We had an awesome training event in our company yesterday. The team brought their goals (personal, professional, relational, financial & spiritual) and discussed them with one another. Then I fleshed out a couple of our key corporate goals. There was a great energy in the room; not a fizzy excitement, but more of a determined yet upbeat resolve and assurance that yes, what had been written would come to pass. You see in our company we know that the first step to achievement is writing it down, and our team has learned how that works. 2009 was an incredible year. Profits were up ten fold. Accomplishment was everywhere. I can hardly wait to see what 2010 will bring.

Will every goal be achieved exactly as it was written down? No. And that’s not the point. The purpose of the goal is progression—forward motion toward the desire. But any variety of things will then come to bear on that goal that might change it’s measurement, it’s time frame, or even its exactly purpose.

In pursuit of your goals there’s gonna be some hiccups. Call ’em failures if it makes you feel more comfortable. And I’m a big fan of failing early so you can get it out of the way and get on with pursuing that which is most important. That’s why I believe you should never exercise, read your Bible, or pray on January 2nd, and you should always eat chocolate cake on that day. Each of those things represent failures.

Hundreds of millions of people established diet and exercise goals for the new year. Tens of millions of people make spiritual resolutions. By this time…..writing on the 6th day of the year….many of those goals and resolutions are already weakened because we’ve already faltered or failed. Somewhere deep in our psyche is a warped, perfection-based notion that any failure to execute the goal activity or resolution blows up the whole goal. But that is nonsense. All it did is delay it by a day. Since such delays are inevitable—it’s not realistic to think that you’ll execute your eating or exercise, or devotional intention perfectly—-I advocate failing early. January 2, is a good day. Then, on January 3, get right back in pursuit of the thing that was so important that you wrote it down in the first place.

For years I was hampered by perfection. I didn’t know that was what it was, but that was it. I remember my spiritual mentors encouraging me to read the Bible and pray daily, and if I really wanted to do it right, I’d do it “a great while before day” because the Bible told of Jesus going out to pray “a great while before day.” (Notice it wasn’t just “before” it was “a GREAT while before”—apparently the effectiveness of prayer diminishes with each extra ray of light as the sun rises.)  If I wanted to be like Jesus, I needed to emulate Him in rising early to pray. But that didn’t work really well for a college student who stayed up until all hours of the night. I’d feel guilty that I wasn’t disciplined enough to get to bed early so I would have enough sleep that I could get up and pray “a great while before day.” Then one day I realized that God didn’t keep time. It’s always day in Heaven. There was no need to focus on the WHEN of my devotions, and that frees me to focus on the WHO—Jesus. I’m released from my perfection, which—in reality—I didn’t have to begin with or I wouldn’t have needed Jesus to come and die for me in the first place.

The mantra of my mentors Lee Brower  and Dan Sullivan is “Progress, not Perfection.” That’s a good way to think about it. You haven’t achieved your goal yet? So what? Are you closer to it now, than you were before? If the answer is “yes” let’s celebrate that progress and figure out how we can get more of it—moving ever closer to the goal.

I really don’t care what your failure, sin, or shortcoming was yesterday. What’s really important is your tomorrow. Make tomorrow’s achievements your total focus, and make sure the steps of today are pointed toward them.

In San Francisco last week a nice fellow walked up to me and said “Thank you.” I shook his hand and asked why and he then told me that he’d read about me in a book called Get It written by my colleague John Hayes. In the book John had written about the fact that I have a signed, $1 million check taped to the mirror in my closet. It’s a reminder of my economic ability, my earning power, and of the value of my contribution.  Think about it, if you wouldn’t write yourself a $1 million check, why should anyone else?

Anyway, this nice guy named Kirk said “Yeah, I taped a $300,000 check in my mirror, and this year, I’m going to earn $150,000.” Hmmmm. I thanked him for mentioning it and told him I was glad he’d read the book and found the idea helpful. But then later I got to thinking: “He had a $300,000 check taped to his mirror, but I wonder what size the check was in his heart?”

I’ll bet it was $150,000.

Focus is a central key to success in any endeavor. Focus. Laser-like focus!

A few days ago I was sitting in Panera Bread (which we call “The Annex” because that’s where I have a lot of my meetings) with my associate Nola. The food at Panera is better than average. The atmosphere is outstanding! The baroque music stirs my creative juices! I can get alot done at Panera. On this occasion Ron Spigelman, Conductor of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra was sitting at a table nearby, and he was havin’ a concert. Laid out on the table in front of him was a thick musical score. He was swinging his arms and directing imaginary music in a big way. All the while, Panera’s own piped in music was playing in the room. He seemed oblivious to that, and to everything else in the room for that matter.

I watched him for a while, and then I couldn’t help it. I had to ask how he could work through this voluminous musical score while totally different music played overhead. He said “It’s easy. I’m a conductor. I am trained to hear many things at once, while listening to only one particular instrument. So, I never even notice the background music.”

Now that’s focus!

Shift gears for a moment and let’s take a look at an example of non-focus. You may remember a few weeks ago a group of medical academics issued a report that said women didn’t need to have mammograms as often as had been protocol in the past. Shortly after this report came out, HHS Secretary and former Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius appeared on all the morning news shows saying the report was wrong and that women of a certain age should still have mammograms on the previous schedule.

Now, understand this. I don’t know when women should have mammograms? (If they help with early cancer detection I want my wife to have one……DAILY!) I don’t know whether the physicians who issued the report saying less is more know what they are talking about or not (though I’ll give them latitude because they are physicians).

Here’s what I do know: Running the State of Kansas is an executive job filled by an elected politician. Being the Director of Health and Human Services is an executive job filled by an appointed politician. If Kathleen Sebelius were a wise woman she’d realize that this was an argument for the medical community, not a stage for political theatre. But I know, when you are just the HHS secretary and you really want to be the Senator (or whatever) from Kansas you’ve got to get your face on TV whenever you can. However, the point is: she was out of her area of expertise. She drifted from politics and administration into medicine. The HHS secretary needs to deal with public health policy, but she shouldn’t be advising people on when to schedule an exam. She’d lost her focus!

Those of us who have capacious curiosity and large egos can be given to mission creep—to drifting into areas where we really don’t have specialized knowledge to contribute, or helpful things to say. We need to know when to shut up. Beyond that, we need to take a good look at our lives and determine whether we are really investing our energy in the places where it makes the most impact. Are we focused?

I’m reminded of the power of focus in nature: The Grand Canyon was carved not by water that dispersed over acres, but by water that was concentrated into a stream focused on one path.

Sports provides an analogy. I’m writing this piece from Chicago, home of the greatest basketball player ever, Michael Jordan. Do you remember when the great Michael Jordan tried to play professional baseball? He failed! He lost his focus on doing what he did best, drifted into another arena, and failed.

Dispersion = failure. Focus = success.

I just departed from a convention of my colleagues who were asking questions about how to be successful. Many of the answers given were about things they could “add on” to their existing business to give them success. NO! Success comes when you “take away” the ancillary things that distract you from your primary mission and focus your efforts and energy on the one thing that matters most to your success. Don’t seek to do more. Do less, and do it really well.

Focus! Focus! Focus!

Success is natural. The river of life leads us there. But there are dams on that river that prevent us from arriving at that point called success.  My life is about helping people identify those dams—we’ll call them blockages—which prevent the river of their life from delivering them into that great ocean downstream which we’ll call “Success.”

What are those blockages? They could be anything: How you grew up; Some little, silly something that a teacher said; Erroneous teachings from unknowledgeable leaders in your religion; The Great Depression’s influence on your parents or grandparents. Today, blockages are being created in the lives of young people who are growing up with a parent gone to war. Blockages can come from anywhere. And we’ve ALL got them.

I recall one man who, recently divorced, was asked why he ever married the girl in the first place. He said “I thought she was pretty. As a child my parents had always teased me about growing up to marry the “ugly” little girls in class; the dirty haired ones with snot bubbles hanging out their nose.  So when I got the chance to catch a beauty, I did.”

Turns out she was beautiful on the outside, but broken on the inside. The result was a divorce devastating in its emotional, personal and professional impact even a decade later.

Wow! That was a messy blockage, producing bad thinking, and leading to a personal  train wreck. How much better it would have been if that blockage could have been identified and removed earlier allowing the flow of the river to lead to a successful marriage.

We often feel guilty about our blockages, so much so that we may be reluctant to admit them, and therein lies the first lesson: There’s no shame in having a blockage. It’s not your fault. It’s not a weakness. It’s just an “is.” It’s a factor that affects your success. The first key to blowing up that dam on the River of Success is recognizing that it exists, admitting it, and moving beyond the false & improper guilt and shame to look for a solution. We want to dynamite that dam—blow it up—so the natural flow of the water carries you downstream to the Ocean of Success.

Exactly what is that blockage? Is it a circumstance? Or, is it a mental paradigm; a way of thinking that needs to be changed? It could be either, but more often than not its simply a way of thinking or a “false belief” that needs to be eliminated. Sometimes those false beliefs may be so deeply rooted that it’s hard to get to the tap root eliminate them. Our strongly-held, false beliefs may even be so comfortable we don’t want to let them go. There can be a sense of security, even in false belief!

Removing the dams on the River of Success requires willingness on your part to #1. Look into yourself and discover the blockage. #2. Delve into your thinking to ask yourself why you think that way. #3. Be willing to challenge your own belief to be sure it is correct or to change your thinking if it needs to be changed. When you remove those blockages, you’ll be amazed at how quickly the current of the River of Success will deliver you to higher and higher levels of achievement and personal satisfaction.

“There are four quarters in a game, and four quarters in a year. At the end of the year did you walk away having won, or did you just play the game?” Nola Peterson crystalized that thought yesterday at the end of a brief Year End Sprint training session in which I focused our top leadership on “running through the bag” so the year could be completed instead of  just lazily “trotting” the bases until the year was over. It’s an important thought. Are you winning, or just playing.

I think most people engage their work for the sport of it instead of playing to win. It’s a game to get up everyday, suit up, show up on the playing field, drink Columbian Gatorade with friendly teammates, step to the workstation to run a play, drink some more finely ground Columbian Gatorade, have half-time, then go back to the playing field and run a few more plays all the while waiting for the clock to run out. I call this “Playing between the 40’s.”

In football if your team manages to keep the game between the two forty yard lines, nobody wins. The ball moves a few feet one direction or another while players repeatedly grunt, sweat, and pile into a heap. Not much exciting happens, and no points are scored. They don’t give points away for “fine execution between the 40’s.” You are credited with points when you break across the 40 and drive into the opposing team’s end zone.  Trophies don’t go to teams that consistently “deep into the 42 yard line.” Trophies go to teams that break across the goal line and occupy the enemy’s territory.

Notice the use of the word “break.” If you are going to succeed you’ve got to have a break out, away from the rest of the pack. You’ve got to break away from old habits and break-up with negative people who are holding you back.

Why don’t more people experience breakouts? I think its because breaking out involves risk. If I stay huddled with my team between the 40’s, nobody is going to criticize me for showboating and my opponents aren’t going to come crashing into me, making me eat dirt because I broke out. There is camaraderie in the huddle and safety in the group. There is no thrill of victory. There are no awards for accomplishment. There is no forward momentum for greater achievement. But it’s safe. If you’ll just agree to not go beyond the 40, the other team will take it easy on you when they tackle you and make it look like you are really playing the game. If you won’t embarrass them and make them run “all the way” down to the endzone. They won’t face-plant you. But that’s no way to live, knowing neither the sweet taste of victory nor the satisfaction of giving your best amidst defeat.

If you are going to be successful, you’ve got to break out away from the group. You’ve got to take the risk that when you rise above the crowd somebody will take a shot at you. You’ve got to understand that people you thought were your friends will suddenly turn on you because your hard-work, effort, and success make them feel bad about their own life between the 40’s. But life and work are not hobbies played for mere entertainment, we’re here to win. When we win big we advance the ball for our family, our team, and all the people depending on us. And, we give ourselves the respect we deserve. We are worthy of being winners!

As we make the final turn in 2009 and head toward the starting gate for 2010 let’s evaluate our game. Let’s be willing to do the hard work so that in 2010 we can spend more time dancing in the end zone of life.