Soon, you’ll have just polished off your best year yet.
The question then becomes how do we install the habit of living great days - days where we work at congruence with our values and days where we are positive/excellent and passionate?
Let’s look at a a concept called “30 Day Challenges”. Say you want to grow the habits of 1 - daily exercise and 2 - high performance visualisation in your life? Start by committing to these 2 new habits for the next 30 days, as it will take about 4 weeks before a new ritual becomes your New Normal. Then, start recording the fact that you followed through on these 2 daily commitments in your journal before you go to bed. After a few days, you will not want to break your track record. And seeing the victories of the past days fuels forward momentum. Giving yourself 30 Day Challenges to install new behaviours is such a powerful tactic for leadership and personal success.
Please remember, mastery and greatness doesn’t come from one bold act that then defines your life. Instead, they come from those small, seemingly invisible daily wins that over time amount to a Best in World career and a World-Class Life. So start today.
Jim
The key message is that innovation permeates every aspect of their activities - you have to live their commitment each and every day - that’s why we call it innovation in action. There is no single formula for success - no universal panacea. Businesses with innovation in action develop a repertoire of attitudes, skills, and techniques that enable them to pursue the goals and they do this with their support of company cultures
If you want to do something creative: write a story or a song, paint a picture, dream up your perfect career, or come up with a great solution to an office problem. But you have no idea where to start. Your mind keeps coming up empty.
Let’s try a small experiment - we shall spend the rest of the week working to be in one place at a time and to learn the most powerful lesson in the universe. There is little tension or anxiety in the place we call the present. If you find yourself worrying about things in the future, say, “How fascinating!” Then take a deep breath and return to the now.
Just when you think the economic news couldn’t get much worse, it gets scarier. Confidence in the British economy is lower than it’s been in over half a century and that anxiety is stretching to other parts of the world.
Dara made her Olympic debut in 1984 as a 17-year-old. After winning four medals in three Olympic Games, she retired from competitive swimming in 1992 because she thought, at age 25, she was “too old.” But in 1999 she resumed training, re-entered Olympic competition, and left the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney with three bronze and two gold medals.
Though Dara would be the first to admit that “there are times when I feel 40 and I feel like there’s a piano on my back,” there are other times when she feels 20 and “just flying through the water.”
A secret is something that is not generally known by most people. Those who love their work and do it well all have certain characteristics. Check to see which of the following passion secrets is true about you.
I buy more books than I’ll ever read in my lifetime. Why? Because I know that all it takes is one idea read in a single book to transform the way you work - and the way you live. One idea. And so I buy books. Constantly. Passionately. Hungrily. Searching for that One Idea that will change the way I think/feel/behave and view the world. It’s never to late to find that book and to learn.
Brilliant people and brilliant companies are curious. They constantly scan the world around them. They scrutinize their efforts and results. They look within at their values. And they do it regularly. Quite simply they are wildly disciplined about asking the fundamental questions.
