An entrepreneur’s stock in trade is confidence. When he has no confidence, he can’t function because entrepreneurism is fraught with risk—emotional and financial danger, risk to employees, risk to investors, risk to the family. More than one entrepreneur has bit the dust financially and lost everything they own because their business fell apart. So remaining confident in the face of danger is important.

The team that surrounds the entrepreneur exists to “guard his flank” by being sure the enterprise functions properly and successfully. The Flank Guards surround the entrepreneur like the Secret Service surrounds the President. As dangers pop up, the Flank Guards knock them down and keep the entrepreneur protected—more specifically keep his confidence high—so he can continue to creatively fleshing out the vision for the enterprise he is leading.

I’ve found that as my confidence increases my emotions de-celerate. They slow down. I’m not as jumpy—hasty—edgy—nasty. I’m nicer to people when I am confident. I am more patient and more flexible? I am the me I like.

Why is confidence emotionally decelerating? Because an entrepreneur is always guarding his enterprise. He’s always on edge, protecting the baby from danger. Sometimes it seems like there are mercenaries inside and outside the organization who are intent on screwing it up—damaging the baby; Shutting off the revenue; Increasing the expenses;  Draining the bank account; But when the entrepreneur is confident that his flanks are well-guarded and the dangers are protected against, he begins to relax; to not push so hard. His fear that “they” are going to “screw it up” begins to diminish. That’s why confidence is so important.

If you are an entrepreneur you should ask yourself “What am I afraid of? Where am I lacking confidence?” Answering those questions will tell you where you need to focus your attention.

If you work for an entrepreneur you should ask “What can I do to increase my boss’ confidence? Am I executing my responsibilities so he feels like his flanks are guarded?”

A successful bigger future begins with increasing your confidence today.

When it comes to executing your roles in your family, and in that responsibility for which you are economically compensated, are you a leader or a manager? Oh, I know some reading this post will say “I’m neither, I just……” but wait, in that case you are at least a manager; responsible for managing that particular responsibility which you’ve been assigned. So if you are willing to accept at least the “manager” designation, then I want to engage in thought with you about Leadership vs. Management. Perhaps in the mental conversation you’ll find a way to make a bigger difference in the world.

This matter arose in my company because of a management issue. I have colleagues who the world would call “managers” but I find myself talking to them about being better “leaders.” What’s the difference and why does it matter? Good question!

My mentor Lee Brower called my attention to the fact that we have way too much management in this world, and not nearly enough leadership. This is true from Wall Street to your street. Think about it: The large financial companies were gaming the system in the early 2000’s and proverbially “got caught with their pants down” causing legendary firms with centuries of history to vanish over night in 2008. The response was “We need more regulation.” That’s “management speak” and it’s wrong.

What we needed then and now is leadership which says “that’s wrong, danger ahead, you can’t cheat the system and keep inflating the numbers into perpetuity. There will be a pay day, some day.” Leadership speaks to the WHY behind those kind of decisions while management just seeks control. But control ultimately never works. In the 30’s the government tried to control liquor. All that did was make the bootleggers like Joe Kennedy and Al Capone rich. Today, we’ve got drug laws that seek to control use of illicit substances. How’s that working in your community? It won’t work on Wall Street either. Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme has already resulted in a great host of additional government “management” through financial regulations seeking to “control” unethical financial behavior. What’s needed instead is leadership born of personal morality that says “No. You can’t do it. We won’t allow it. And you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to do it. We shun you!” all the while teaching people about the financial, emotional, moral, social, and spiritual costs of such thievery. Really, we need stronger teaching, not stronger legislating. There are absolutes, and those of us who know that need to stand by them.

Lest you think this is just an issue on Wall Street, let’s look at your street. Lee has mentioned how leadership vs. management plays out at your kids school, or in their Little League, or Mighty Mights or whatever they are involved in. Have you heard about these places where the children’s athletic teams don’t keep score because “we wouldn’t want little Johnny to feel badly because his team lost”? Or how about the schools that don’t give grades because they wouldn’t want the low achievers to feel badly because they flunked. What kind of stupid thinking is that? Do you think that when these kids grow up they are going to get a passing grade in life and business just for showing up, without contributing…..”doing their homework” so to speak? Is no one going to keep score in life? Is their employer going to give everyone the same promotion and the same raise, or are there going to be winners and losers? Those who advance, and those who are held back? Those who succeed and those who fail? Ask the guy I terminated yesterday. He’s a prince of a fellow. I like him alot! But he wasn’t getting the job done. He wasn’t passing the class, and ultimately he got kicked out of school. He lost his job. To have kept him on the team risked the economic health of the entire company and ultimately the jobs of every person on the team. Management might have protected his job and thus his emotions, but leadership ultimately protected the jobs of 50 others.

I’m all for cushioning someone’s pain the best we can. Medicine calls it “palliative care” But I’m also for letting people learn by experiencing the hard realities that are life. You will lose, sometimes. You will get hurt. You will experience pain. You will someday die! This is life. Good leadership doesn’t try to “manage” away the pain, instead it equips people to overcome the negatives they face.

Are you leading your family, or managing them? What about your department? Your peers?

When it comes to the vision you are pursuing at home or professionally, are you throwing wood or water on the flame, or are you the keeper of the flame? One is management, the other is leadership.

Here’s another difference between management and leadership: Management focuses on short-term results—what will get the best response “tomorrow?” Leadership focuses on long-term results—what will ultimately make us the strongest as a family or a company over the long haul?

Which is best, short term management, or long term leadership? It depends on what you want. Pine trees grow rapidly. They are a “soft” open-grained wood and don’t have tremendous strength. Oak trees grow slowly. They produce a “hard” tightly grained wood with the greatest strength. So what do you want? A soft child that is emotionally weak? Then manage his environment so that he is protected from every unpleasantness. But if you want a strong family that endures and thrives amid the hardship of life you lead them in how they are to think, how they are to approach and experience life’s difficulties, and you produce a child that will have deep roots through which to draw water during the harsh droughts of adulthood.

In my company I want leaders. People come to us for our leadership. We even having a saying “We help people who have problems, not those who are problems.” That’s true. People come to us when their financial, investment, real estate and business life aren’t working, and we help them sort through their options and develop a strategy to move their life forward.

I want each member of my team—everyone I touch, really—to step up their leadership; to seek to influence for better, the situations in which they are involved and the people they are around. I don’t want people who know how to check boxes, though that is required. I want people who understand intuitively WHY we are checking the boxes. It’s NOT so we’ll have “checked boxes” at the end of the day. It’s because if we have checked all those boxes we’ll have followed a protocol designed to give the highest probability of a positive result for the people who are depending on us.

You see, it really is about WHY vs. WHAT. People who ask WHAT always work for people who KNOW WHY. WHY people set the temperature in the room. WHAT people monitor the temperature in the room.

If the WHY is big enough, the WHAT will always become evident, at least for bright people.

You are bright. You wouldn’t have been able to read this far in this lengthy epistle if you weren’t. You are bright enough to be a WHY guy (or gal). You can be a leader. You can be a difference maker in your family, your church, your community, and your workplace. It starts when you move through and beyond your management responsibilities to take up the mantle of leadership for all the people who are depending on you.

One of the most helpful truths my friend Lee Brower has taught me is “Lift the Anchor.” When we face a big, insurmountable project we often fail to tackle it because of it’s size, or that the ‘getting ready’ is its self an enormous task. So the question is: How do you move a battleship? You don’t have to haul the anchor thousands of feet up from the sea floor and safely stow it on deck. All you have to do is lift the anchor an inch off the sea floor and you can move the ship. So the BIG SHIP in your life that you need to move only requires a small task to get started: Lift the anchor!

Lifting the anchor, taking action, take the first step, getting in motion—they are all the same principle. Norman Vincent Peale said “Inaction is both the result of fear and the cause of fear.” When we take action it begins to build our confidence (or restore confidence that has waned.) So get up off the couch, put on your sneakers, and walk the first 100 steps toward the physically fit you. That’s lifting the anchor. Clean just one drawer in your dressor, or one spot on your desk. That’s lifting the anchor. Sweep just one corner of your garage. Anchor’s away!

What BIG challenge do you face today? You can be paralyzed by fear and enormity, or you can take the first step.

Get in motion!

Do you live your life according to generalities? Kinda? Sorta? Mostly? Or, are you living precisely as you intended?

This thought came to mind as I interacted with one of my team. We’re building some new advertising and needed to know somethings about our customer. When I asked the question I got back “probably” answers. As you might guess, I’m not interested in building advertising that sorta, kinda, generally targets who we suspect our customer to be; especially when we’ve got the information available to us. I want to know exactly. As I told him, “You fly a kite on ‘probably.” You fly an F18 on ‘precision’.”

There’s always a larger lesson in these kinds of encounters. And the larger lesson in this one—for me—had to do with how we live our lives, generally, mostly, kinda, sorta. And guess what kind of results that produces, mostly. ….Yeah, I think you are beginning to get my drift.

What if life really does give you exactly what you ask for? Exactly what you intend?

Is your intention set precisely so that you’ll achieve what you really want? Or, is it just sorta pointed in a general direction?

My belief is that we get what we ask for. There’s even a spiritual component to this. If you read the Bible you’ll find repeatedly that Jesus asked people “What do you want?”

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t think God is Santa Claus to be treated like a celestial slot machine. But there is a sense that when we set our intention in a focused way on a thing to be achieved or attained, that it then begins to show up in our life. For example, I recently decided I wanted to be more grateful and to facilitate that I bought a notebook to keep beside my bed in which I write nightly “I am grateful for…..” and my sense is that my overall gratitude has increased since I began that exercise. My historically cheery daughter has recently been downcast and gloomy with a “life sucks” attitude. Her mother bought her a notebook and every night she has to write down at least one thing that happened during the day that was positive. Guess what? She’s now discovering many more positive things. Why? Because we set her intention to find those things.

Life is to be lived in abundance. I believe that a key to that experience is deciding what we really want, and pursuing it intentionally with passion and vigor. And I’m 100%, definitely, absolutely, precisely, positive about that.

Remember, you miss 100% of the targets you never aim for.

What’s in your bulls-eye?

If you are looking for strippers, sex and drunkenness you’re in the wrong place. Move on. (Well, actually, there are strippers and sex….you’ll have to read on to get the rest of the story.)

Your heart may be in the right place, but you can still fail if you don’t have the right tools. In order to illustrate that principle I need to tell you about my bachelor party.

Twenty-four years ago I got married. On the night before the wedding, my best man and I had a party. It was a wild one; out of this world you might say. After the rehersal we went back to my little one-bedroom apartment number “A” at 401 N. Ann Street in Columbia, Missouri and had a prayer meeting. Oh, we talked some, and I’m sure we drank some lemonade or ice tea (not the kind that comes from Long Island, either) but mostly we prayed about my upcoming marriage. Same goes for the wedding night. I knelt beside that bridal bed and asked God to bless our union.

Fast forward nine years and you’d have found me in the abyss of the greatest and only significant failure in my life as I signed the papers allowing a judge to dissove that marriage. I still reflect on that today—15 years later. Most recently it occurred to me that you can have the best, most honorable, and most noble intentions (and I promise you I did) and still fail if you don’t also have the right tools (and obviously I didn’t).

Today, my life and work is really about helping people find the right tools to succeed, in business and in life. In the process we buy, rehab and sell hundreds of properties, while also designing financial plans, loaning money, making an occasional speech, leading a couple of small groups, and a variety of other things. But the focused intention of that effort is giving people the right tools for success.

I got to this little parable by thinking about a friend of mine. His marriage is on the rocks. A quarter of a century ago his bachelor party included strippers and all that comes with that. Hmmm. Mine started nobly, his in sin. But the result was the same. Neither of us had the tools.

I know that you largely have good intentions. But do you have the tools to deliver on that intention? If you don’t, what are you doing to get those tools? Somebody said “You are who you are because of the books you read and the people you hang around with.” What are you reading? Who are you hanging with?

The road to Hell is paved with good intention. You’ve got to proactively reach out and grab the tools for success.