how to be happy not taught at university of phoenix, but a business coach
-I have found that– Napoleon Hill, a business coach, wrote his book “Think and Grow Rich”, Napoleon Hill says that, “behind every temporary failure, there’s a seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.”
TIM REDMOND: I love that. Yes.
-And I always find myself, if something really bad is happening, there has to be a really great benefit. And you start asking yourself, what can you learn from this? And I want to ask you this here. So all entrepreneurs, I would say the more successful you are, the more adversity you’re going to run into. A business coach can tell you that! People have very–
TIM REDMOND: I want you to hold that thought here. I just saw this happen with you. A couple weeks ago, we had some pretty emotional times. You went to hell and back so many times you became a certified tour guide, I believe.
-It was awesome.
-But I saw you decide what you’re going to focus on. And I saw to say, you quoted the Napoleon Hill, a business coach, quote. You live this stuff. You quoted that quote here. And I saw your eyes and I heard your volume of your voice and your energy and your voice– not just, well, I know there’s something equivalent that’s going to be good-er or better-er. It’s not that. It’s you had faith, you really believed there’s, with all this garbage hitting the fan, that there’s really some good things. And you’re actively looking for it. And you lit me up on the inside. It was amazing to see this in action. This happened a couple weeks ago with you.
-Well, I appreciate that. I was trying to speak to the mountains. Sometimes you have to shout at those mountains.
[TRIUMPHANT MUSIC]
-And to shout at it, but I saw you not just, well, I hope there’s something equivalent. You believe that there’s this yin and yang here that happens with balancing thing, and there’s all this negative comes in. You’re looking actively for the positive in that.
-Let me ask you this here– so to be happy, one, is whenever you see this adversity coming in, you have to deal with it. So we talked about that. Now we have to be happy. We have to pursue excellence. This is a big thing. If we pursue excellence, we’re going to get paid more. And now Tim, nearly every successful entrepreneur I’ve ever met is obsessed about excellence, or the pursuit of excellence. Why is it so important to becoming happy to pursue excellence instead of just enough to get by? Why is so important to pursue excellence, as opposed to just enough? If you want to know the answer, hire a business coach!
-Well, I think even your own personal sense of accomplishment, the two biggest needs that humans have is the need for security, and another need is a need for significance, the need to be able to contribute. And so if you have this halfhearted fecal infested product that you’re saying this is OK, there’s a sense that you’re living below your design. And so that’s one thing. And another thing here is the market– if you’re not improving– like my good friend Tom Peter said many years ago, read that book, one of the first business books I read in 1982, “In Search of Excellence.” Tom Peters, Robert Waterman.
He said, if you’re not improving faster than your competitors are improving, you’re actually falling behind. And your satisfaction with the mediocre is going to make you poor. It’s going to make you fall behind. You’re going to be less attractive to the people that you’re wanting to continue to have engaged with buying your product or service.
CLAY CLARK: Now Martin Luther King, Jr, He once famously wrote, “if a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and the earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” I think his quotes have so many implications, but I just remember when I was working at Target, I’m there and I was working in the electronic section. And in the Bible, some of these people who believe in the Bible, it says, you’re supposed to work as under the Lord.
I was probably working– if we’re supposed to work into the Lord, I might have been working as unto Satan. I was just not doing a good job. And I was just barely doing a good job. We were supposed to take all the items that someone took out an electronics and left in a random other section of the store, we’re supposed to take those items into the shopping cart and bring them back to the correct areas. And I was acted like I was working. I was getting pretzels, because you get pretzels when you work there. I would try to get pretzels. I’d try to act like I was busy. I had all that. And then she pulls me aside and she was just like, hey, I don’t know who you’re tricking, but you can’t trick me, and you can trick yourself, and you’ll never get promoted with that kind of attitude. And I was like, oh, man. And I realized that I was not working hard.