Deception # 18: Distinguish Work/Play (That’s Why They Call It Work)

Business Week writer Liz Ryan accurately suggests the problem with the no fun all work mentality when she writes this tongue in cheek thought: “Here at Acme Explosives, our motto is, ‘Work’s not supposed to be fun.’ Our employees are highly qualified individuals who don’t choose to be here but come for the money. That level of commitment helps us ensure a moderate level of customer service at all times.”

Most of us tend to separate our lives into life stages of playing, learning, earning, and playing again as we move into retirement. The most successful people I know collapse it all together and never stop. The Pikes Place Fish Market in Seattle has built a whole workplace culture that turns a very tough job into play. In the last few years they have taken that philosophy and exported into hospitals, classrooms, and nearly every type of work environment you can imagine. I've personally visited Pikes Place Fish Market several times and then had the opportunity to watch people's eyes light up as they see the possibilities for their own work place. I’ve led workshops based on the “Fish Philosophy” and watched huge shifts in perspective and behavior. For an introduction, check out the book "FISH"!

Nicholas Lore is the creator of The Rockport Institute Career Choice Program in Rockville, Maryland. In his book The Pathfinder - How to Choose or Change Your Career for a Lifetime of Satisfaction and Success he shares a very useful Career Satisfaction Scale. Lore suggests there are generally 5 categories of career satisfaction, which he loosely places on a 0-10 Scale. What you see here is a description of the work as play people:

Level 10: Work Occurs As Passionate Play. His experience is that only about 10% of the U.S. Population fall into this category, not much different from the Gallop findings presented by Marcus Buckingham.

General Description: Looks forward to going to work. Work is seen as a vehicle for full self-expression, fun, and pleasurable. Difficulties are interpreted as positive challenges. Considerable personal growth and contribution to self-esteem is linked to work. There is very little distinction between work and the rest of life. Sense of purpose and making a difference. Uses talents fully. Work fits personality. Usually exhibits eagerness and alacrity.

Effect on Personal Life: Self-Actualized lifestyle. Generous with self, often participates in “service” to others. Loves life. Active participant in all aspects of life. Goes for the gusto, playful, high level of personal integrity. Self-esteem is very rarely an issue. Very significant increase in longevity and disease resistance.

Contribution to Workplace: Work is an expression of a clear personal purpose. Self generating. Does not need supervision. Very trustworthy. Will persist until objective is reached. Almost always contributes and is appropriate. Takes correction as an opportunity. The presence of a person living at this level raises others with whom he or she works.

Author and business owner Harvey Mackay understands the importance of collapsing work together with play very well. In his weekly column he writes:

"CEOs should appreciate the value of fun at work -- and they shouldn't reserve it just for themselves. The smart ones recognize the importance of a positive work environment which encourages fun.

For example, Microsoft founder Bill Gates was asked if he were graduating from college at that point, would he go to work for Microsoft or start his own company. After reminding the audience that he never graduated from college, Harvard's most famous dropout pointed out how incredibly important it is for companies to make work "as fun and interesting" as possible for employees.

When a management research company asked the employees at Southwest Airlines what mattered most about their jobs, they discovered that "having fun at work" was at the top of the list. More predictable items followed: "manage in the good times for the bad times, keep a warrior spirit, informal is comfortable, minimize paperwork, dare to be different and do whatever it takes."

I love this quote from motivational speaker Jody Urquhart. She says there are three ways to motivate people to work harder, faster and smarter: threaten them, pay them lots of money or make their work fun. She quickly eliminates the first two options as ineffective. But making their work fun, she says, "has a track record of effecting real change." Why? "Creativity, intuition and flexibility are key to successful operation of organizations today. In stimulating environments, employees enjoy their time at work and they will also excel at work. Attracting customers is easier in an environment of hospitality. A fun workplace is not only more productive, but it attracts people and profits."

“You have to pay the price for success” is still the mantra heard across America. But author/speaker Zig Ziglar wisely points out that “you actually pay the price for failure”. I think one of the biggest deceptions adults in particular labor under is that:

Play = Energizing
Work = Depleting

This is probably what most people experience at work. Some of us with church backgrounds actually justify this Biblically. We believe that work was introduced after the fall of Adam and Eve. But if you read the Biblical account closely we see that Adam was working quite happily before the fall. And if you believe that Jesus came to reverse what happened at the fall, then it must follow that we have a good shot at turning work into something that is energizing and fulfilling. That’s what this writing is about… How we can extend much of the mission of Jesus and make work the joy that God intended.

Your Moment of Truth: When operating in your strengths, work becomes play that energizes you.

Deception #17 Definitive Method Management - Taylorism (One Best Way)

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was a mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He is regarded by some as the father of scientific management and was one of the first to participate in the then new role of management consultant.

Taylor had very precise ideas about the way manufacturing should be performed with regard to both men and machines. He believed there was always “One Best Way” to do anything and that “Best Way” should always be employed. Taylor would break each individual manufacturing task down to it’s smallest component part and then in his famous stop-watch studies, time measure it to a hundredth of a minute. He decided that the most efficient shovel scoop weighed exactly 21.5 pounds and had shovels manufactured so that they would systematically scoop that amount.

Taylor also believed in transferring control from workers to management. He set out to increase the distinction between mental (planning work) and manual labor (executing work). Detailed plans specifying the job, and how it was to be done, were to be formulated by management and communicated to the workers.

I would argue that Taylor’s elitist thinking eventually led to America’s manufacturing decline. Compare this with Toyota’s management philosophy. Toyota grew on the belief that “there is always a new and better way”. And they believed that this new and better way would consistently come from the lowest level workers on the shop floor. Toyota consistently implemented over 1 million new ideas each year.

Although his own focus was on manufacturing, Taylor’s disregard for the individual spread to management outside of the manufacturing world as well. Sales organizations would adopt this philosophy teaching precisely scripted selling presentations. And we are still ridding ourselves of “One Best Way” thinking well into the knowledge, information, and creative economies of today.

Virginia Satir was one of the leading therapists in America for many years. She maintained that there existed 250 different ways to wash the dishes. I am the dishwasher in our family fallowing in the footsteps of my Grandpa Cobb who washed the dishes for my grandmother every night. I don’t know about 250 ways but I do know there are many ways to succeed at this task in a reasonably efficient manner. Anyone’s best way may depend on a lot of factors.

Most workplace training and development programs are built around what is theoretically “universal”. The strengths revolution is finally moving us toward training and development built around what makes us “unique”. This is a giant step forward with regard to both our success and satisfaction at work.

Your Moment of Truth: Replace “the best way” with “your best way”.

Deception #16 Done It Before - Work Experience

What's keeping you from using your strengths in the work place? Many job searchers are fixating on what they have done in the past and not on their greatest potential. To be fair employers share a lot of the blame on this point.

I spent the week with a gentleman who works as an HR Professional for one of the countries largest and well-known financial service companies. He is frustrated with his own companies reluctance to "In-Source", to look for talent within the organization. The focus on work history can be so debilitating to employee and employer alike costing both in terms of economic growth.

I’ll get help from Marcus Buckingham along with Co-Author Curt Coffman on this one from their management book, First Break All The Rules. This book is based on Gallop interviews with over 80,000 managers in over 400 companies. Buckingham and Coffman comment on the ill-advised strategy of managers who select base solely on experience:

“Manager’s who place a special emphasis on experience pay closest attention to a candidates work history. They pore over each person’s resume, rating the companies who employed him and the kind of work they performed. They see his past as a window to the future.”

Buckingham and Coffman agree that experience can teach valuable lessons… but it fails to take into account the many kinds of talents required to get a job done. Conventional wisdom often suggests that somehow managers can teach talent, or at least teach skills that might somehow make up for talent.

From my perspective in managing for several years in a well known national company, this is acerbated by the fact that few organizations prepare their managers with tools that give any kind of a window into a perspective applicants actual natural talents. Work sampling would be one possibility. Having an applicant perform same or similar task simulations would be one way to get additional helpful insight. Talent oriented interviewing strategies would be another.

Strengths Oriented Interviewing is on the rise in most Western Countries. Marcus Buckingham’s Strong Manager Program teaches a whole recruiting strategy including how to build an ad and how to conduct an interview designed to uncover underlying natural talent and strengths. Many top companies are doing this including Google, Facebook and Accenture. Earnst & Young has a set of recruiting pages devoted to recruiting strengths. You can see them here:

http://ukstudentstories.ey.com/yourstrengths/default.shtml

Scroll down in the left column of this blog and find sections titled “Strengths-Based Recruiting” and “Strengths-Based Interviewing” if you’d like to get a better sense of what’s happening out there.

John Wooden was perhaps the greatest basketball coach of all-time…arguably the greatest sports coach of all-time. Wooden said, “I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.”

Amen.

Deception #15 Depressing Job Statistics

In some countries, the number of job seekers is reaching unheard-of proportions. Ireland and Spain, two of the worse cases, are on their way to a 20% unemployment rate. Some American Counties face the same grim statistics. Merced County in California is just up the road from me. They found themselves a lead story in USA Today with unemployment figures hovering around 19%. In fact most of the counties around me including my own are at least in the 15% category. As part of Road to Jobs we had a booth set up at our local career fair. I only spent a few minutes because I had appointments set up on the coast. But just that few minutes almost hurled me into a panic attack. The convention center floor was wall-to-wall people looking for jobs.

The depressing job statistics deceive many people into believing that no one is being hired in this economy. But 162,000 Americans got hired in March 2010 alone, this at the height of the recession.

If you have work, count your blessings even if it’s not your ideal gig!!!! If you are un-employed at the moment don’t panic. As the above numbers show, thousands of people are still being hired, just make sure you are doing everything you can to be one of them. Mass un-employment is a phenomenon that results from major economic shits. Don’t take it personally. Just get into action.

How you handle the job statistics will somewhat governed by your unique goals, needs, and circumstances as well as the unique conditions in your area. Are you looking for Cash, a Career, or a Calling in this season of your life? Ideally these all come together in one nice job package but in the real world you sometimes have to pull them in one at a time.
Here are some thoughts:

1. Go Where The Jobs Are! While jobs are being lost in certain areas and sectors of the economy, go to the places where you stand a better chance. Don’t waste a lot of time trying to find work in companies that are falling apart.

2. Be Relentless In Your Search! Don't post your resume in two places, try ten or twenty. Call up ten to twenty companies per day, ask to talk to their human resources manager, and present your skills.

3. Package Yourself Perfectly! Polish your resume and your shoes. Polish everything. This is a time to “Kick It Up A Notch”. Ask for feedback on your presentation.

4. Make Special Offers! Offer to work the swing shift. Go to the location nobody wants. Propose a reduced introductory salary. Whatever you do… make sure you have made it very clear when you really want to work somewhere. This is not a season to be coy. Follow up...even a few weeks after you didn’t get the job. Often an employer’s first choice doesn’t work out the way they’d hoped. If you are waiting in the wings and easily accessible you might get a shot just because the person in charge of hiring doesn’t want to go through whole publicizing and interviewing process again.

In our Road 2 Jobs program almost 90% of those who completed our one-week program found work, on average within 10 days. Many our clients had huge hurdles to overcome including parole restrictions. Don’t give up! You can still find work.

Your Moment of Truth: People Are Being Hired Somewhere in Every Economy!

Deception #14 In-Demand Careers (Hot Jobs)

I am in a series of posts describing different mindsets, obstacles, and reasons people get stuck working for long periods of time far outside their circle of talent or strengths. Some of these are personal, some are familial, some are cultural. This particular deception sounds so good and seems to make so much sense. It is even pushed by some well-meaning career counselors.

Here is one of many such "Hot Jobs" list found in newspapers, magazines, placement offices, and the internet:

Career possibility #1: Personal/Home Health Aide
Career possibility #2: Medical Assistants.
Career possibility #3: Mental Health Counselors/Social Workers.
Career possibility #4: Network Systems and Data Communications Analysts.
Career possibility #5: Computer Software Applications Engineers.
Career possibility #6: Teacher.
Career possibility #7: Paralegal/Legal Assistant.
Career possibility #8: Financial Services.
Career possibility #9: Accountants and Auditors.
Career possibility #10: Employment Services.

The problems with using this type of list are many, but let me share just two:

1. By following the educational career path suggested to reach some of these jobs, they may no longer be in demand once you complete school. In fact, if enough people follow this strategy, that the career may actually be over supplied with applicants once you are job ready.

2. But for our purposes there is an even greater reason. It relies heavily on Trap # 9… that anyone can do anything. You may not have the talent to excel in one these areas. And if you do have the talent, you may not have the passion which drives the commitment to get really good.

Your Moment of Truth: Forget about the “hot jobs” and get in touch with what burns inside you!

#13 Degree Deceptions (Including Generalized Intelligence, Academic Scorecards, and College)

Each of these could be considered an individual deception but they so often come packaged together that I will treat them as a connected group. I’m going to start with what I consider to be a wise quote from Warren Buffet. “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut”. Of course the implication is that they will always say yes because they have a vested interest in the answer.

I recently had a coaching session with a college recruiter. One thing that came out during that session was the amount of pressure he was under to meet a quota of students enrolled in a graduate program. This guy was an honest hard-worker who I’m confident placed his potential students above his universities need to keep enrollments up. But make sure you keep Warren Buffet’s comment in mind when you decide to purchase an education.

By most accounts inside and outside, our educational system is broken. Forty years ago the United States had the number one educational system in the world. As I write this we stand at nineteenth. Approximately 6,000 kids drop out of high school every day. I have had numerous friends that work as educators. The reports of chaos and fighting are frightening… and that’s just the administrators. What they have to deal with in the classroom in beyond belief. What should be environments of help and hope toward a better future have become dungeons of discouragement and despair. And these are the people that claim to hold the keys to our children’s future.

The system is so flawed it’s hard to know where to start. There are pockets of greatness springing up all over the country. A teacher here, a school there, and even occasionally we see a whole school district excelling. But I want to address 3 flaws that we rarely here discussed in any forum on educational reform.

The first is generalized intelligence testing that has often come packaged as the Stanford-Binet which I believe is now in it’s 5th version. Although it is designed to access 5 areas including Fluid Reasoning, Knowledge, Quantitative Reasoning, Visual-Spatial Processing, and Working Memory it still cuts a very narrow swath in terms of possible talents that can be productively applied in ways that could make both a contribution to society and earn substantial income. As Harvard Professor Howard Gardener likes to point out, the Stanford-Binet and tests like it tend to erroneously ask, “How smart are you?” instead of the more helpful question, “How are you smart?” This simple reorganization of 4 words has enormous implications. The solution, which is already showing up in the more progressive learning institutions is the adoption of “Multiple Intelligence” concepts and methods in the classroom. If you have children of any age, don’t wait to develop a working knowledge of these ideas. A good primer for the uninitiated is Thomas Armstrong’s Seven Kinds of Smart.

The second opportunity for ref ore is Academic Scorecards, specifically the SAT, which is a college entrance exam. Educator Jennifer Fox reports:

“Since 1983, U.S. News and World Report magazine has ranked America’s 100 Best Colleges. This publication has changed the way parents and students choose institutions of higher education, leading them to believe that the value of a college degree is only as good as its brand name. For the past twenty-five years, this annual ranking system has almost guaranteed that SAT scores are considered the most important factor in college admission. In reality, SAT scores remain a notoriously poor measure of both student ability and likelihood of success in college.”

For a more thorough discussion of SAT’s I recommend Chapter 3 of Fox’s book Your Child’s Strengths. But my main concern is that the SAT like general intelligence testing focuses way too narrowly and leaves many children out who are very talented in ways not measured by this instrument.

My third topic of this education trap drives back to Buffet’s comment about “never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” Let me cut to the chase. The snobbery in education is appalling to me. We see it in many forms. There are Public School Snobs who insist that they are necessary. There are Private School Snobs who insist that only they provide a superior educational experience that will catapult your child forward to a place that will insure success. And there are the College and University Snobs who consistently suggest that you can’t succeed or be a productive member of society without jumping through the sometimes ridiculous ceremonious hoops.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I believe a good education is critical in establishing the foundation for success. I’m just suggesting that our institutions aren’t as good or as necessary as they think they are in providing this foundation. And in many cases they actually confound, confuse, and destroy initiative and hope.

If you believe a college degree is a pre-requisite for success let me drop a few names on you. Each of the following either dropped out or never attended college in the first place:
Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Richard Branson, Lawrence Ellison, Kirk Kerkorian, David Geffen, John Richard Simplot, Theodore W. Waitt, Wayne Huizenga, Ralph Lauren, Joseph Albertson, Michael Dell, Stephen Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Harry Truman, Frank Sinatra, Tony Robbins, Erik Erickson, Eric Hoffer, Andy Rooney, Peter Jennings, Barry Diller.

Many of them are billionaires. All of them have been off the charts successful. And this is only a partial list of some of the more famous names. I have quite a file going on these people. I could go on by telling you about the University of Chicago study that reports that those with college degrees have less sex and that those with post-graduate degrees have the least sex of all. I could tell you about the 500,000 you would have in the bank at age 50 if you took your college $120,000 college education fund and invested it in a meager municipal bond paying only 5%. I could tell you about the fuzzy math educrats use to convince you that your earnings will be higher if you get a college degree. But I won’t...

Again, I’m not saying don’t go to college or don’t get a degree. In many cases college is a very useful step. In some cases like medicine it is a necessary step. College can also be a great place to explore and discover your passion. Use school and college as one tool in your bag on the road to a good education built around your unique talents.

If you drop out of school make sure you drop in on some other kind of continued education for the rest of your life. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College but he didn't stop taking courses at a university. He followed his natural curiosity and spent 18 months taking classes on Calligraphy and Fonts. These design courses later figured heavily in the directions Apple would take.

"Course Correction" or "Coarse Correction" is on the way. The internet is forcing it. According to yesterday's Week-End Edition of the Wall Street Journal, University's are beginning to hand out "merit badges" for specific kinds of course work short of a degree. This will allow students to focus developing areas of talent rather than struggle through classes dispensing information they will never use. Even top schools like MIT are jumping on this bandwagon offering credit for completing this type of short program.

Your Moment of Truth: Focus on education that develops your natural talent into full blown strengths while staying wary of the education systems sometimes self-serving hoops.

#12 The Dollar Deceptions (“You Can’t Make Any Money At That”)

Both The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko and the follow up book The Millionaire Mind penned only by Stanley were well-researched, well-documented material on the background and behaviors of the wealthy in the United States. They both had a number of good useable principles and clearly communicated that most wealth is generated by great work as opposed to good investments.

But two points jumped off the pages at me. In The Millionaire Mind Stanley did the homework on how millionaires in this country selected their careers and line of work. Overwhelming, when given all kinds of options they said they chose based on aptitude. In other words their own understanding of their individual strengths drove their decision far more than any other factor.

The second point was the shear number of different types of businesses the self-employed millionaires came from. Our culture would have us believe that only a few kinds of work really offer an opportunity for economic success. Look at the different kinds of businesses that produced millionaire status:

Accountant, Accounting/Auditing Services, Advertising Agency, Advertising Specialty Distributor, Advertising/Marketing Advisor, Aerospace Consultant, Agriculture, Ambulance Service, Antique Sales, Apartment Complex Owner/Manager, Apparel Manufacturer-Sportswear, Apparel Manufacturer-Infant Wear, Apparel Manufacturer-Ready To Wear, Apparel Retailer-Wholesaler-Ladies Fashions, Artist Commercial, Attorney, Attorney-Entertainment Industry, Attorney-Real Estate, Auctioneer. Auctioneer-Appraiser, Audio/Video Reproduction, Author-Fiction, Author-Text Books/Training Manuals, Automotive Leasing, Baked Goods Producer, Beauty Solon(s) Owner Manager, Beer Wholesaler, Beverage Machinery Manufacturer, Bovine Semen Distributor, Brokerage/Sales, Builder, Builder/Real Estate Developer, Business/Real Estate Broker/Investor, Cafeteria Owner, Candy/Tobacco Wholesaler, Caps/Hats Manufacturer, Carpet Manufacturer, Citrus Fruits Farmer, Civil Engineer and Surveyor, Clergyman-Lecturer, Clinical Psychologist, Coin and Stamp Dealer, Commercial Laundry Commercial Real Estate Management, Commercial Laboratory, Commercial Property Management, Commodity Brokerage Company, Computer Consultant, Computer Applications Consultant, Construction, Construction Equipment Dealer, Construction Equipment Manufacturing, Construction-Mechanical/Electrical, Construction Performance Insurance, Consultant, Consulting Geologist, Contract Feeding, Contractor, Convenience Food Stores Owner, Cotton Gin Operator, Cotton Farmer, Cotton Ginning Owner/Manager, CPA/Broker, CPA/Financial Planner, Curtain Manufacturer, Dairy Farmer, Dairy Products Manufacturer, Data Services, Dentist, Dentist-Orthodontist, Department Store Owner, Design/Engineering/Builder, Developer/Construction,
Diesel Engine Rebuilder/Distributor, Direct Mail Services, Direct Marketing, Direct Marketing Service Organization, Display and Fixture Manufacturer, Donut Maker Machine Manufacturer, Electrical Supply Wholesaler, Employment Agency Owner/Manager, Energy Production Engineer/Consultant, Energy Consultant, Engineer/Architect, Excavation Contractor, Excavation/Foundation Contracting, Executive Transportation/Bodyguard Service, Farmer, Fast Food Restaurants, Financial Consultant, Florist Retailer/Wholesaler, Freight Agent, Fruit and Vegetable Distributor, Fuel Oil Dealer, Fuel Oil Distributor, Fund Raiser/Consultant, Funeral Home Operator, Furniture Manufacturing, General Agent Insurance Agency, General Contractor, Grading Contractor, Grocery Wholesaler, Grocery Store Retailer, Heat Transfer Equipment Manufacturer, Home Health Care Service, Home Builder/Developer, Home Repair/Painting, Home Furnishings, Horse Breeder, Human Resources Consulting Services, Import-Export, Independent Investment Manager, Independent Insurance Agency, Industrial Laundry/Dry Cleaning Plant, Industrial Chemicals-Cleaning/Sanitation Manufacture, Information Services, Installations Contractor. Insurance Agent, Insurance Agency Owner, Insurance Adjusters, Investment Management, Irrigated Farm Land Realtor-Lessee, Janitorial Services Contractor, Janitorial Supply-Wholesaler Distributor, Janitorial Contractor, Jewelry Retailer/Wholesaler, Job Training/Vocational Tech School Owner, Koolin Mining-Processing-Sales, Kitchens and Bath Distributor, Labor Arbitrator, Labor Negotiator, Laminated and Coated Paper Manufacturer, Land Planning, Designing, Engineering, Lawyer-Personal Injury, Lecturer, Liquor Wholesaler, Loan Broker, Long-term Care Facilities, Machine Design, Machine Tool Manufacturing, Managed Care Facilities Owner, Management Consulting, Manufactured Housing, Manufacturer-Woman’s Foundation Wear, Marina Owner/Repair Service, Marketing/ Sales Professional, Marketing Services, Marketing Consultant, Mattress/Foundation Manufacturer, Meat Processor, Mechanical Contractor, Medical Research, Merchant, Micro-Electronics, Mobile-Home Park Owner, Mobile-Home Dealer, Motion Picture Production, Motor Sports Promoter Marketing Consultant, Mattress/Foundation Manufacturer, Meat Processor, Mechanical Contractor, Medical Research, Merchant, Micro-Electronics, Mobile-Home Park Owner, Mobile-Home Dealer, Motion Picture Production, Motor Sports Promoter, Moving and Storage, Newsletter Publisher, Non-Profit Trade Association Manager, Nursing Home,Office Furnishings, Office Temp Recruiting Service, Office Park Developer, Office Supply Wholesaler, Oil/Gas Company Owner, Orthopedic Surgeon, Oversize Vehicle Escort Service, Owner/College President, Paint Removal/Metal Cleaning, Patent Owner/Inventor, Paving Contractor, Pest Control Services, Petroleum Engineering Consulting Services, Pharmaceuticals, Pharmacist, Physical and Speech Therapy Company, Physician, Physician-Anesthesiologist, Physician-Dermatologist, Physicist-Inventor, Pizza Restaurant Chain Owner, Plastic Surgeon, Poultry Farmer, President/Owner Mutual Fund, Printing-Self Storage-Farming, Printing, Private Schooling, Property Owner/Developer, Public Relations/Lobbyist, Publisher of Newsletters, Publishing, Race Track/Speedway Operator, Radiologist, Rancher, Real Estate Agency Owner, Real Estate Broker, Real Estate Developer, Real Estate Investment Trust-Manager, Real Estate/Broker/Developer/Finacier, Real Estate Auctioneer, Real Estate, Restaurant Owner, Retail Jeweler, Retail Chain-Women’s Ready-to-Wear, Retail Store/Personnel Service, Rice Farmer, Sales Agent, Sales Representative Agency, Salvage Merchandiser, Sand Blasting Contractor, Sand and Gravel, Scrap Metal Dealer, Seafood Distributor, Seafood Wholesaler, Service Station Chain Owner, Ship Repair-Dry Dock, Sign Manufacturer, Soft Drink Bottler, Software Development, Specialty Steel Manufacturer, Specialty Oil Food Importer/Distributor, Specialty Tools Manufacturer, Specialty Fabric Manufacturer, Speculator in Distressed Real Estate, Stock Broker, Store Owner, Tax Consultant/Attorney, Technical Consultant/Scientific Worker, Technical/Scientific Worker, Textile Engineering Services, Timber Farmer, Tool Engineer, Tradesman, Trading Company, Transportation/Freight Management, Travel Agency Owner/Manager, Travel Agency Owner, Truck Stop(s) Owner, Trustee Advisor, Tug (Boat) Services Owner, Vegetables Farmer, Vehicle Engines & Parts Wholesaler, Water Supply Contracting, Welding Contracting, Welding Supply Distributor, Wholesale/Distribution, Wholesale/Distributor, Wholesale Grocery, Wholesale Produce, Wholesale Photo Franchiser, Xerox Sales/Service

Now, if you read that list carefully I already know what you’re thinking… especially if you are a Willie Nelson fan. Nowhere on that list of millionaires did you see cowboy. But how many times, as you were reading the list did you raise an eyebrow? How many items were there, that you didn't even know that type of work existed? Keep in mind this isn't a list of hot opportunities. It's a reminder of the shear diversity of talent and ways to leverage it into living.

Your Moment of Truth: The only way you are likely earn a lot of money is to find your unique strengthspath and stay on it!

Deception #11 The Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys (The Parental Desire Problem)

I'm in a series of posts working through answers to the question: "What's keeping us stuck?" "Why are we in careers that make such poor use of our natural talents and aptitudes?" I've identified about 20 places people in our culture get deceived. If you have parents, are a parent, or somehow operate in a parental type roll, pay careful attention to this one.

Many would question or affirm the wisdom found in the lyrics of Country and Western Music probably depending on their appreciation of the style. With all do respect to Willie Nelson who sings Don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys… make ‘em be doctors and lawyers and such… maybe we need to rethink that verse.

Jack and Suzy Welch tell a story in their book Winning that represents this trap very well. A student was about to graduate from Harvard and he set up an appointment to get career advice from one of Jack’s friends who was very familiar with investment banking and management consulting. His friend reported that she answered each question the young man had very thoroughly and he took good notes but that he wasn’t especially curious about anything. After about 30 minutes he thanked her politely and stood up to leave. As he did this, he stuck his note pad inside a folder and she noticed that it was totally covered with very detailed drawings of cars.

“Wow, those are amazing! Who did them?” she asked.

In the blink of an eye the student was full of energy as he said, “I did—I’m always drawing cars… my dorm room is covered with posters and paintings of cars—I subscribe to every car magazine! I’ve been obsessed with cars since I was five years old. My whole life, I’ve wanted to be a car designer. That’s why I’m always going to car shows and NASCAR races. I went to Indianapolis last year—I drove there!”

Jack’s friend tried to convince the student that he actually belonged in Detroit or working for a car company. But she said he deflated just as quickly as he had come to life a few minutes earlier.

“My dad says the car business is not what I went to Harvard for.”

She wasn’t surprised when she bumped into the father a few months later and he proudly told her that his son was working 80 hour weeks at a Wall Street firm.

Jack Welch continues, “I know someone who literally became a doctor because his entire childhood his mother—a Polish Immigrant who loved the American Dream—introduced him by saying, “And here’s my doctor!” He didn’t hate the profession, but you’ve never met anyone more eager to retire. Welch summarizes his thoughts with this: “Working to fulfill someone else’s needs or dreams almost always catches up to you.”

Isaac Newton followed his inner pull and became a world class physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and theologian. Imagine if he had followed his mother’s desire that he run the family farm. Dvorak and Handel were world class composers. Dvorak’s father wanted him to become a butcher and Handel’s father hoped that he would pursue law.

If you are a parent your role should be one of objectively trying your best to help your child discover their own unique design, passions, talents and then support them relentlessly in their pursuit. If you are a child of a pushy parent, adult or otherwise, it’s critical that you respectfully listen to their viewpoint and then go on to be about following the trail of gifts and desires God has placed deep inside.

I love the Amplified Bible’s Translation of Proverbs 22:6

“Train up a child in the way he should go [and in keeping with his individual gift or bent], and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

There are probably a variety of reasons parents push their kids toward work that is often unsuited for them. Some parents want to continue building their business and legacy. Some parents are trying to live their lives vicariously through their children. If I had a son, I’m sure I would have nudged him pretty hard toward baseball, hoping he could do what I didn’t. For some it may be pride, for others security. Mother’s may be particularly inclined to push their kids in the direction of jobs that they feel are “secure” especially if a father or a spouse didn’t provide what they considered a level of security. Sometimes parents just think they know better. Maybe occasionally they do...

Each new generation provides new challenges for parents. I remember growing up reading the biography of baseball great Ty Cobb who is still on anybody’s short list of top players of all time. His father wasn’t thrilled about his son’s passion for baseball, believing it to be a complete waste of time with no future. With today’s multi million dollar salaries most parents take a gentler view of baseball as a career choice today. I grew up in a church sub-culture where film, stage, and secular music careers would have been seriously frowned upon. We pretty much withdrew from, Hollywood, Nashville, and Broadway.

But, what about video gaming?

What about snow boarding and skate boarding?

What about MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) or Synthetic Universe Games like Eve?

Before you judge to quickly I recommend Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete by Byron Reeves and J. Leighton Read.

I don’t have all the answers. I recognize that some of these new options have sub-cultures that are fraught with danger and if you are a parent you have every right to be concerned. Just be careful you don’t let your fear keep your son or daughter from the career God designed them for.

Deception #10 The Dead End Job - Version 4

The Agriculture Version

I live in an agricultural area. When you think about California, many things probably come to mind. Sunny and 77. The beaches. The crazies. Hollywood. But I live in the heart of California where farming and ranching is king.


In my town, there is a saying, “Smells Like Money”. We have a dairy on every corner. No matter what part of town you live in, depending on whether you are upwind or downwind, some days it’s going to smell like money. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m referring to the manure that always accompanies dairy farming.

My grandfather moved to Central California in the 1920’s. He came to work as a farm laborer. They lived in tents. Today they would have been considered homeless. But my grandfather had a dream and honestly, he was a bit of a genius.

My grandfather’s job was tending a fairly young walnut orchard. He went to his employer and asked if he could plant cotton in between the rows of trees and work it on his time off. His employer agreed, and that’s how he got his start in farming. My grandfather loved farming and I still have memories of traveling around with him in his pick up truck setting water and checking the cotton. To this day, seeing really healthy cotton gives me a positive emotional charge.

My grandfather took that seed money profit and bought some land. Then he bought some more land. His dream was to have one piece of property to leave to each of his kids, which he accomplished before he passed away. He also had phenomenal mechanical aptitudes. He was an inventor who invented farm equipment and had several patents to his name.

Nice story, what’s my point? Today, like retail, like fast food, like working with your hands, agriculture is sometimes looked down upon as a way to make a living. I think the opportunities are still there. But many over look the opportunities because all they see is a dead end farm labor job.

I received an email recently from Michael Senoff. Actually, Michael is a marketing genius and I get an email from him everyday. But that’s a different story for a different day. Michael sent me an attachment with his email that told a story about a man who grew up on a fruit tree farm. As a teenager he was set up with a little fruit stand to make some extra money. He had a knack for it, and just kept trying out new ways to improve sales. He experimented with location, signage, everything. Over time he came up with a very successful system. Then he started hiring people to man the stands and multiplying the whole operation. He spells out the system in pretty great detail in this link where you can choose to either listen to the interview or download a pdf transcript:

http://www.hardtofindseminars.com/Fruit_Guy_Interview.htm

Here’s my point. What I absolutely know, is that you and I have been blind to 100’s of opportunities to make a lot of money doing something we are talented to do because it was hidden behind a type of work that we have been deceived into believing had no potential. How many times have you and I both driven by a fruit stand imagining that the owner was struggling to get by?

Don’t rush out and start a fruit stand. Don’t go out and buy a cow. Just don’t over look an opportunity that you are drawn toward because you are “sure” you couldn’t make a living doing that. And maybe even more important, don’t discourage your kids from pursuing something that they are drawn to because you can’t imagine a good income. And that leads us to the next “Deception”….

Deception #10 The Dead End Job - Version 3

The Work With Your Hands Version

I never worked in fast food or as a clerk in retail but I spent many years working with my hands. I did this first in my dad’s construction business, then in my own small plaster/stucco business, and finally as a wall covering contractor. The last gig went on for almost 10 years until I reached my early 30’s. I was surrounded with talent, some of it world class, and I sought some of them out as mentors and coaches. One of them was Larry Spitler, an insanely great wall covering installer who traveled all over the country putting together teams that did installations on huge Las Vegas Hotels, commercial buildings, and high end homes. Once he came and helped me install a 300 dollar per roll hand screened silk from Thailand.

The reality was that I seemed to inherit almost none of the aptitude for the environment I was planted in although it seemed so rich with opportunity. I left working with my hands in 1991 and never looked back. One thing I learned is there is abundant opportunity to build a lucrative career working with your hands if you have the aptitude and passion for it. But the opportunity is never enough. Another thing I learned is that there is a considerable bias in this culture against working with our hands regardless of the opportunity it may afford those so wired. I could feel this bias viscerally in the smallest interaction with the bank teller on days I made deposits and withdrawls in my stellar white wall covering uniform. The days I banked in nice casual clothing or even a suit brought slightly different but discernably better treatment.

Matthew Crawford digs into this bias deeply, first in an article he wrote for New York Times Magazine… and then in the book Shop Class as Soul Craft. Crawford writes:

“High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straight forwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind.”

But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers.

The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car, because they are in India.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.”

The article continues. I encourage you to follow the article link and even pick up the book.

And his web site is www.matthewbcrawford.com

Deception #10 The Dead End Job - Version 2

The Retail Store Clerk Version

Close behind flipping burgers would be the almost equally maligned “retail store clerk”. Marcus Buckingham shares the inspiring story of Tami Heim in his fantastic book, The One Thing You Need To Know. Buckingham begins:


Tami always had a fascination with stores. So great was her fascination that by the age of twelve she knew she wanted to go into retail. Actually, that is not entirely true. She started playing store with her friends much earlier than that. But it was only as she reached age twelve that she started talking about it seriously.

She was urged by her uncle, at age sixteen, to test out her fascination by apply at a local department store. She applied at Lazarus in her hometown of Indianapolis. She was told they weren’t hiring any part timers, but because she was unclear what part-time meant she sat in the waiting room all day in hopes she would get hired. She was finally granted an interview with the operations manager and her passion won him over.

At first she got all the tough jobs to show her that retail in real life wasn’t all fun and games. But Tami says she was addicted from the get go. She loved the immediate feed back of retail where if you change or move a display you can see right away if it worked. She loved the theater of it, the drama of every day putting on a show for thousands of customers. As she puts it, “I just couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than coming in every day and having a chance to do that.”

She worked at the store all the way through high school and through her years studying retail management at Purdue University. After graduation she was placed in a management training program and steadily moved up through the ranks from department manager, to manager of a small store, then manager of a larger store. There were setbacks along the way. Her parent company went into bankruptcy but through it all she maintained her passion.

Then one day Borders called. She was first hired as one of there territorial vice-presidents responsible for the western U.S. Only two years later she was asked to assume the role of company president. During her tenure profits shot up and the stock price grew 66%.

Let’s establish once and for all, the only dead end job is the one you are not talented for and passionate about.

Patrick McCarthy arrived at a then small regional seven-store retail chain in 1971 at the age of 26. He had found his former job as a prison counselor frustrating and mentally draining and was looking for something he might have a better aptitude for.

Unfortunately he was ill prepared for the job and as he says, “I made every mistake in the book”. As a beginner in the men’s clothing department he knew nothing about clothes and had know personal style. He wore his shirts too big, he didn’t know how to fold garments for display, and knew nothing of how to coordinate color and texture. Worse...after working at Nordstrom for less than two years, he had developed a reputation for being uncooperative, hard to manage, and not a team player.

But then things began to shift. He found a mentor by the name of Ray Black. A manager by the name of Patrick Kennedy took McCarthy under his wing and began to develop him. McCarthy says, about his 7th year his business started to come together an take off. At one point his client list included 40 lawyers from one firm alone.

After 30 years Patrick McCarthy retired in 2001 as Nordstrom’s All-Time Top Salesman. In fact… for 15 consecutive years, he was the number one salesperson through out the entire chain. If you feel a tug toward retail, I can think of no better primer than a book he co-wrote with Robert Spector titled The Nordstrom Way.

Deception #10 The Dead End Job

The Dead End Job Trap is pervasive in today’s American culture and it comes in at least 4 versions. We believe that certain jobs have no future. But as cultural architect, Erwin McManus states, “your future is within you”.

I believe there are people wandering around disconnected from their unique destiny because they assimilated this deception. They were hoping to do something important with their life like play basketball or become a rocket scientist all the while their true genius lays in fast food operations or retail or somehow working with their hands. They could have been working at the C-Suite level at In n Out if they had just been willing to start flipping burgers. They could have been working at the C-Suite level at Nordstrom had they just been willing to fold and stock clothes. They could have owned their own Harley-Davidson dealership had they just been willing to get their hands greasy on a motorcycle chain. Or they could have set up a very successful farming operation had they believed it was worth starting in the fields. Let’s look at some people who were willing.

The Fast-Food Version

Probably no job is more maligned than working at a fast food restaurant. Most of us assume this job is beneath us and in many cases beneath our kids. With this in mind I clipped a lengthy article from my local newspaper back in 1996 and saved it away in a file. The article described the career of Susan Steele:

“When Susan Steele began her climb up the corporate ladder, there was one question she repeated day after days: “Will there be fries with that?” That’s because the first rung on her climb was a job at a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant in Phoenix in 1972. Today, as vice president in charge of the chain’s Bay Area region she sits in her headquarters office in north San Jose, responsible for 500 corporate-owned McDonald’s outlets and 5,000 employees. Her question: ‘Why all the put-downs of fast-food jobs?

We resent it when people say, ‘You don’t want to end up flipping hamburgers all your life.’
Steel started out after graduating early from high school making milk shakes and from there moved to the front counter. She gently pushed to work the grill, which was in those days a male dominated job. She enjoyed it so much she changed her plans to pursue literature in college and put her initial career goal of teaching school on hold.

By age 19, she was newly married and supervising workers. She bootstrapped her way to swing manager and then moved into the salaried assistant manager ranks. “I made the decision not to continued community college when I was promoted to first assistant manager. I was thinking, ‘I really like this. I’m going to do this for a while.’” Five years after she mixed her first milk shake she was given her own restaurant to manage. Successful there, she was then asked to open a new McDonald’s. She was promoted to field supervisor over seeing relations with owner-operated restaurants in the region and then went to Chicago to teach classes at Hamburger University.

Then came a move to San Diego working as director of operations and then the move to San Jose overseeing the entire Bay Area. At that juncture she had become an officer of the company. Steele states, “I finally made that, in the time frame I’d set for myself. All the way along I had precise goals. I wanted to be at a certain place by a certain date, and I wanted to be very good at it when I got there, not just have a title.”

Can you say “Mcopportunity?” There are no dead end jobs… only dead end approaches and dead end attitudes!

Deception #9: If You Can Dream It You Can Do It

It's time to give up checkers!

Let me explain...


The idea that “If you can dream it you can do it” may not be uniquely American but it is a huge piece of our natural psyche. This one often comes disguised as “The American Dream”. It is the idea that any one can do anything they want to. It’s roots are deeply imbedded in Tabula Rasa (Latin: blank slate) which refers to the thesis that individual human beings are born with no built-in mental content, in a word, "blank", and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world. It is supported by many psychological theories including American psychologist-educator-inventor-poet B.F Skinner who established his own philosophy called Radical Behaviorism.

Skinner believed and taught immediate positive and negative reinforcement. He supported the idea that with proper behavioral objectives and feedback everyone should be able to learn anything and everything. Strengths in Education expert Jennifer Fox suggests this is a philosophy permeates education today. Fox says our system is founded on the belief that, “that given the right amount of learning in a small enough dose, everyone can master the entire curriculum.”

It only follows that this idea is also deeply imbedded in our places of work. Motivational experts who espouse theories like Neuro-Linguistic Programming (Brain Language Programming) canonize a primary pre-supposition, “If one person can do something, anyone can do it”. It is rampant in all kinds of sales organizations. Network marketers often teach that with hard work, anyone can be successful at selling.

The problem is that they seem to be ignoring loads of evidence and research that balance and complete the conclusions they present. Let me sum up this body of work on behaviorism: “Talent and innate aptitude is of very little or no importance when it comes to world class performance. Desire, deliberate practice, and supportive environments over time, lead to world class performance.”

In other words, they take a checkers position in a chess world! In some ways this simplifies management and throws us back into a world of “If you’re not performing, you either have a bad attitude or aren’t working hard or smart enough”. The problem is that this line of thinking is simply incomplete and will lead millions to frustration and often failure.

Dr. K. Anders Ericsson is a Swedish psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who is recognized by some as one of the world's leading theoretical and experimental researchers on expertise. Ericsson is the current leader in perpetuating the checkers myth. His thoughts on innate talent can be summed up here:

“With the exception of fixed genetic factors determining body size and height, we were unable to find evidence for innate constraints to the attainment of elite achievement for healthy individuals.”

I believe that educators, Skinner, and a host of motivational speakers have significant value in inspiring people to reach their full potential and I am indebted to many of them. In Ericsson’s case he has uncovered some critical details that would help anyone develop innate talent. But we must move from the checkers mentality to a chess mentality. What is the essential difference between checkers and chess? Many would answer, “Chess is more complicated than Checkers”. Surely this is one right answer. But why is it more complicated? One reason is that there are multiple pieces in chess with each having different abilities to move on the board. The Rook moves in straight lines. The Bishop moves diagonally and the Knight moves in an “L” shape. In checkers all the pieces are the same. We live in a chess world and always have.

Motivator Zig Ziglar acknowledged this in some of his talks around the country. Often Zig has shared, “I don’t believe I could get in the ring with Mohammed Ali and win a boxing match no matter how hard I train… I’m too old, too slow, and too fat.” Most of us recognize this truth in the realm of physical talent. We don’t try to put 7 foot basketball players on horses and make them jockeys. We don’t try to make basketball centers out of 5 foot jockeys. We just need to realize that it extends far more widely than most of us realize. Zig rightly inspires us:

“Man is designed for accomplishment, engineered for success, endowed with the seeds of greatness.”

I couldn’t agree more. But we are designed differently, engineered uniquely, and each endowed with seeds that bloom in different shades and colors and hues.

The Dream Happens When We:

1. Discover our unique natural gifts, talents, aptitudes, abilities, traits, and passion

2. Develop those unique natural gifts, talents, aptitudes, abilities, traits, and passion through hard work over time into full- fledged strengths.

3. Deliver those gifts, talents, abilities, traits, and passion to a place that intersects with a need.

It is actually in step two that the work of the behaviorists and motivators become extremely useful. When built solidly on the foundation of step one, flowing into step three they have identified the “heart” of performance.

Your Moment of Truth: You Can Help The Team Realize It's Dream When You Consistently Offer Up The Best That Is In You!

Deception #8 : Do Whatever It Takes

Most of us are taught to do whatever it takes to help the team win and that includes spending large amounts of time contributing our lesser talents and even our non-talents. In the above commercial, basketball star Carmelo Anthony communicates this idea while promoting his version of a new Michael Jordan (Nike) shoe, the M7. In the commercial Carmelo plays every position on the court. He is the coach, the janitor, the photographer, and is even in the broadcast booth as the announcer. If you want to see his explanation of the above video to get a little better understanding of what’s actually happening click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqwZWALNpKU

On occasion we do need to step up and do something that needs to get to get done even if it outside what we do best and enjoy most. I played high school baseball and during my sophomore year I actually started at 7 different positions including catcher, 3rd base, 1st base, 2nd base, shortstop, right field and left field. That year I played everything but pitcher and center field. I was the proverbial “utility player” who could contribute in a variety of positions. Honestly, I really loved that roll! In enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of learning the different positions. I also produced reasonably well with the bat and overall it was a fun year. At the awards banquet I was shocked when I received the coach’s award for my contributions.

I’ve owned a couple of businesses in the construction industry where I was the chief cook and bottle washer. I did everything at times. I can clean the toilets, wash dishes and vacuum at home. So what I’m about to say should never be an issue of pride. You can never believe that you are to good to perform a particular role.

There are occasions when you need to perform in an area that is not a strength. In a tough economy you may even have to as financial guru Dave Ramsey suggests, deliver a few pizzas. But the most successful team players stay committed to consistently offering up the best of themselves knowing that their talents will make the biggest contributions to the team’s winning on the athletic field or in the market place. This is fairly well understood in athletics but I am amazed at how poorly it’s understood in corporate America. Employees are routinely expected to perform in positions and roles they have absolutely no chance to excel in. The reason for this has a lot to do with the next deception we will discuss.

When a “Do Whatever It Takes” mindset means that you must regularly perform in areas that have little or nothing to do with your natural wiring, talent, and aptitude you need to make an adjustment. That adjustment may mean re-crafting your position, re-negotiating your role, and in some cases it may mean looking for another position in another company altogether.

The Gallup Organization and Strengths Strategist Marcus Buckingham have research that suggests about 8 out 10 workers don’t have the opportunity to do what they do best everyday. Of those 8 out of 10, Buckingham suggests that about 1/3 or the workers are in the ballpark of their strengths but they would be far more effective if they were doing a reduced subset of their current work. Another 1/3 would be far more effective if they had expanded duties around their current work. The remaining 1/3 would be far more effective in another role or position all together.

If you want to maximize your performance and your paycheck, if you want to maximize you success and your satisfaction, you must become a 20%er. You must craft and build and negotiate your tasks and roles so that they fit you succinctly. Only 10-20% of us do that.


Your Moment of Truth: The most selfless thing you can do is stay focused on consistently offering up your talents maximizing your contribution to the team, the organization, even the country.

#7 The Deficit Attention Disorder Deception (Grow Most Fixing Weakness)

The seventh deception works in tremendous synergy with the sixth. Not only do we often believe that our core personality can be changed, most of us believe that we grow most by fixing our weaknesses. We have “D.A.D.’ or Deficit Attention Disorder. If we want to grow, most of us will pick an area that we are weak. If we want to help our children, our students, our spouse, or our employees grow we will almost always try to help them overcome a weakness. But if you really want to grow and develop the most, or help others, choose to develop talents, those areas where you already have great natural ability.

During the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a relatively famous company going around the country conducting speedreading courses. During that time period, the Nebraska School Study Council asked the University of Nebraska to launch a major 3 year study to determine the best way to teach speed reading. In one study on reading improvement they compared the % of improvement contrasting poor readers with gifted readers. The findings were dramatic. The first conclusion aligns perfectly with current research being conducted by the Gates Foundation. That is, the best teachers got the best results, independent of who was being taught. The second conclusion was not a surprise. The best results came when the best teachers interacted with the best students. But the third conclusion was startling, to even the most experienced of the researchers. Setting aside who was doing the teaching, going through the same program, poor readers increased their reading speed from 90 to 150 words per minute. That’s almost double…not bad. But gifted readers increased their speed from 350 to 2900 words per minute. In a nutshell, the fastest readers grew and profited the most from the training.

At another place I will present the biological and neurological underpinnings to this. You come pre-wired to grow exponentially in your natural talents. But again most of us don’t believe that. The assistant director of Cincinnati public schools, George Reavis wrote a wonderful story in 1940’s that is in my experience a very accurate commentary on our education system.

Once upon a time, the animals got together and decided to start a school. They adopted a full curriculum that was easy to administer and designed to develop a well-rounded animal. There were classes in running, swimming, climbing, jumping and flying.

The duck was a very good swimmer… actually even better than his instructor. He passed flying but only barely, and failed running. Before long he was asked to drop swimming and stay after school so he could practice running. The running practiced caused problems with his webbed feet to the point he became only average in swimming. Average was acceptable, so no one worried too much… except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of his class in running, but he was asked to drop that and stay after class and work harder on his swimming. He developed a nervous twitch from so much swimming, and that negatively impacted his running.

The squirrel was naturally a fantastic climber, but he was constantly frustrated in flying class because his teacher wanted him to start from the ground. He regularly got cramps from over exertion and ended up with only a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was always in trouble for being a non-conformist. In climbing class he beat everyone else to the top of the tree, but he used his own methods for getting there.

Then one day, a wise old owl came to be the new headmaster of school. He re-arranged the curriculum so that ducks could spend most of the time swimming, rabbits could spend most of their time running, squirrels could spend most of their time climbing, and eagles could spend most of their time flying. The animals went on to get very good high paying jobs doing what they loved and were good at.

The End

I’m guessing your time in school, like mine, may not have ended that way.

This is so ingrained in our culture. We absolutely believe that the path to success is more about fixing our weaknesses than amplifying our strengths. This has been verified by Gallop Polls and Surveys and can be confirmed in most families where a report card is brought home. Marcus Buckingham regularly tells the story about the proverbial kid who brings home 2 A’s, 1 C, and an F. Then he rhetorically asks which grade gets the most parental attention. In most every family the answer is the F. Buckingham suggests that the parents role is not to ignore the F but most of the attention should be placed on the A’s. My experience is that this suggestion is hugely counter-cultural. 80% of American families would place most of the attention on improving the F.

Leadership author and speaker John Maxwell has good way of explaining the importance of strengths focused development. He will draw out a graph that looks something like this:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Then Maxwell, who authored the book, Talent Is Never Enough, goes on to explain:

“You’ve probably heard somebody say, “You can do anything as long as you put your mind to it.” Sadly, as nice as that sounds, it simply isn’t true. In watching people grow, I have discovered that, on a scale of 1-10, people can only improve about two notches. For instance, I love to sing; that’s the good news. The bad news is that I can’t carry a tune. Now, let’s be generous and say that, as a singer, I’m a “two”. If I put lots of money, effort, and energy into developing my voice, perhaps I can grow into a “four”. News flash: on a ten-point scale, four is still below average. With regards to my career, it would be foolish for me to focus my personal growth on my voice. At best, I’d become an average singer, and no one pays for average.”

Maxwell continues, “Don’t work on your weaknesses. Devote yourself to fine-tuning your strengths. I work exceptionally hard on personal growth in four areas of my life. Why only four: Because I’m only good at four things. I lead, communicate, create, and network. That’s it. Outside those areas, I’m not very valuable. However, within those areas of strength I have incredible potential to make a difference.”

I have about 4 decades of experience in the workplace. This includes about a decade growing up in a family business, a decade founding and building my own small business, a decade working as sales rep for 2 large companies, a decade working as trainer and manager for a large company. I have served on the boards of 2 non-profits. All of this experience overwhelmingly confirms everything I have just written. And my experience with golf actually suggests that if I am 5, and I work really hard I might actually regress to a 3. In an area of non-talent, hard work might actually in some cases send you backwards.

Your Moment of Truth: You will grow most by developing your areas of natural talent!

#6 The Developing Personality Deception (Personality Change)

The sixth deception is what I call the “Developing Personality” deception. About 66% of us believe that we can change our basic personality and alter our talent distribution as we get older. The truth is, with regard to our talents and potential strengths we don’t change much.

My first grade teacher commented on how “serious” I was. My wife was concerned on our first date that I might be too serious for her, and in my last performance appraisal at work my manager commented on my seriousness and how it might benefit me to loosen up a bit.

I’m happy to report that I was able to convince my wife that I had a seriously non-serious side. I was able to quickly produce a picture of me dancing on a bar in Las Vegas taken on a company scavenger hunt and a reasonably professional recording of me singing Johnny Cash’s song, “A Boy Named Sue”. I do loosen up once you get to know me, but chances are your first impression of me will be that I’m a fairly serious type. That hasn’t changed much since first grade.

Columbia University’s Nathan Brody once commented in a speech, "Change is the process of becoming more like who we are.” Science author, William Wright says that “as we age, we tend to become more like the genetic blueprint with which we started in in life”.

Of course our values change and our beliefs change. The apostle Paul’s dramatic conversion in the Bible was an example of this. He went from encouraging the murder of Christians to becoming one and then to spending his life urging others to become one. His beliefs and values experienced a dramatic change. But his talents, the core of who he was didn’t change one bit. He was intense and driven before his conversion. He was intense and driven after his conversion.

In addition to changing your beliefs and values, you can also develop your talents into full blown strengths. By adding skills that compliment your innate abilities you can maximize your growth. You can also add knowledge, both book learning and experience. Again, if you do this in areas that compliment your natural ability your growth will be amazing.

Your Moment of Truth: You can’t change who you are, but you can become so much more by fully developing your talents and focusing them on worthwhile goals!

Deception #5: Delay the Dream (I'll Pursue My Strengths Later)

Should you put off working on your dream job until later in life when you are more financially stable and other circumstances seem more promising? Investor Warren Buffett wryly says, “This is a little like delaying sex for old age”.

Pursue your strengths aggressively starting now and don’t stop, ever!

That doesn’t mean you won’t need a “day job”. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be delays, defeats, disappointments, denials and even a few dead horses on the strengthspath. There certainly will be. Stanford University Professors Lorna Catford and Michael Ray talk about “The Path of the Everyday Hero” in their brilliant book by that title. They suggest that all of us are somewhere on this archetypical pathway that includes the following phases:

Innocence – The easy, safe, and comfortable place

Call to Adventure - The beginning of the journey often precipitated by a crisis

Initiation - The acceptance of the call including the first step taken without guarantees

Dips, Disappointments, Delays, Defeat, Discouragement

Allies – People and resources come, sometimes it seems out of nowhere providing protection and advice

Breakthrough – The allies provide the way for successful resolution of the crisis or accomplishment of the task

Celebration – The journey ends with the hero’s return, bringing gifts or wisdom accumulated on the path.

The weekend before writing this, Susy and I went to see Mission Impossible 4. MI4 follows this outline very closely as does most every good movie you’ve seen and every good book you’ve read. It’s the outline for just about every Bible story I can think of. If we look closely, this is your life and my life when we are living it well.

Catford and Ray also share that the creative process is very closely aligned with this thing they call the hero’s path. The creative steps they suggest are Preparation, Frustration, Incubation, Strategizing, Illumination, and Verification. I identify with all this in the process of creating blogs, books, career design, and the strengthspathing I talk about here.

Seth Godin, in his book The Dip gives great insight into all this with regard to a very particular hero’s call that he describes as “Becoming Best In The World”. This little book offers up great contemporary examples from the worlds of business, entertainment, athletics, and his own life. He also offers up some suggestions that will help you figure out if you are experiencing a dip/delay or if you are in fact riding a dead horse. If it is a dead horse then of course the only sensible thing to do is dismount.



Your Moment of Truth: Now is your time to start down your strengthspath!

Deception #4 : Do, Be, Do, Be, Do

What's keeping us from making career choices where we will offer up the best of us? What's keeping us from choosing work that allows us to maximize our contribution?

At age 5, I decided that I wanted to be a cowboy. Roy Rogers was my first hero and being a cowboy looked cool. I liked the idea of being a hero, having a loyal dog and horse. As you can see in the photo I had the boots, hat, gun, and dog. But I really was “all hat and no cattle”. The problem was that when I found out what being a “real cowboy” entailed, I didn’t like it so much. When I discovered that being a cowboy involved camping with very few Hampton Inns in sight, I reconsidered my choice. My first efforts on a horse didn’t go well either. To this day when I get on a horse, they bend their neck back around and look at me as if to say, “Who is this guy, and what are you doing on my back?” And the idea of jerking a baby calf off its feet at a full gallop, then applying a hot brand to it’s backside, well, that still just seems wrong to me. Over time, I found that the only rodeo I really enjoyed visiting was Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

A lot of people have false starts like this in their careers. One of my favorite career discovery books is Nicholas Lore’s The Pathfinder. He writes:

“If you are like most of us, when you attempt to make career decisions, you imagine careers that might be interesting (doctor, lawyer, Indian Chief). Your mind hops from one potentially interesting career to another. Your romantic imagination kicks in. You think of all the positive aspects of the job: “Let’s see, I really like the idea of becoming an Indian Chief. It seems like an exciting job, working outside, nature all around, not a boring desk job, great clothes, etc.” Then after a while, you have an attack of negative considerations, an attack of ‘Yeahbut’ thoughts: ‘I’m allergic to feathers, those cold winter nights in the teepee, and what about the cavalry attacks?’ You are left with a veritable blizzard of mental images and opinions about potential careers yet are no nearer to making a definite decision about which one to pursue. What’s worse, using this method, things tend to get foggier rather than clearer.”

Nicholas Lore continues:

“When you first think of a new potential career, it is an idea as pure as newly fallen snow. Then as you think of it more, your opinions, both positive and negative, tend to get stuck onto the original picture. After a while, whenever the thought of that particular career surfaces in your mind, all you see is all the stuff stuck to it. When you think ‘Indian Chief,’ up pops a picture of a cavalry attack.”

I call this the “Do, Be, Do, Be, Do” Deception. We confuse being something, which we imagine is very cool, with actually doing it. Many times our choice is built around a desire for fame and fortune. Sometimes we pick a career not because it will make us rich or famous but because we believe that we will be highly esteemed by others.

But strengths strategist Marcus Buckingham rightly observes, “doing trumps being every time.” Similarly, football coach Vince Lombardi used to talk about “loving the daily grind”. Before you make a career choice or career change, find out what you will actually do for 6, 12, or 18 hours a day to be successful.

I will blog about several ways of doing this in the future. These "I-Sight" methods of career insight could save you years of grief. But one method is Internship and Interim Work. Dustin is a friend of our family, actually, a family member by marriage. He got good grades all through high school, college and was considering medical school. But he wasn't sure how he would deal with the reality of blood and body parts. To avoid spending a small fortune and wasting several years of education, he trained to become a medic on an ambulance team. Once he made it through that without a problem he enrolled in medical school. This was a wonderful example and you should be able to figure out something similar to get insight into a career you are considering.

Your Moment of Truth: Make sure you pick a career where the tasks and roles involve activities that you actually like doing, generally for long periods of time.

Deception #3: Destructive Ego

It’s curious that self-depreciation often keeps us from delivering our strengths, while it seems as though it’s opposite does the same thing. Even more curious, self-depreciation and destructive ego may just be different manifestations of the same inferiority thoughts.

What is a destructive ego? Destructive Ego is synonymous with narcissism, inflated self-importance, vanity and conceit. It’s a self-focused belief that the team depends on you, and solely on you. A destructive ego might be named by the term “a self-made” man especially if it is self-referenced. There is no such thing as a “self-made” man in either my theology or my sociology. From a faith perspective, God created us, and every single talent is on loan from Him. From a sociological or a business perspective, no one succeeds by them selves. Even a solo business depends on suppliers, shippers, and service support of some kind. Supposed solo athletes have sponsors, caddies, and fans who pay to see them play. Whatever success you have attained, you’ve had some support. I love the way Leadership author John Maxwell put’s it:

“If you see a turtle on a fence post, chances are he had help!”

A destructive ego can make demands that it does all the “important” work. A destructive ego suggests that only it’s piece or part is the most important. A destructive ego has trouble recognizing the strengths in others or at least minimizes them. One look at the compensation structure in much of corporate America suggests that a destructive ego is in charge in many of our largest companies. What happened to the Lee Iacocca’s that were willing to work for $1.00 a year until the company they ran was out of debt and making a profit? Progressive organizations like Ben & Jerry’s and Whole Foods voluntarily limit top compensation as a % or specific multiple of bottom compensation though both have had to make adjustments after outsiders started poaching their management team. In one study done in 2005, the average corporate CEO was making 411 times the salary of the lowest worker.

In some individuals this manifests itself in a reluctance to delegate tasks that better fit someone else. In other individuals it manifests as a reluctance to partner. At the end of the day, the destructive ego gets robbed of the opportunity to focus on what they do best because they must do it all. And they rob the potential employee or partner as well.

Before we hammer to hard on the destructive ego, let’s make a few balancing points. Destructive ego is not the same thing as a healthy self-assurance identified by Gallup studies as a critical talent or when developed, a wonderful strength. Self-Assurance is critical for people who start businesses and knock and doors to sell things. These people are our talented entrepreneurs who drive our economy. Those with self-assurance build great teams and have the ability to step back and let others do what they are great at.

Your Moment of Truth:

A healthy ego shares the best chores, the cash, and the credit!

Deception #2: Depreciation (Disguised as Humility)

What's keeping us stuck? What's holding us back? What is it that blocks us from fully delivering our strengths in the work place and to the world? I think it's often a misunderstanding or mis-characterization of humility.

This one is a little different than the “Doesn’t Everyone?” deception although they are often linked. Depreciation goes further than simply feeling that you have nothing special to offer. Depreciation is more of an “I’m not worthy” or “I’m not valuable” mindset. The Depreciation Deception moves from “I have nothing special to offer” even lower to a “I have nothing to offer” viewpoint. I find people mix these first two deceptions up and even move back and forth between the two or combining them.

What makes this deception particularly pernicious is that it often comes all dressed up as humility. A religious halo is then thrown on top to make it seem more valid. But properly understood, humility is thinking highly of others, not less of your self.

Terry Mante, an author and coach from Ghana suggests that humility is a strength with at least 3 parts. They are composure, circumspection, and consideration.

Composure is refusing to let negative emotions drive your actions. It is strength with a bridle. It is under control. Mante offers up Nelson Mandela as a resent historical example of composure and humility during the events following his release from a South African prison. Mandela was incarcerated on Robin Island from 1964 to 1990. Instead of focusing on revenge for false imprisonment and unfair treatment, he chose instead to focus on issues of reconciliation and development in his country. As Mante says, “Humility is a choice we make to focus on higher issues.”

Circumspection is taking the necessary time to examine weighty decisions. I would call circumspection “decision making in 360”. It’s taking the time to notice all the factors around us. Circumspection is noticing who is impacted and how. It’s about considering potential risks and consequences as well as opportunities. The circumspect person risks being seen as slow and timid. The reality is that they are exhibiting intellectual dexterity and discipline.

Consideration is about paying attention to the feelings, difficulties, and circumstances of others before taking action. While offering Jesus as the ultimate example of consideration Mante writes:

“Think about Jesus; a man considered to be part of the Triune God. As the second person of what Christians call the Trinity, Jesus has all power at His disposal including power over life and death. He has power to restore life to the dead, command the storms of the sea and walk on water. He is the one who died and resurrected on the third day of His death – a man of tremendous power and authority; a man who was also God.”

“In spite of all that, Jesus appeared on earth as a natural person, served God and humanity and got Himself unjustly maltreated and eventually executed by the Roman authorities. Why did Jesus do that? Why would such a powerful person allow Himself to go through such humiliation? Was it because He was weak? Definitely not! He thought about the impact His life, death and resurrection would have on the entire human race. He did not just look at His God-position, but He wanted the human race to have a dignified position in life. Certainly, any individual who purposefully gives up a privileged position for the sake of others is not a reed. Today, Jesus has become such a powerful phenomenon that His name is not just that of a person, but it is the centerpiece of the Christian faith – the largest religious ideology in the world. Jesus now lives in the hearts of many and is the first and final hope of many who are worn out, weak and weary.”

Mante concludes, “HUMBLE people are not fumbled people. Meekness is not weakness but it is strength at its peak, which is deliberately constrained. Choose to be humble and you will be strong.”

Humility is not about putting yourself down. Humility is about lifting others up! Humility and Self Assurance are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, real humility requires tremendous self-confidence and I would argue God-Confidence as well.

Your Moment of Truth

Humility is directing your strengths in a way that maximizes your contribution to others!