Tag Archives: reality

What is the purpose of your business?

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hay rollsGreatness doesn’t start with a market opportunity; it starts with a problem that needs solving.  The opportunity comes from marketing the solution.

Simon Sinek

If you are struggling getting your new business venture off the ground, it’s time to visit with one of the masters of business success, Peter Drucker.  He was the leader in the development of management education and invented “management by objectives”.  He wrote dozens of books about business and management.  Drucker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.

The article by Eric Wagner, contributor to Forbes Magazine, lists Drucker’s 12 Keys to success (http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericwagner/2013/05/07/entrepreneurship-according-to-drucker-your-12-keys-to-success/)

Today, we will continue to consider the next three keys to success as defined by Peter Drucker.

He delineated the following as the first and second key.

Key 1: “Those who perform love what they’re doing.”

Key 2:“Successful entrepreneurs do not wait until “the Muse kisses them” and gives them a bright idea; they go to work.”

Let’s exam the next three keys.

Key 3: “What is our business?”

In the eye of the daily working storm we often forget why we are working.  What is the purpose of your business?  Why did you start it?  What happened that pointed you to this particular business?  Has your purpose changed?  How will your business make a difference?  Do you intend that it does make a difference?  These questions are reflective, of course.  And it’s useful to pull yourself back into yourself and look at your purpose newly.  In order to maintain your passion for your business you really have to be clear about your purpose.  If your purpose is to only make money, I assert that you have lost your way.  Keep your purpose alive.

Key 4:  “Who is the customer?”

Knowing who your one and only one customer is, is the key to pointing your business marketing to that person.  Notice that I say “that person” not to them.  Your business is intended to provide a product or service to one person.  Who is that person?  Can you see him or her in your mind’s eye?  This is not time for generalizations; it’s time for specifics.  Be specific about your one and only one client.  It is important that you take the time to define that one person down to what that person likes, who he admires, and how smart she is.

Key 5: “Neither studies nor market research nor computer modeling is a substitute for the test of reality.”

Ah, yes, reality.  This is where your efforts in marketing and selling become the check for “is it working?”  I recently began advanced training to improve my business marketing acumen.  This program is a Master course with lots of homework and requires a great deal of thinking.  I love the challenge and notice that I have to prick the balloon of my own magical thinking that just by excelling at the homework doesn’t mean anything.  The reality check will come when I apply what I am learning to marketing my business and see how my customers relate to it.  As entrepreneurs we must rely on reality and be able to pivot and switch our approach when reality tells us to.

Now, it’s your turn.  Please tell me in the comments below how these next three keys to success relate to you and your business.  I am looking forward to hearing from you!

How To Open Your Box

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open your box 2To continue last week’s discussion, we were asking “What it is that really extraordinary people bring forth that allows them to operate outside of the boundaries of their psychological (ontological) box?” — the purpose being to give us equivalent access.

Look and see for yourself.  There have most likely been times in your life when things just worked, when life seemed almost magical, when you made exactly the right moves at exactly the right time, when other people suddenly appeared to assist you somehow at just the point when they were needed.  Granted, for most people it seems accidental — seems like it just happened.  But maybe not.  Maybe you brought something special to the party.  And more importantly, what we are after here is, how can you cause this state of being in your life and your work?

What conditions are present that allow people access to miraculous living, and not have their ambitions and dreams be either just more of the same box sized futures, or else another bunch of airy-fairy nonsense?

First, you will see that they are 100% committed to something that cannot be accomplished unless they re-invent themselves as bigger people.  And that takes courage.  The kind of courage that can be with not knowing how, with being uncertain, with being afraid.

Second, they have at least one person who knows that they are big enough to do it and who is there to remind them of that fact when they themselves forget.  That’s why smart people who are up to big things have coaches, be it a business associate or a professional coach.  Mohammed Ali had Angelo Dundee; Roger Staubach had Tom Landry; Joe Namath had Bear Bryant.

Third, they somehow keep going when reality screams that they should quit, or change course.  Remember what we said last week: you invented that old reality anyway, in response to some very pressing conditions.  Now it is time to invent new ones!

 

Photo courtesy of Unsplash- Vee-O

How Your Mind Built the Box

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A Box100173923If we are to accomplish anything really worthwhile we are going to have to push up against, and to break through, our limits to what’s possible.

That’s not so easy.  Oh sure, in that first flush of excitement that comes with a new idea, great things seem possible; in fact we seem to be a new kind of human being, until all too soon we find ourselves out on the firing line.  Faced with putting those ideas into action, how quickly we become our same old selves again.

What exactly has happened?  How did we forget our new selves so quickly, and so entirely?

To arrive at a useful answer, perhaps we must be willing to consider that reality is not the way we think it is.  What is reality anyway?  Or more importantly, what gives you and me our realities?

First, we do not experience the world—what you and I experience is our own personal interpretation of the world.  If you don’t believe this, ask any senior physicist about that chair you are sitting on.  He will tell you it is nothing but empty space, and some unimaginably tiny particles that take up no space at all.

We learn quickly from birth to experience the world in a particular way—the way the people around us experience it.  If we don’t, we are not allowed to play in the game of everyday life—(they will put you away).  We form a persona—a me—and by the time we begin school that me is almost rock solid.  It determines what we think, what we feel, what we do—and more important—it determines what is possible, and what is impossible.  How we experience the world is absolutely consistent with that persona.  And we will defend it with our lives.  Just watch your reaction the next time some idiot cuts in front of you in traffic.  What actually happened is a brightly colored steel box on four wheels moved into the path of the brightly colored steel box you were sitting in.  But your reaction?  You’d think you had been threatened with assassination.

Given that a great many human beings have gone beyond their limits and have accomplished extraordinary things, things that were, until then, considered impossible, the question arises: what allows these people to transcend the limits of the box they live their lives in?  (And be it a large box or a small box; it’s still a box.)  What allows them to push up against their limits—and their limits are just as real as are yours—and to reach their goals?

Next week we will inquire into this.

 

 

Photo courtesy of  ”Blank Cardboard Box” by aopsan

 

Who Are You Being? Just Watch!

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“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.”

                                                                  ~ Charles Simic

 

For the past several weeks we have been discussing the nature of who we are !cid_part2_03010608_02010703@wellbeing when we are with other people; and specifically, inquiring into what is it that has certain people in a group shine like a lighthouse—who are they being?—while the rest of the group is busily doing whatever it is they habitually do when they are with other people?

The powerful action to take regarding being is to simply observe it.  You can’t do anything to impact being; anything you do is more of the same, just different.

When I was a kid I kept a cold all winter, with two or three bedridden bouts with the flu as well.  By the time I was in my thirties, it had gotten somewhat better: now only three or four bad colds each winter, with a case of the flu thrown in now and then.  So here I was, thirty-six years old, in February, thirty-five degrees and drizzling rain, and I’m running a boatyard.  We are building a wooden ship; I’m outside all day in the rain, and here it comes: the sore throat and the feverish feeling that signals the start of yet another bad cold.  I plan to go home after work, take a hot shower, and go to bed.

But then something extraordinary happened; it changed my life forever.  After my shower, one of my employees called and said, “Let’s go down to Gloucester and see a movie.”  I went with him, and I got home late that night.  I had completely forgotten about the cold.  It was only the next morning, back at the boatyard—again out in the drizzling rain—that I finally remembered and realized that the sore throat and fever were gone.  At that instant something happened.  The world shifted.  Time seemed to stop; the mental chatter stopped; I was totally present.  And then a single thought ran through my mind, “I don’t have to go to school any more.”

That was thirty-three years ago.  Since that time I have had maybe four colds.  A shift in being occurred on that February morning, as I was standing out there in the rain.  I had a direct experience of reality.  The whole edifice of explanations and knowledge, everything I knew about colds, collapsed.  Reality shifted.

Observation allows for shifts in reality; change (doing) merely rearranges the already existing elements of the current reality into a different order: more of the same, just different.

Photo from www.villagecraftsmen.com