I’ve Moved

I moved my blog to:

www.gathergreatness.com/blog

Bill

#1 Advisor to the Aspiring Business Professional

“Helping you Achieve your Greatest Self”

A Time to Gather Stones Together

Gratitude Journal

I wrote in my Gratitude Journal today.

Thank you God,
for allowing me the clarity to move my life forward,

for keeping my thoughts positive,

for inspiring me to action,

for going the distance.

Today I took a big step in realizing my dream,

my dream to help others achieve their greatness.

My dream of becoming a ‘Career Mentor’  and  ‘Life Coach’  has started to take shape.

Bill

I hope to see you ‘on the road to greatness.’

Join me on my journey.

www.gathergreatness.com

Millionaire or Reallionaire

I started this blog with the intention of journeying toward the path of greatness, not seeking so much to becoming a man of success, but rather a man of value.

Becoming a man of value may not make you a millionaire,  but it can produce something more.  It can produce a reallionaire.

REALLIONAIRE 

 ”Someone who has discovered that there is more to money than having money. 

 A person who understands that success is not just being rich in your pocket; you have to be rich on the inside too.”    Farrah Gray

Anyone who wants more out of life and the rewards that follow will build their success on three pillars,

1. honesty
2. ambition
3. hard work.

Become ’someone great.’

Journey ‘the road less traveled.’

I hope to see you, ‘on the road to greatness.’

Bill@gathergreatness.com

 

The Earthquake of 2008

I get up kind of early in the morning, usually at 5:00 am.  This morning was like any other, I shaved, showered and dressed.  I sat down at my computer to check my e-mail about 5:30.  It must of been 10 or 15 minutes later, I felt the strangest sensation.  We have a treadmill in the room next to mine and it felt as though someone had turned it on.  But, No one in my house gets up this early, I thought.  My thoughts flashed to the furnace in the basement.  I hope the belt or motor wasn’t going bad.  A few seconds later the vibration stopped.  I’d check it out when I got done on the computer.

A half hour had past and I caught a bit of the news.  There had been an Earthquake, 5.4 in the neighboring state, somewhere around Evansville, Indiana.

I live in Southern Ohio, so I guess we had felt the ripple effect.

What’s really bizarre was that I was reading an article on the internet about the same time, concerning the Law of Attraction. It was eluding to the idea that our thought waves send out vibrations and resonate through the Universe.

I thought, “this is pretty powerful stuff.”

In this case, I know it was just coincidence, but I really got a chuckle out of the timing of it all!

Here’s to increasing your Greatness,

Bill@GatherGreatness.com

 

 

 

Don’t Wait Until You’re Great

I wise man once said:

“You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”    [Mike Litman]

 

“Ignore the rules. There are no rules. There are no regulations. You get out and you do what you need to do because you believe in what you’re doing.”

John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten), punk rock musician 

Don’t Wait Until You’re Great

By David Cross

David Howell Evans is not known for being a technically accomplished guitarist – although few people really care. He developed a trademark sound that contributed to the success of the band in which he plays – a band that has sold over 170 million albums worldwide. Rolling Stone magazine proclaimed him #24 on their list of The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

The Edge – as Evans is better known – is the guitarist for U2, one of the greatest rock bands ever. Did he wait until he was a virtuoso on the guitar before joining U2? Nope.

The Clash – a pioneer of punk music – didn’t care a lick about being “great” either. When they started, only two of the band’s four members could even play an instrument. Despite that, The Clash produced one of the top-selling albums of all time (“London Calling“) and wound up as #30 on Rolling Stone’s list of The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. And they went on to kick-start thousands of other bands… including U2.

The world is packed with thousands of successful people who leapt right in. People who became great because they were willing to take a risk.

Still, I often hear of people who say the reason they have not started their business is that they’re not good enough. They feel they need to wait to acquire more information, deeper knowledge, or more specific skills.

The simple fact is that you can get much better at doing almost anything by doing that thing. Another important thing to note is that you never really know – until you get out there and do it – whether or not you’re good.

Until you actually start your business, it’s all theory. You don’t know how well your idea will succeed until you put it into practice. But the last thing you want to do is wait around until you’re sure. For one thing, you run the risk that your idea will become obsolete. By waiting, you allow the quick and the brave to one-up you in the marketplace. Plus, no matter how long you tinker or research, you STILL won’t know if your idea is good until you put it out there.

Start marketing your widget today, and you’ll know in a few weeks or months whether it’s a big success or a stinker. Keep planning for decades, and you could find out it’s a flop… after having wasted too many years of your life banking on its success. Michael Masterson calls this approach “accelerated failure.” Pick up his best-selling book Ready, Fire, Aim and learn more about it.

This advice holds true for practically any business I can think of. Internet marketing is no different.

We’ve been urging you to get a little Internet side business started for some time in ETR. If you’ve been waiting to do it, here are four things you can do immediately to jump right in:

1. Launch a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ad Campaign

Google, Yahoo, and other major search engines allow you to display your ads by bidding on keywords relevant to your business. When someone clicks on one of your ads, you pay a pre-set fee of a few cents. You can set a daily budget of a few dollars so you can ease into PPC advertising and perfect your technique before upping your budget.

Agora Inc. brought in hundreds of thousands of new customers last year alone through effective PPC campaigns.

Learn more about setting up a PPC account by reading Patrick Coffey ’s article, “Mastering Google AdWords in 3 Easy Steps.”

2. Start Collecting E-Mail Addresses

A huge factor in the success of many online businesses is e-mail marketing. Establishing regular, relevant, and timely contact with your customers and prospects is a proven way to generate more sales and to turn prospects into customers. Offering a free report, useful advice, or information that you deliver by e-mail will help you do it.

For more details about collecting names online, take a look at Patrick’s article “How to Build Your E-Mail Subscriber List Quickly and Easily.”

3. Start an E-Mail Newsletter

Start to regularly send out useful information to the people on your e-mail list. Don’t know what to write? Not to worry. Write about what you know. If you have a music store, send out tips and advice for playing or caring for instruments. Garden store? Timely, seasonal, local advice on what to plant and when and how to tend a garden. Try to remember some of the meetings or phone calls you’ve had with your customers and recount them. Voila! You’ve started an e-mail newsletter. Spice up the articles with some relevant product or service information – and don’t be afraid to ask for an order!

For more about how to create an e-newsletter, read my article “The 3 Basics You Need to Start an E-Mail Newsletter.”

4. Start a Blog

One thing that takes longer to master with an online business is search engine marketing. That is, creating content and copy that is both attractive to search engines and readable by humans (your customers and prospects). With a blog, you can quickly amass a plethora of information that will attract search engines… and customers. As with an e-newsletter, just write about what you know and offer advice and tips that will be useful to your readers.

Starting something new is both exciting and scary. But sometimes the fear of getting started can stop you right in your tracks. If you don’t start, you can’t fail. But then again, you cannot succeed either. There is no better time than right now to get up there, plug in your guitar (or laptop!) and start strumming away. Do not wait until you are great. Start small. Start now.

[Ed. Note: David Cross is Senior Internet Consultant to Agora Inc. in Baltimore. People from all over the country have already experienced the power of managing their destinies through motivation, determination, and goal setting. Discover the secrets that have made them successful.

Increase your Value

“Who can I encourage today? Who can I bless today? What
problems can I solve today?”

Those are all good questions, the answers to which,  can help to move your life forward.

I would like to share a place where entrepreneurs or someone aspiring to become an entrepreneur can discover a wealth of information.

A place *Where Entrepreneurs Gather.*

There is a forum where questions can be posed and information can be shared.

Check it out at:

http://gathergreatness.ning.com/?xgi=9dgZEoM

Thank you for sharing,

Bill
‘The Great Bill from Ohio’

Secret Message

‘Secrets of Successful People’ 

Gather Greatness 

www.GatherGreatness.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Science Museum’s ‘Science of Spying‘ exhibition.

 The Main Entrance to the Museum is on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London, SW7 2DD.

‘A secret message on a mock newsstand.’

Countdown, in less than 9 Hours

That’s Right,  Only 9 Hours.

[] Would you like more meaning in your life? 

[] Are you open to new ideas?

[] Do you feel you have more greatness inside of you?

Learn more about achieving your Greatness!

Follow me on an Entrepreneurial Journey

Only 9 hours left

Until the next issue of the Gather Greatness Newsletter

Issue Date

April 1, 2008

If you want the latest news

go to

www.gathergreatness.com

Bill

Bill@gathergreatness.com

Fortune Magazine: Secrets of Greatness. October 2006

 *** Valuable Information ***

[This is the 2'nd and last Post ]

*What it takes to be great*:

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work

By Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large October 19 2006: 3:14 PM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) — What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway (Charts) Chairman Warren Buffett the world’s premier investor? We think we know: Each was a natural who came into the world with a gift for doing exactly what he ended up doing. As Buffett told Fortune not long ago, he was “wired at birth to allocate capital.” It’s a one-in-a-million thing. You’ve got it – or you don’t. Well, folks, it’s not so simple. For one thing, you do not possess a natural gift for a certain job, because targeted natural gifts don’t exist. (Sorry, Warren.) You are not a born CEO or investor or chess grandmaster. You will achieve greatness only through an enormous amount of hard work over many years. And not just any hard work, but work of a particular type that’s demanding and painful. Buffett, for instance, is famed for his discipline and the hours he spends studying financial statements of potential investment targets.  The good news is that your lack of a natural gift is irrelevant – talent has little or nothing to do with greatness. You can make yourself into any number of things, and you can even make yourself great. Scientific experts are producing remarkably consistent findings across a wide array of fields. Understand that talent doesn’t mean intelligence, motivation or personality traits. It’s an innate ability to do some specific activity especially well. British-based researchers Michael J. Howe, Jane W. Davidson and John A. Sluboda conclude in an extensive study, “The evidence we have surveyed … does not support the [notion that] excelling is a consequence of possessing innate gifts.” To see how the researchers could reach such a conclusion, consider the problem they were trying to solve. In virtually every field of endeavor, most people learn quickly at first, then more slowly and then stop developing completely. Yet a few do improve for years and even decades, and go on to greatness. The irresistible question – the “fundamental challenge” for researchers in this field, says the most prominent of them, professor K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University – is, Why? How are certain people able to go on improving? The answers begin with consistent observations about great performers in many fields. Scientists worldwide have conducted scores of studies since the 1993 publication of a landmark paper by Ericsson and two colleagues, many focusing on sports, music and chess, in which performance is relatively easy to measure and plot over time. But plenty of additional studies have also examined other fields, including business.

 No substitute for hard work The first major conclusion is that nobody is great without work. It’s nice to believe that if you find the field where you’re naturally gifted, you’ll be great from day one, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence of high-level performance without experience or practice. Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule. What about Bobby Fischer, who became a chess grandmaster at 16? Turns out the rule holds: He’d had nine years of intensive study. And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, “The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.” In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith. So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing? 

 Practice makes perfect The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call “deliberate practice.” It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition. For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice. Consistency is crucial. As Ericsson notes, “Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends.” Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

The skeptics Not all researchers are totally onboard with the myth-of-talent hypothesis, though their objections go to its edges rather than its center. For one thing, there are the intangibles. Two athletes might work equally hard, but what explains the ability of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to perform at a higher level in the last two minutes of a game? Researchers also note, for example, child prodigies who could speak, read or play music at an unusually early age. But on investigation those cases generally include highly involved parents. And many prodigies do not go on to greatness in their early field, while great performers include many who showed no special early aptitude. Certainly some important traits are partly inherited, such as physical size and particular measures of intelligence, but those influence what a person doesn’t do more than what he does; a five-footer will never be an NFL lineman, and a seven-footer will never be an Olympic gymnast. Even those restrictions are less severe than you’d expect: Ericsson notes, “Some international chess masters have IQs in the 90s.” The more research that’s done, the more solid the deliberate-practice model becomes. 

 Real-world examples All this scholarly research is simply evidence for what great performers have been showing us for years. To take a handful of examples: Winston Churchill, one of the 20th century’s greatest orators, practiced his speeches compulsively. Vladimir Horowitz supposedly said, “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it. If I don’t practice for two days, my wife knows it. If I don’t practice for three days, the world knows it.” He was certainly a demon practicer, but the same quote has been attributed to world-class musicians like Ignace Paderewski and Luciano Pavarotti. Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines. In basketball, Michael Jordan practiced intensely beyond the already punishing team practices. (Had Jordan possessed some mammoth natural gift specifically for basketball, it seems unlikely he’d have been cut from his high school team.) In football, all-time-great receiver Jerry Rice – passed up by 15 teams because they considered him too slow – practiced so hard that other players would get sick trying to keep up. Tiger Woods is a textbook example of what the research shows. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age – 18 months – and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Also in line with the findings, he has never stopped trying to improve, devoting many hours a day to conditioning and practice, even remaking his swing twice because that’s what it took to get even better.

The business side The evidence, scientific as well as anecdotal, seems overwhelmingly in favor of deliberate practice as the source of great performance. Just one problem: How do you practice business? Many elements of business, in fact, are directly practicable. Presenting, negotiating, delivering evaluations, deciphering financial statements – you can practice them all. Still, they aren’t the essence of great managerial performance. That requires making judgments and decisions with imperfect information in an uncertain environment, interacting with people, seeking information – can you practice those things too? You can, though not in the way you would practice a Chopin etude. Instead, it’s all about how you do what you’re already doing – you create the practice in your work, which requires a few critical changes. The first is going at any task with a new goal: Instead of merely trying to get it done, you aim to get better at it. Report writing involves finding information, analyzing it and presenting it – each an improvable skill. Chairing a board meeting requires understanding the company’s strategy in the deepest way, forming a coherent view of coming market changes and setting a tone for the discussion. Anything that anyone does at work, from the most basic task to the most exalted, is an improvable skill.

 Adopting a new mindset Armed with that mindset, people go at a job in a new way. Research shows they process information more deeply and retain it longer. They want more information on what they’re doing and seek other perspectives. They adopt a longer-term point of view. In the activity itself, the mindset persists. You aren’t just doing the job, you’re explicitly trying to get better at it in the larger sense. Again, research shows that this difference in mental approach is vital. For example, when amateur singers take a singing lesson, they experience it as fun, a release of tension. But for professional singers, it’s the opposite: They increase their concentration and focus on improving their performance during the lesson. Same activity, different mindset. Feedback is crucial, and getting it should be no problem in business. Yet most people don’t seek it; they just wait for it, half hoping it won’t come. Without it, as Goldman Sachs leadership-development chief Steve Kerr says, “it’s as if you’re bowling through a curtain that comes down to knee level. If you don’t know how successful you are, two things happen: One, you don’t get any better, and two, you stop caring.” In some companies, like General Electric, frequent feedback is part of the culture. If you aren’t lucky enough to get that, seek it out.

 Be the ball

Through the whole process, one of your goals is to build what the researchers call “mental models of your business” – pictures of how the elements fit together and influence one another. The more you work on it, the larger your mental models will become and the better your performance will grow. Andy Grove could keep a model of a whole world-changing technology industry in his head and adapt Intel (Charts) as needed. Bill Gates, Microsoft’s (Charts) founder, had the same knack: He could see at the dawn of the PC that his goal of a computer on every desk was realistic and would create an unimaginably large market. John D. Rockefeller, too, saw ahead when the world-changing new industry was oil. Napoleon was perhaps the greatest ever. He could not only hold all the elements of a vast battle in his mind but, more important, could also respond quickly when they shifted in unexpected ways. That’s a lot to focus on for the benefits of deliberate practice – and worthless without one more requirement: Do it regularly, not sporadically.

Why?

For most people, work is hard enough without pushing even harder. Those extra steps are so difficult and painful they almost never get done. That’s the way it must be. If great performance were easy, it wouldn’t be rare. Which leads to possibly the deepest question about greatness. While experts understand an enormous amount about the behavior that produces great performance, they understand very little about where that behavior comes from. The authors of one study conclude, “We still do not know which factors encourage individuals to engage in deliberate practice.” Or as University of Michigan business school professor Noel Tichy puts it after 30 years of working with managers, “Some people are much more motivated than others, and that’s the existential question I cannot answer – why.” The critical reality is that we are not hostage to some naturally granted level of talent. We can make ourselves what we will. Strangely, that idea is not popular. People hate abandoning the notion that they would coast to fame and riches if they found their talent. But that view is tragically constraining, because when they hit life’s inevitable bumps in the road, they conclude that they just aren’t gifted and give up. Maybe we can’t expect most people to achieve greatness. It’s just too demanding. But the striking, liberating news is that greatness isn’t reserved for a preordained few.

 It is available to you and to everyone.

 From the October 30, 2006 issue

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