Dan Pink's Talk on Drive Animated

I came across this video and I think it is both fun and very informative.

Three Guiding Principles for Your Life and Career - Part 2

Find the Best Source of Opportunities Long Term

Long term is the key word here.  Life is a marathon not a sprint, and we should treat it as such.  Often we pick a course of action because of the short term gain.  I have usually looked for the short route and not the best route.  In my career I have chosen the paths that had the most immediate pay-out and did not seek the ones that would provide me with the greatest long-term benefits and enjoyments.
The old Aesop fable of the grasshopper and the ant illustrates this wonderfully.  We all know the story so I won't retell it, but the grasshopper chose the short term path, which held the most enjoyment for the moment, not the path for the best opportunities long term and so was left out in the cold when summer ended and winter came.
In our careers and personal lives we need to be looking down the road at the outcomes of any action that we under take.  The short pleasures and gains many times hurt us long term.  A great example of this is with diets, over eating and eating junk food gives us short term pleasures (I am starting to rethink this logic but that is for another post) but long term damage our bodies.  I recently lost 30lbs, I had to stick to a strict diet and had to give up many foods that I love which is anything fried.  But now I am reaping the rewards, I feel better and I look better.
When you are making a decision and apply this principle you should view the opportunity not only as what will bring in you the future but also will this opportunity come up again in the future.  Many times we are offered opportunities that are truly a once in a lifetime chance.  This doesn't mean that you should automatically take the opportunity but you should consider the fact that you will not have this chance again.
Use this principle to guide you daily life in a direction that you have chosen, by ignoring this principle you will make decisions that might be good for your immediate future but you will eventually find yourself in place you didn't intend nor want to be in.

Three Guiding Principles for your Life and Career - Part 1

I am constantly questioning the volume of information that we have flooding into our lives and vying for our attention and whether or not we really need to pay attention to any of it.  All the blogs, tweets, magazines, ads, e-zines and we could go on here for days.  But one of the exceptional pieces of information that is now available to us are the lectures and course materials from top universities, such as Open Courseware from MIT.  Stanford University has a lecture series online entitled Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar, you can find the podcasts on iTunes.  This lecture series brings in the top players in the technology startup field, where they share their experiences and ideas about technology and entrepreneurship.  If you are at all interested in business and entrepreneurship I highly recommend it. 

A recent comment from one of the speakers really struck me.  The speaker was Randy Komisar, an experienced leader in the technology field and author of the book Getting to Plan B.  What he said was that even though he had failed many times, he had only felt like a failure twice and that was when he didn't follow his three guiding principles.  His guiding principles were these:

1. Find the Best people in the world you can associate with and learn from them

2. Find the best source of opportunities long term.

3. Find something today, this moment, that engages your passion.

I found these points profound for a couple of reasons.  The first was what he prefaced these statements with and that was, he had only felt like a failure twice in his life.  Now like many people I feel like a failure often, more recently it has become a more profound struggle.  I have reached or am coming up on middle-age, whether or not I am there yet depends on how you define middle-age (personally I think 40 is the new 30 so I am a good ways off).  And as I look at some of my peers and their accomplishments mine accomplishments pale in comparison. So if I had something to keep me from feeling like a failure then I want to know what that something is.  The second reason that I find these three principles exceptional is that these statements encompass some basic truths that if you read a lot of success and business literature you will see these truths repeated time and again.

Find the Best People and Learn from Them

In this principle is a truth that goes back millennia, in fact you can find this truth in arguably the best piece of success literature ever written, the book of Proverbs.  The following verses echoes the sentiment of this principle

He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm. Proverbs 13:20

and

Iron sharpens iron, So one man sharpens another. Proverbs 27:17

You are who you associate with, this can not be statement more emphatically.  Napoleon Hill took this principle to an even higher level with his Law of the Master Mind.  This idea is from his book The Law of Success.  The idea of the master mind is that people are connected and influence each other in ways that are not directly observed.  Hill put forth that you need to find people that are of like mind to help move you forward in life.  This is idea of association is important even in parenting, one of the greatest concerns that any parent has is who their child hangs around with.  And yet we do not exhibit that same level of judgement or effort when selecting our associates that we would want our children to exhibit.  Make an effort to look around you and strike up friendships with people that you would want to be most like, many of these people are more approachable than you might think and everyone loves to show off what they know.

The second part of the statement is "Learn from Them", being around brilliant and inspiring people is worthless if you do not listen to what they have to say and apply it to your life.  Many times this requires some humility and healthy self-image to allow your self to be quiet and listen to people and stop trying to impress them.  This is my issue many times,  I will get around brilliant people and will not be quiet long enough to listen to what they have to say.
In Part 2 I will break out the second guiding principle "Find the Best Source of Opportunities Long Term".