Benjamin Franklin Archives - denisgmclaughlin.com

Success is a process – what will you do next?

Nov 20

Success is an elusive goal that’s fleeting and requires constant focus and effort. Have we ever really “made it?” By accomplishing the goals you set for yourself, you were successful. But notice the word “were.” Success is a process of achievement that we must strive for on every effort.

In the book Grit – The Power of Passion of Perseverance Angela Duckworth discusses her research and findings on the psychology of human accomplishment. In the formula below, Duckworth points out that while “talent” is important, “effort” appears twice in the equation.

“Talent + Effort = Skill. Skill + Effort = Accomplishment.” – Angela Duckworth

The process of success is made of three steps: Do what you can – Learn more – Do the next thing.

Do what you can. Why aren’t we willing to do something if we can’t do everything? It’s as if we believe that nothing worthwhile can come from what we offer unless we can’t offer the best there is. Part of that is true but with a qualifier. There is great value in what can offer, if it is the best we can do at the moment.

Don’t compare your best with that of anyone else, use your talent and skill to do the best you can right where you are. Recognizing when we do that, we will continue to improve and out best will get better.

“Leave your ego at the door every morning, and just do some truly great work. Few things will make you feel better than a job brilliantly done.” – Robin S. Sharma

Learn more. With every action, there is an opportunity to learn and improve in preparation for the next action. No matter the result, whether it worked just as planned or not, take away something that you will do better the next time.

Invest in your growth: read a book, listen to a podcast, ask questions, practice, and keep a look out for ideas you can use.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.” – Benjamin Franklin

Do the next thing. Now that you have done your best and learned some more, it’s time to do your new best. Strive to apply all that your talent, skill, and effort has brought to this effort, and the next, and the next…

“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” – Marie Curie

The best answers are often questions

Sep 13

Sometimes easy answers are just too easy, and aren’t the best answers. Often the best answers are questions that force us to dig deeper into the issue. Good questions can challenge our assumptions and lead us down another path than the easy answer would. Paul Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, said “Good questions outrank easy answers.”

Take the time to ask questions and you will see that you and other people will learn more even if you think you know the answer.

Questions help get to the right answer. We have heard about the five whys of consulting – asking why until you uncover the root cause. Peter Drucker says the best consultants work by simply asking a few questions. People are better connected to the outcome if they are part of developing the plan.

Here are a few ways to ask questions that helps others discover the right answer for them:

“How would you go about accomplishing this….” then listen to their ideas.

“What would happen if…” then challenge different assumptions in the answers being presented.

“Have you thought about…” then offer alternative options to be discussed.

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin

The right questions help solve the right problem. The human mind is a wonderful machine that is a problem solver. When you pose a question, it works tirelessly to seek the answer. The key to solving the right problem is to ask the right question.

If something is not working, we might ask ourselves and our team, “Why can’t we accomplish this?” That is the wrong question because all of your energy will focus on understanding the ways you have been deficient and uncovering reasons why you can’t succeed.

Instead, in the same situation the right question is, “What does it take to accomplish this?” With this question you and your team will begin to identify all that needs to happen to succeed. Once you have solved that, your next question should be, “How can we deliver what it takes to succeed?” and so on until you narrow down the right answer to the right question.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” – Albert Einstein

A second chance.

May 03

Sometimes good people make bad choices, that doesn’t mean their bad, it means their human. A bad choice isn’t the end, but it makes the next choice that much more important. Legendary NBA coach Pat Riley said, “You have no choices about how you lose, but you do have a choice about how you come back and prepare to win again.”

“We cannot start over, but we can begin now, and make a new ending.” – Zig Ziglar

Give yourself a second chance. We are often hardest on ourselves when things don’t go as planned. You think you let the team down. As long as you stay focused on your goals, sometimes second chances work out better than the first because you can learn from your mistakes and improve on your success.

“I didn’t fail the test, I just found 100 ways to do it wrong.” – Benjamin Franklin

Give others a second chance. Allow other people to try again. Encourage them to get back up and do it again. Tell them what they did well and ensure they understand why the first chance didn’t work and what they are going to do to make the second chance work. Keep your belief that everyone genuinely wants to succeed.

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” – Robert Kennedy

Make the second chance count. A second chance should bring us closer to succees. Don’t just jump back in and try harder, try smarter. Second chances are not given to make things right, but to prove that we can be better even after we fall.

“If plan A doesn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters.”– Claire Cook

What is the importance of diversity in leadership?

May 28

Information, knowledge, wisdom – while they all have a slightly different meaning, the overarching theme is it’s good to learn and good to understand different options when you make choices – especially in leadership. Abraham Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you are likely to perceive every problem as a nail.” What he meant by that oft-used phrase is that an individual is limited by their talents and experience in their ability to offer ideas to solve problems.

Talents

There is a great book titled Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham. The theme of this book is that each of us is born with natural talent, or strengths. Now this doesn’t say what job or career you can or cannot undertake, but it does identify how you will be naturally good at what you do if you use your strengths.

The book discusses the thirty-four possible strengths that people have. When you take the online assessment offered in the book your top five strengths are identified in order from one to five. Here is where the idea of diversity really stands out. The number of possible combinations of top five strengths in order from one to five out of a possible thirty-four strengths is amazingly high. There are over thirty three million combinations – 33,390,720 to be exact.

Imagine, the people who work with you have a very high probability of having a completely different set of strengths – or talents. It would be a waste to just pick the hammer you know when you have so many other available talents to draw on. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?”

Experience

Now you know that your team has a broad set of talents to bring to the forefront in decision making. Added to their talent is their experience. While talent is the foundation of what someone is naturally good at, experience gives people a front row seat at what has worked, and likely more important, what hasn’t worked before. In other words, when you have experience you have made mistakes and seen other people make mistakes.

As a leader you want every person on your team to share their experience when evaluating options. Not that you would reject every possible solution just because it didn’t work before, but knowing this information might give you an edge if you decide to try it again.

“Experience enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.” Franklin P. Jones

Ideas

Diverse talents combined with diverse experiences will lead to diverse ideas – that is what every leader needs. Remember, your job as a leader is not to have all the good ideas, but to find all the good ideas. As former Yale University President Alfred Whitney Griswold once said, “The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.”

Finally, I really like the way Michael Abrashoff, the former commander of the USS Benfold describes diversity by asking this question, “In what way can someone be a superstar?”