You are a brilliant person. You have ideas that come to you all the time. The trouble is, you have a hard time convincing people that the idea is a reasonable, and valid path to take.
When that happens, you get flustered and frustrated and walk away in disgust.
You played baseball or softball right. Remember the first lesson about fielding grounders? Stay with the ball.
Wait, the first rule was, “Keep your eye on the ball”. Then, “Stay with the ball”.
Either way, stay with the idea. Let it be rejected, for now. Find out why it didn’t get put through. Tune it up and tweak the details.
Then push it back through. It is a great idea, it just needs some grease on the wheels. If you do not stick with the idea, you will see it rolling out under someone else’s banner a few miles down the road.
At that point, all you have is shrugging shoulders and a pathetic, “That was my idea” on your lips.
You are a great person. You trust other people because you think everyone works the same way that you do.
You might not want to believe this, but not everyone sees the world the same way you do.
No one out there is going to care more about your project, your product, your dream, than you. People may join you in trying to achieve your goal, but the promises they make might not be what they deliver.
What you see and what they see is different. Even if the difference is as small as a grain of salt.
When people make promises to you, take the time to calculate in the difference between what your view is and the view of the person making the offer. Understand that, they might not be deceptive on purpose, but they are not going to deliver what they tell you they will.
Granted, there are a vast number of liars, cheats, and criminals out there, however, the general populace is not dishonest. They just have a much different outlook than you.
Imagine that you are The Big Boss. You stand in front of a huge auditorium of your employees. You froth and slam your fist and churn up that loyal fervor in your company and you ask them all to put in 110%. They all jump and applaud because they believe in you as a leader; after all, you are a great leader. They vow with every ounce that they are, that they will give 110%.
They are all a twitter with excitement as they rush back to their work stations. Loyalty and pride oozes out of every pore. And in their heads they are churning out 113%. They threw in a little extra just in case they miscalculated. They are pouring everything they have, then going back to the well and sucking out any remaining drop.
And as you sit in your humble office, you look over the numbers for the past quarter. You think, “Hmm, I asked for 110% and they only gave me 82%. I wonder what I did wrong.”
The answer is, nothing. The only mistake you made is that you forgot to factor in the grain of salt.
You are a nice person. In general. You get along well with people. You are good at dealing with people. You, however, have an arch nemesis. The asshole.
For some reason when you face off against the asshole, you turn into a blithering idiot. You argue over the stupidest thing. You raise your voice. You pump sweat from your armpits like you were a water treatment plant. You begin to spit when you talk. You flail. You…
You… become an asshole.
How is this transformation made possible? How can someone like you, intelligent, witty, good looking, funny, and one hell of a dapper dresser, turn into the garrulous, mundane, argumentative, peice of shit you have come to hate so much in life. You act like being an asshole is contagious.
Being an asshole is not a contagious disease, it is a disease that feeds on weakness.
You have to be a strong person. You have to be a bigger person. You have to realize that eventually karma does pay off. You also have to remember that an asshole feeds on confrontation. By turning into the festering sore on the back thigh of humanity, and screaming and shouting at an asshole, you give them exactly what they crave. You feed their pathetic ego, and drive them to follow along the same course.
Assholes are a cancer on your life and they should be cut out. Immediatly and without prejudice.
If your asshole is the boss, find a new job.
If your asshole is an employee, fire them.
If your asshole is your significant other, become single (quickly).
You don’t have to be an asshole to succeed. You just have to steer your ship around the assbergs in life.
You have been told that you have a great sense of humor. But you do realize that not everyone will understand all of your jokes.
Believe it or not, there are people that do not understand the simple idea of “Take my wife, Please!” . There are some people that do not find “I’m F*cking Matt Damon” to be funny.
You have to walk a fine line between being interesting and funny, and being offensive to those that have a much smaller brain and no funny bone.
You are damn good at everything you do. The trouble is, when you do make a mistake, it hits you like a bomb.
Everyone makes mistakes. You will make mistakes. Here is a secret: it is not the end of the world. So far, in the history of man, no one has made a mistake so large that is has caused the end of civilization.
Some have come close. But no one has made a mistake that has been that devastating yet.
They key is to learn from any mistake that you do make. That is how success is built. You can learn from the mistakes of others, but when it is your blunder, the lesson is really driven home.
You are brilliant, there is no doubt about it. You laid out the plans, went through the process in your head, and were meticulous. The one thing you forgot was going back and double checking the results of your work.
Face it, things happen. You can cross all of your t’s, but if you forgot one dot on one of your i’s, it could cause the entire structure to crumble down on top of you.
You should never waste hours and hours of hard work to shortcut on a few minutes of double checking.
You are in charge. You do not need to make suggestions. Suggestions are a waste of time. You can put out demands. That is what being in charge means.You are in charge, so act like it. You may be the top guy, or the second in command, or even middle management, but you are in charge of something. You need to take charge.
Don’t be afraid to give mandates and then follow through.
You have a goal. You have a plan. Your plan requires that all the players in the game conduct themselves according to the play book. You need to ensure that all the players know the plays and that they are held accountable for not following through.
You can safely say that you are not the most organized person in the world. You try to excuse the disaster area as your organized mess, but the fact is, it is just a mess.
You know… eh… roughly how much you have in the bank and on your credit cards.
You know that sometime soon you have a meeting.
You should consider finding someone that possesses the organization skills that you lack, and someone that you trust, and having them use their strengths to compliment your weaknesses.
You have a great product, an incredible service, or a mind blowing skill. The problem is, not very many people know about it. That is where YOU come in.
You have to have enough confidence in your product, your service, or your skill to tell everyone about it.
You do not like to brag, but you are smart enough to figure out how to let the world know what you have without seeming like a braggart. You can stop watching people with far inferior products, substandard service, and subpar skills get ahead, but you have to be willing to open your mouth and let people know.
If you cannot tell the world what you have to offer them, chances are slim that someone else will champion your cause for you. (It does happen, but it is rare.)
You have what the world is looking for, you just have to take the step of letting the world know.
You have watched the decay of customer satisfaction decline with anger in your heart. Once upon a time, there were companies that cared about the customer. There were bosses that loved their workers, and there were co-workers that put in everything they had to give.
You can see, all around the restaurant, customers that are unhappy, yet unwilling to demand proper service. You look around and you see that fear and laziness have allowed excellence to decay into barely tolerable.
You make excuses why something might be less than excellent. You dismiss a problem thinking someone might be having a bad day.
You are tired of sub-par performance from those around you. You want the best there is, not the best someone has the energy to muster despite not having a smoke break in like… a whole half hour… pshaw!
When you spend the money that you earned, you want your products to work. When you do have a problem, you want to speak to someone who is courteous and wants to take care of the problem. You want the service man to show up on time and with all the tools needed for the job.
You demand excellence from yourself, and you should demand it from others.
