“Think Different” – Apple Confidential – Internal Meeting Sept. 23, 1997
Leadership
COMMITTED to being successful and yet relinquish ATTACHMENT to the outcome
Success is a state of being.
Setting your perspective on COMMITMENT ensures that regardless of how the results of your endeavors manifest, you will persist and create the future based on all the wisdom gained in your previous efforts. To be a successful leader, it is not important that everything you do succeed, only that you do.
If you are COMMITTED to being successful and relinquish your ATTACHMENT to the outcome, you will achieve success regardless of how the world shows up.
Great leaders do not define success in terms of the external results of their efforts; they know that their COMMITMENT to the effort is what counts most. They let go of their ATTACHMENT to the outcomes even as they pursue them. In so doing, they learn valuable lessons no matter what actually happens, and they use these insights to create their future.
COMMITMENT allows you to define the success of any endeavor in terms of the experience you seek to create for yourself. It allows you to be the way you want to be. It gives you the freedom to take what comes and move on.
When you become ATTACHED to the outcome that others experience, you become vulnerable to their definitions of success and bogged down in their judgments.
The world does not always show up with the results we might want, and if you are ATTACHED to the outcome, you may see in your effort a failure when in fact it contains the seeds of success.
Commit yourself completely to whatever calling you choose to answer. Live full out to achieve it. Take what comes and move on. TRUST THE UNIVERSE and focus on your COMMITMENT in order to succeed every time.
Understanding the distinction between Commitment and Attachment will serve you as much personally as it will in your role as a leader; it makes success possible even when the world delivers what to the outside eye appears as failure.
– Chris McGoff from ‘The Primes’
when you stand for something, decisions are obvious
“Draw a line in the sand – As you get going, keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing. Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone. You need to know what you’re willing to fight for. And then you need to show the world. A strong stand is how you attract super fans. They point to you and defend you. And they spread the word further, wider, and more passionately than any advertising could. Strong opinions aren’t free. You’ll turn some people off. They’ll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That’s life. For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate you. If no one’s upset by what you’re saying, you’re probably not pushing hard enough. (And you’re probably boring, too.) ……..
………That’s our line in the sand. When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.
― Jason Fried, ReWork
Do you want to change the world?
“The trouble with people is that they’re busy fixing things they
don’t even understand. We’re always fixing things, aren’t we? It
never strikes us that things don’t need to be fixed. They really
don’t. This is a great illumination. They need to be understood.
If you understood them, they’d change.”
Should I be taking a Sabbatical?
I don’t have time to sharpen the saw. Don’t you see I’m too busy?
A woodcutter strained to saw down a tree. A young man who was watching asked “What are you doing?”
“Are you blind?” the woodcutter replied. “I’m cutting down this tree.”
The young man was unabashed. “You look exhausted! Take a break. Sharpen your saw.”
The woodcutter explained to the young man that he had been sawing for hours and did not have time to take a break.
The young man pushed back… “If you sharpen the saw, you would cut down the tree much faster.”
The woodcutter said “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw. Don’t you see I’m too busy?”
Anyway, here’s how Stephen Covey takes this story and applies it to his seventh habit.
“Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have–you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual. Here are some examples of activities:
| Physical: | Beneficial eating, exercising, and resting |
| Social/Emotional: | Making social and meaningful connections with others |
| Mental: | Learning, reading, writing, and teaching |
| Spiritual: | Spending time in nature, expanding spiritual self through meditation, music, art, prayer, or service |
As you renew yourself in each of the four areas, you create growth and change in your life. Sharpen the Saw keeps you fresh so you can continue to practice the other six habits. You increase your capacity to produce and handle the challenges around you. Without this renewal, the body becomes weak, the mind mechanical, the emotions raw, the spirit insensitive, and the person selfish. Not a pretty picture, is it?
Feeling good doesn’t just happen. Living a life in balance means taking the necessary time to renew yourself. It’s all up to you. You can renew yourself through relaxation. Or you can totally burn yourself out by overdoing everything. You can pamper yourself mentally and spiritually. Or you can go through life oblivious to your well-being. You can experience vibrant energy. Or you can procrastinate and miss out on the benefits of good health and exercise. You can revitalize yourself and face a new day in peace and harmony. Or you can wake up in the morning full of apathy because your get-up-and-go has got-up-and-gone. Just remember that every day provides a new opportunity for renewal–a new opportunity to recharge yourself instead of hitting the wall. All it takes is the desire, knowledge, and skill.”
Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?
– William Hooke
Thought for the Week – 7th July 2014
Don’t give up beforehand!
There could be all sorts of different situations in our life when the time comes and we feel that we are about to give up. Sometimes we give up before we even started doing something new. Sometimes we give up just before making this huge breakthrough to success just because we saw how much effort should go through in order to succeed and it can really scare us. Don’t give up beforehand!
–
They change big, complicated things with their bare hearts…
“…Activists are the coolest people on the planet. They change big, complicated things with their bare hearts. They punch more than their weight And when they fail, they fail nobly. To be an activist you need more than an agenda and a clever campaign. You need a set of values that will set you apart from the courtiers and the wannabes. Continue reading
How great a price are we willing to pay for our convictions?
“…One of life’s great temptations is to yield to the popular side of an issue. When confronted with the prospect of standing firm and holding fast to a conviction at the cost of security, it is a temptation to compromise and to rationalise. Under pressure we often conclude that the cost is too great and the results too meagre to warrant the sacrifice.
Have we confused control with order?
Our organizations are strong complicated structures that are resistant to change, fearful of the future and we have built them that way deliberately. We built them that way to hold back the forces that seem to threaten their very existence. We are afraid of what would happen if we lose our grip. If we let the elements of our organizations recombine or reconfigure or even to speak truthfully to one another, we are afraid that things will fall apart. We do not trust that this is a world of growth, rejuvenation and process. We believe we must provide the energy to hold it together. By sheer force of will, we have resisted destruction. And if we let go, the world will dis- integrate.
Yet, throughout the universe, things work very well without us. Wherever we look, we see a landscape of movement and complexity, of forms that come and go, of structures that are not from organizational charts or job descriptions, but from impulses arriving out of deep natural processes of growth and of self-renewal. In our desire to control our organizations, we have detached ourselves from the forces that create order in the universe. All these years we have confused control with order. So what if we reframed the search? What if we stop looking for control and begin the search for order, which we can see everywhere around us in living dynamic systems?
It is time, I believe, to become a community of inquirers, serious explorers seeking to discover the essence of order-order we will find even in the heart of chaos. It is time to relinquish the limits we have placed on our organizations, time to release our defenses and fear. Time to take up new lenses and explore beyond our known boundaries. It is time to become full participants in this universe of emergent order.
– Margaret Wheatley
ONE TUSK 