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Monday Mojo: Stay in the Zone

By Tom Tognoli | November 22nd, 2010 0 Comments

The same 20% of your clothes are what you end up wearing 80% of the time. You eat the same 20% of the stuff in your kitchen 80% of the time. You get 80% of your results from 20% of your effort and the scarier part is you get only 20% of your results from the other 80% of your effort. So, stop doing 80% of the things you are doing where you are not getting the results and do a lot more of the 20% where you are getting all of the results. Check out this math:

  • 80% results / 20% effort = 4
  • 20% results / 80% effort = .25
  • 4 / .25 = 16X

What this means is you are 16 times more efficient when you are in your 20% zone. That means that in a typical 8 hour work day you get 80% of your results from1.6 hours of work and 20% of your results out of the other 6.4 hours. If you could just stay in “the zone” for 30% of your day instead of 20% of your day, you could work 2.4 hours and then go home. You would be getting 120% done of what you are doing today and work 5.6 hours less.

You just have to do more of what you’re already doing that works fantastically well because most of what you do is a waste of time. So, you might as well stop most of what you do. You can put less energy in, yet get far better results, if you just concentrate on the things that produce fantastic results.

Of course, the math in 16X only applies if the relationship between energy and results is exactly 80/20. So it’s best to think of the 80/20 formula as only a rule of thumb. If the true ratio is 75/25, then you’ll “only” get 9 times better results from the top things you do. Sometimes the true ratio turns out to be 90/10, though, which gives you a massive 81 times better results.

The mechanics of 16X are more about stopping than starting to do more. The key is to create white space – in your schedule, in your mind and in your life as a whole. It’s about emptying your days of those things that don’t justify your time and effort because they give such a poor return.  Most of the things you allow to take up space in your life are not important. They accumulated gradually over a period of years – certain work habits, leisure activities, relationships, stuff lying around your home and office, and a lot more that you could add to the list.

Just think, what would it would be like if you scaled back to those things that truly count the most, that work the very best, that bring you the greatest joy, energy, and sense of fulfillment? How much more time, vitality, and peace would that bring? Then imagine taking some of this new white space you’ve created by uncluttering your life, and investing it in those things that count most, work best, and bring the greatest rewards. That’s your path to breakthrough results.

Here are some of the ideas on what you can do to stay in the zone longer:

  • Get up 30 minutes earlier. Don’t wake up in a crisis or the rest of your day and life will be one big crisis. Quit hitting the snooze bar!!!!
  • Health…you don’t have BIG BONES
    - Diet (less than 2,000 to 2,500 calories everyday)
    - Cardio for at least 30 minutes 5 times a week: INTENSE!!!!!!
    - Take vitamins everyday – don’t get sick
    - Drink a lot of water
    - Don’t drink alcohol or smoke
    - Sleep 7 hours a night
  • Dress for success, clean up yourself, clean your car, clean your office and clean your house
  • Review your affirmations everyday, day dream everyday and think everyday
  • Be focused while doing one thing and do it well…you will knock it out of the park. If you try and do everything, especially try and do everything all at once, you will suck at it all.
  • Do the things you like least first every day, then knock out all of the little things so your mind is clear.
  • Have a good system for To Do’s and your Schedule and live by it.
  • Create white space in your mind and you physical spaces. Purge 80% of everything at work, in your car, and at home.
  • Speed up. Walk 25% faster. It will carry over into everything you do. Speed is key.
    (Read the book New Work Habits for a Radically Changing World Operate)
  • Go with your gut and don’t over think it. Your first instinct is almost always right. If it feels right, do it and do it with focus and intensity. (Read the book Blink)
  • Don’t play it safe. Take risks and think different.
  • Turn your dreams into a plan. Turn your plan into a list and plug your list into your schedule. Then do what your schedules says. If you ever wake up and actually have to think about what you need to do, you are dead.
  • Have Fun, be Focused, be Intense, be Accountable and be Disciplined.
  • Fill at least two Garbage Bags every month from home and work. One for garbage and one to donate.
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Thoughts on Leadership: How Leaders Can Build Momentum on the Road to Success

By Gino Blefari | November 18th, 2010 0 Comments

Momentum is a force you need on your side as the leader of any type of business or organization. It is often the decider between winners and losers.

In the book “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership,” John Maxwell explains that, “Momentum is really a leader’s best friend. Sometimes it’s the only difference between winning and losing.”

Momentum is when things happen easily, where one success follows another and forward growth comes quickly. Momentum allows leaders to move past mistakes and opens possibility for change. It motivates people throughout the organization to achieve more. It makes leaders look good.

Here’s an amazing story of recent momentum in a major sports team:

Last Sunday, the Dallas Cowboys, a team with a 1-7 record going in and under new leadership, played the New York Giants, arguably the best team in the NFC. The Cowboys won. Under these challenging circumstances, what was it that pushed this underdog team to victory?

It was the Cowboys’ first game under new head coach Jason Garrett, and they played like an entirely different team compared to the rest of the season. They looked like the talented, confident and capable team that fans expected to see going into this season. They believed they could win. And it all started with momentum.

The first thing Cowboys Coach Garrett did after taking over the team was create momentum. He reminded the players to be great every day so that they could be great in the big moment on Sunday. The process, as he refers to it, is about stacking one “great day” on top of the other. He grabbed attention, tightened rules and raised expectations.

“You feel a different vibe around here,” defensive end Stephen Bowen said. “We worked really hard last week and we showed what we get when we work hard. I felt it just from the beginning of the week it was going to be a different effort. Everybody was all in behind Coach Garrett, and you see how we played out there.”

Garrett explains, “I thought our team responded and the intensity was there in all areas. We were challenged in all areas and I think we stepped up.” Most important was the result – a dominating performance against the NFC East leading Giants, ending the Cowboys five-game losing streak, while making it clear that new management has taken over.

While achieving momentum, it is important to overcome any barriers that come your way. If problems or obstacles occur, do whatever it takes to get past them and move forward. That same problem will become easier as you see more and more success.

The Dallas Cowboys did not look back and did not look forward. They were 100 percent in the now and wanted to build on the good things they were doing and eliminate the bad. The players understood expectations and limitations. Players responded to their new coach with the kind of performance that showed this team still cares and has built the momentum.

Creating momentum is not easy. Do the little things that build momentum in your life today. Give yourself to excellence today – it will give you something to build on when tomorrow comes. It takes hard work and effort, but once you have momentum, it can not only change your business and team but your life too.

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Thoughts on Leadership: Friendship is part of success

By Gino Blefari | November 11th, 2010 0 Comments

Friendships are a springboard to success, both in the business world and in our personal lives. The ability to make friends often differentiates the successful person from the unsuccessful one. This type of networking should never be overlooked.
 
I once interviewed Dave Diaz-Infante, former long snapper for the Denver Broncos, to get more insight on this topic. I asked him what stood out for the Broncos when they won Super Bowls XXXII and XXXIII. His answer: “The one thing that stood out the most was the great level of friendship this football team had. We were just all great friends.”
 
Likewise, New York Yankees player Derek Jeter, was asked the same question after the 1998 Yankees ranked #1 in the ESPN25 Panel of Experts ranking of the Top 25 Teams: 1979-2004. Jeter’s answer: “Our highest level of camaraderie and friendship is what made our baseball team a dynamic organization.”

Good relationships with co-workers, clients and friends take time to build, but can start with something as simple as asking questions. The next time you are trying to build a relationship with someone, ask them about their goals, their family and their hobbies. Let them do the talking.
 
The ‘Innerview’
 
A technique I often use to build friendships is the Dale Carnegie “Innerview.” The Dale Carnegie Training organization is an expert in employee development – from presentation skills to public speaking, interpersonal relations and other essential management skills.Dale Carnegie’s set of 18 questions includes:
 
What else do you do besides work?
What kind of memories do you have about your childhood?
What does the future hold for you?
 
These questions allow me to deepen my understanding of a person, while allowing that person to share their likes and dislikes. I also get to ask myself the following two questions: “What’s one thing I learned about this person that I didn’t know before and What did I learn about this person that makes me appreciate or respect them even more than before Innerviewing them?”

Using this technique, you’ll gather more information to build a friendship in one hour than most people typically try to get out of another person in several years. This information will help you build friendships that last. When you know what makes other people happy, they will want to be around you and help you succeed. Once you know their needs and joys you can help them, which in turn encourages them to want to help you.
 
As a business professional, you should ask yourself, “What business am I in?” The answer is quite simple: If your business has anything to do with people – and all businesses do – you are in the business of building relationships. Some people think that if they sell things, they are in the business of selling. They aren’t. They are in the business of building relationships – because that’s how you sell things. Those in management are also in the business of building relationships, because that’s how good managers get things done.

I’ve often said I love what I do because of who I get to work with. Some of my dearest and closest friends are at Intero and I value the friendships I have with each of them.

This is why “Friendship” appears within our Intero Value Pyramid, which expresses our vision and values used to empower our agents to achieve their dreams. We believe these core principles are necessary to achieve success.

Intero’s “Friendship” value must become a consistent priority if you are to climb the leadership success ladder. Respect and camaraderie will enable us to succeed. Put in the effort and you too will have many friendships that will benefit your success.

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Monday Mojo: Take a Lesson From The Processionary Caterpillar

By Tom Tognoli | November 8th, 2010 0 Comments

An epidemic is occurring all around us and there is a good chance it has already found its way into some of our lives.  It begins slowly at first, but it grows, and in time it can take over our entire life…and if we don’t act now, it may happen to you.  It’s easy to fall in the trap. Well-intentioned people of all ages don’t mean for it to happen, but that doesn’t matter. It takes much more than good intentions to steer clear of this problem. If all it took were good intentions, the world would be packed with people living their dreams and accomplishing their goals.  But that’s not how it works and this trap is one of the most common reasons why it has happened too often in the past and will continue to happen in the future.  What exactly are we dealing with here?  What is so deadly to the goals and hopes we have stored away in our head?

Routine!!! More specifically, a BAD routine.

What am I talking about you ask?

The routines I’m referring to are much deeper than a morning process of a shower and shave. I’m talking about turning off our brains and letting autopilot kick in. Doing the same things we did the day before with no plans to change the pattern any time soon.  You know the drill – wake up, shower, work, home and sleep.  This is no way to live, and you know that.  But it’s still hard to break free once the bad routine has gotten hold of us. All hope is not lost. If we want to turn off the autopilot and start taking control of our lives it takes only one moment to make the decision. And then everything changes. You’ve heard it a thousands times, and it’s a good thing, because it’s true. If you keep doing what you have always done in the past you will keep getting the exact same thing in the future.

People experience a partial insanity when it comes to routine. Perfectly logical people believe that doing the same thing again and again will get different results. That’s crazy!  If we want to lose weight but continue with the same eating habits, we won’t lose weight.  If we want to make more money but keep doing the same things day in day out, it’s not going to happen.

We have goals, but if we are stuck in a bad routine we won’t accomplish them. Be honest with yourself about this one. It’s the only way we’ll realize the need for a change before we can enjoy improvement.  Create a new and improved routine, which is in alignment with what you want in life.

What does it take? It takes a decision. A choice of what we really want to do with our life and the actions to make it happen. If we know where we are going, how to get there and have a good new and improved routine to make it happen, we will not be disappointed in the end.

Check out the results of this amazing experiment:

A very unusual experiment was conducted by Jean Henri Fabre, a French entomologist, consisting of processionary caterpillars, a type of caterpillar that blindly follows the one in front of it. The experiment consisted of several of these caterpillars, a flowerpot filled to the rim with dirt, and pine needles.  The caterpillars formed a complete circle around the rim of the flowerpot, with the first one touching the back of the last one. The pine needles, the food of the processionary caterpillar, were placed in the center of the circle. The caterpillars began their procession and continued on the same path hour after hour, day after day, for an entire week. In the end, every one of the caterpillars dropped dead of starvation. The one thing that could have saved them was only inches away, but without purposeful thought or action, the caterpillars continued with a habitual routine that eventually proved too much to endure.

This is happening to people we know…maybe even you.  Get stuck doing the same old thing every single day and your goals, sitting only inches away, are as good as gone…plain and simple. You might think it’s a little too simple, but falling into a bad routine can destroy your life.  People start off with bright hopes for the future, but their bad routine begins to take their place. “No time…no time,” is a common excuse. After seventy+/- years of having no time to do the things you have always wanted to do, you’ll end up with nothing but a good excuse in the end.

This is your life we are talking about here. It’s worth taking the time to break the pattern of habit and creating the changes you wish to make.  There is little more that is as important as the life you create and the good you leave behind. Recognize if you are in a bad routine, break free and get into a good routine.  Sometimes it’s a matter of what we all seek in life – confidence.  Permanent change requires courage and a strong belief in your ability to succeed, something that we all doubt from time to time.

Break your old routine, get a new and improved routine, and then have a GREAT week and a GREAT life!

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Thoughts on Leadership: What Leaders Can Learn from the San Francisco Giants

By Gino Blefari | November 4th, 2010 0 Comments

It’s been an amazing week here in the Bay Area as we watched our San Francisco Giants win the 2010 World Series against the Texas Rangers, in just five games. We can take a lot of inspiration from this winning team – their teamwork, strong will, motivation, strength and perseverance can teach us many successful leadership lessons.
 
At the beginning of this baseball season, no one would’ve predicted the Giants would come out on top. Many said this win couldn’t be done. But the team ignored the commentary, focused and they did it. Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this unexpected victory is the power of teamwork. The Giants are not a team carried by one or two stars. They are a team that works together 100 percent of the time.

Teamwork is defined in Webster’s New World Dictionary as “a joint action by a group of people, in which each person subordinates his or her individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group.”

This does not mean that the individual is no longer important; however, it does mean that effective and efficient teamwork goes beyond individual accomplishments. The most effective teamwork is produced when all the individuals involved compliment their contributions and work towards a common goal.

In 1999, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Steve Sax, a former second baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers. I was quick to bring up the 1988 World Series where the LA Dodgers beat the highly favorite Oakland A’s, who clearly had the best players such as Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire and Dennis Eckersley, to name a few. I recall mentioning to Steve, “The best team didn’t win the World Series.” To this day I can still remember Steve’s reaction as he took a great deal of offense to my comment. His response back to me was distinct, “Maybe the A’s had the better players, but we definitely had the best team.”

To succeed at any task, everyone who is involved needs to combine efforts. If everyone does their job well, then it increases what the team can accomplish. The teamwork ideal has to be recognized by everyone. Great things can happen if individuals master the fundamentals and work together as one unit. Each person has a unique role and that role must be recognized and appreciated.

Legendary baseball player Babe Ruth explains: “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.”

Teamwork is something that must be a high priority and given constant attention. Every player needs to understand how important it is for them to work smoothly together if they want to be successful. Each player must be dedicated to the whole team and be willing to act unselfishly. When challenges arise (as they always do), the team needs to have the resources, accountability and commitment to deal with them in a constructive and positive manner. A sense of teamwork and effective teams will play an integral part in this.

For a better understanding of teamwork, the following are eight characteristics of effective teams that pertain to your path to leadership:

  1. The team must have a clear goal.
  2. The team must have a results-driven structure.
  3. The team must have competent team members.
  4. The team must have unified commitment.
  5. The team must have a collaborative climate.
  6. The team must have high standards that are understood by all.
  7. The team must receive external support and encouragement.
  8. The team must have principled leadership.

In your business career, stop and take a look at how you can truly become a part of a team. On each given day each team member has got to do their job and know someone will step up and help win the game or achieve a goal.

What distinguishes Intero is our company Value #5: “Team”. Collectively we can accomplish more than we can alone. Everyone is a contributor and we succeed by pulling together rather than relying on one or two stars. As San Francisco Giants player Pablo Sandoval said, “We don’t have a star but we have a team.” This will be the legacy of the 2010 San Francisco Giants.

What would you like your legacy to be in your business career? Just about everyone has the will to win and the desire to succeed. However, not everyone has the will to prepare to win or the will to do what it takes to succeed. If you have that, perhaps you will be the next Edgar Renteria or Brian Wilson.

Look at what working together as a team can mean for your business. If you play the game right as the San Francisco Giants did, you too can become a successful leader on your way to the top.

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Thoughts on Leadership: Motivation Leads the Way

By Gino Blefari | October 28th, 2010 0 Comments

Motivation is everything. It sparks action that leads to achievement. It opens up possibilities. It inspires people to work. It is crucial to effective leadership.

To lead with purpose – to lead toward any goal – you will need strong people to follow you. To gain followers, you need trust. All of this requires that your people are motivated. That motivation will help to create trust in their leadership and will move them to get things done.

Leadership without motivation will surely fail.

Mike Ferry, founder of The Mike Ferry Organization, a leading real estate coaching and training company, is an example of a leader who motivates with great success. He has a natural ability to teach and train real estate agents to achieve their personal and business goals.

Just last week, Mike wrote about motivation and leadership in a monthly newsletter to Executive Management Group Brokers and Managers. He talks about the trickledown effect of motivation – how it starts from the top with the leader. But who motivates the leader, you may ask? Mike does such an extraordinary job explaining this. The way he inspires agents to produce at high levels is amazing.

The following excerpts are from the Mike Ferry Organization October 2010 Newsletter #7:

One of the more difficult parts of our jobs as a leader is the ability to continually motivate our salespeople to do something productive.” If you look carefully at the word motivation … there are two distinct parts to the word. Part one … “motive” … part two … “action.”

You’ve seen the question asked time and time again, “Who motivates the motivator?” The motivator does not need to be motivated if they have strong, specific, exciting, challenging goals that they are passionate about and driven to achieve. When the leader does not have specific goals for themselves that are exciting and inspiring … then you as a leader are going to have a very difficult time motivating others to take actions, just as it’s difficult for you to motivate your staff when they have no goals and objectives.

So obviously, it’s a trickledown effect. You and I as leaders have to have specific goals and objectives that we’re excited about every day and can’t wait to achieve. When we have those types of goals and objectives, our attitude about success and achievement and taking actions becomes very apparent to those people around us. Our very presence in the office… from the moment we walk in the door … how we walk to our office … how we carry ourselves … how professionally we’re dressed and look … the smile on our face … to the tone of our voice … tells everybody that sees us our level of motivation or “lack of it.” So the truth is it becomes extremely difficult to motivate your salespeople into action every day if you’re not a motivated person yourself.

So the real job that we have in front of us is to be an inspired … enthusiastic … energetic … smiling … “happy to be around person” … all of the time when our salespeople are around us. If we’re not, we will then in essence be de-motivating our team.

At the same time, we have to sit down with each and every salesperson and determine their level of motivation so in all of our conversations with them, we can discuss how the activities they’re involved in lead them to the achievement of the goals they set. If they don’t have specific goals and objectives, it’s our job to help them set them.

Are you prepared to take on this task? If the answer is yes, let’s go do it … if the answer is no, we need to talk.

Motivation is an ongoing process. As a leader, you will find yourself constantly motivating your team to get things done and to far exceed expectations. Consider this your top priority and you will find that a lot of other things fall into place.

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Thoughts on Leadership: Character Is Where It All Begins

By Gino Blefari | October 14th, 2010 0 Comments

A common thread that runs through all great leaders is undeniably strong character. Leaders come from all types of backgrounds, but each has big dreams and the determination to overcome obstacles and fear that often get in the way.

Character and moral fiber are where it all begins.

One success story that rings true to honorable character is that of Brown University President Ruth Simmons, the first African American female to head an Ivy League University.

Ruth was one of 12 children born to her sharecropper father and her mother who did domestic work for a living. Neither of her parents were formally educated, but the life lessons and personal values Ruth picked up from them would provide the strong basis of character that would lead her through life.

By observing her parents at work and the rich spiritual traditions of her family, Ruth learned the importance of civility and respect for others, attention to detail and the value of hard work.

Ruth worked hard not for praise or enrichment, but because hard work was a value that was ingrained in her character. The Brown University selection committee no doubt admired that ideal.

Ruth’s story is emblematic of the American Dream – hard work, unwavering values and strength of character lead to great rewards. She also provides a lesson in how our parent’s values and leadership style have a profound effect on whom we become. A lot of leadership success stories begin with a parent or role model who teaches the value of consistently living in alignment with our values, goals and actions.

As Ruth’s mother used to say, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree,” which means that an influence on a person’s character as a child will continue to show up in the person as an adult and therefore have a greater impact on their path to success.

Over my entire leadership career going back to managing Cherry Chase Golf Course to my time at Contempo Realty, NRT and Intero Real Estate Services, and with my current partners John Thompson, Tom Tognoli and Bob Moles, the biggest leadership challenges we’ve had to overcome lie in trying to teach people values and traits that their parents should have imparted to them.

For me, personally, the influence of such early lessons runs deep. Sometimes, when making business decisions as CEO of Intero, I will provoke quizzical, “why did you do that?” looks from my partners.

My answer: “Because I am Paul Blefari’s son.”

Lessons learned early still stay with me – and guide me, in their own way, towards decisions that may not seem obvious to those around me but nonetheless contribute to my own growth as a leader.

To live in alignment with your values requires a strong sense of who you are and where you came from. That’s the stuff that builds strong character – and strong character is what helps to build great leaders.

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Thoughts on Leadership: Leaders, born or made?

By Gino Blefari | September 3rd, 2010 0 Comments

“If we treat people as they are, we make them worse, but if we treat them as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”  -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

People often ask the same three questions about leadership:

  1. Can anyone really become a leader?
  2. Is leadership a quality you either have or don’t have?
  3. Aren’t leaders born that way?

On the surface, it may seem that leadership is innate. But it’s not. Leadership is developed over time. In fact, the best leaders are those that have grown through experience, not those who were born into powerful positions.

Look around and you’ll notice that more leaders are created through time than just born that way. The U.S. military, for example, is full of recruits who often – though not always – come from troubled childhoods. Many in the Army, Navy or Marines have not attended college. Most often, they would seem to be missing the essential ingredients to succeed, yet many times these recruits go on to display great leadership as their careers evolve.

As Warren G. Bennis says in a famous quote about leadership, “the most dangerous myth is that leaders are born, that there is a genetic factor to leadership.”

Leadership takes a lifetime to learn. There are always ways to improve, skills to pick up, and lessons to learn. A leader constantly reflects on life experiences, learns from them and builds them into skills. That collection of skills comes together to produce results.

“Leaders are made rather than born.”

The only born ingredient in the leadership recipe is desire. The desire to lead creates the motivation that drives leaders to lead. Everything else they learned along the way.

So the next time you’re admiring someone who would seem to be born with leadership qualities, think about what life experiences may have contributed to their strengths. Reflect on your own challenges, how you reacted, and how you can learn from those experiences.

This process is essential to your leadership success.

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Monday Mojo: Quantum Leap

By Tom Tognoli | July 19th, 2010 0 Comments

Is what you are doing today building on what you did yesterday or are you starting from scratch…again? So often we jump from one thing to another, but never get any significant results – never getting ahead. Why? Because we are spreading ourselves too thin.

Success in achieving almost anything in life is not going to be the result of jumping from one thing to another. It is going to be the compounded result of doing only the most important activities over and over again and by taking on fewer activities more frequently. If we do those few, most important activities consistently over and over again, at some point we reach the tipping point and we will explode into a quantum leap. It’s all about K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple Stupid. Getting what we want in life is not complicated, but it is difficult. It involves doing the important activities, not the urgent ones. The difficult part is being disciplined enough to do those important, not the urgent activities consistently and doing them over and over again until we have a breakthrough.

Why is it so hard? Because we have to do it over and over for long periods of time with what appears to be little or no results. But if we have the discipline to stick with it, all of a sudden, one day we will have a radical breakthrough. The hard part is not to quit when we feel like we are running into a brick wall with no results; the hard part is not quitting when we are having a breakdown. Because when the wall comes down, it won’t come down one brick at a time, but the accumulation affect of hitting it over and over again will bring it tumbling down all at once. It will happen when we are exhausted and beyond wanting to quit. We will hit it again and BANG!!!!

Consider this: Let’s pretend that each individual activity we do in life is represented by one piece of paper. Stacked up on top of each other, a stack of 50 pieces of paper will only be ¼ of an inch high. Unfortunately, the quantum leap never happens. Why? Because there is not accumulation affect, no compounding. Now imagine instead that we only have one huge piece of paper and we fold the piece of paper in half 50 times. This represents our most important activities we do over and over again. If we were to fold a piece of paper 50 times (if this were physically possible, which of course it is not) the paper will be high enough to almost reach the sun! Now that’s a quantum leap!

Do the important, not the urgent activities and make it a great week!

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Monday Mojo: Are you a marathon runner or are you a sprinter?

By Tom Tognoli | June 28th, 2010 0 Comments

Before we can get to work on accomplishing anything significant in business or life, we need to figure this one out. Then set up our plan accordingly.

For example, I personally have two speeds – HIGH and off. I am a sprinter. There are many others who are marathon runners. They never really get up to full speed, but they never really totally shut it down either. We are all different and both speeds can work, but if you are a marathon runner and try to set up your plan to be like me, you are not going to get anything accomplished and you are going to be frustrated. On the other hand, if you are a sprinter and think you will be able to keep up the pace without resting you are going to crash and burn.

Now, before you go putting together your plan, most people tend to like the idea of being a sprinter, because they like the rest idea.  Don’t kid yourself when you put together your plan. Be honest with yourself. Perhaps ask those closest to you which one they think you are. The biggest mistake I see most people making is living their life like a sprinter, but really being a marathon runner…BIG MISTAKE! Now, if you want to switch the metaphorical event you compete in (sprints or marathons), you can, but you need to make sure you are training accordingly. We all can change as long as we want it bad enough and are willing to put in the work to accomplish it.

So, when you are putting your plan together at whatever it is in life, ask yourself that question: “Am I a sprinter or am I a marathon runner”.  Then build your plan, your schedule and your life accordingly…then CRUSH IT!!!

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