Mel,
For Mozart, music seemed to flow from every pore. His compositions seem almost effortless.
Not so for Beethoven, who was going deaf. Once was so poorly dressed, he got arrested for vagrancy.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks describes how Beethoven fought to produce his great works:
It sometimes took years for an idea to crystallize into its final form, with countless drafts and revisions and crossings-out. This was a man who could be angry with himself and with the world, for whom creativity was a struggle from which he emerged triumphant... strenuous and full of conflict until its final majestic resolution.
Admiring great performers is a double-edged sword. They inspire you at the concert, but when you're home alone in your basement practicing your guitar, Eddie Van Halen only seems like he was created to mock you.
"Listen to me and my pathetic chords, how am I ever going to amount to anything? They're gonna boo me off the stage."
I’ll never forget a world-class live-on-firing-line “hostage negotiator” who spent a year+ trying to contort himself into a copywriter.
No matter how he struggled, he was never going to slow his brain down enough to become a master of the keyboard. He was already a samurai of the SPOKEN word.
I was the opposite. I floundered as a sales rep. That year a friend who got our Christmas letter in the mail said, “Perry you’re in the wrong profession.”
I relished her compliment, but at the time I didn’t have the foggiest notion how I would ever make a living as a writer. I was an ‘ok’ writer at the time. It took some Beethoven-style bleeding to get me over the hump.
Mark McShurley runs an 8-figure business, but it’s easy to forget he was living in his in-laws basement starting anxiety meds when RoofSimple was brand new.
As I've matured as a business coach, I've become more and more focused on the person I'm with, and less on the specific snapshot of their business. Their business might change at any moment, but the essential greatness of the human is always there, waiting to be unearthed.
The people in our community really are incredible. Even amidst all our frailties. If 2 years from now you've slammed the ball out of the park and added a few zeros to your net worth, you will still be the same person you are today. The difference will be, you found a way to harness the greatness you already had, a way that was suddenly new to you. On that day, you'll find that even other superstars suddenly look at you and wonder "how you do it." It doesn't seem extraordinary to you. But it is to them.
What "ordinary" thing do you possess that's really extraordinary????
Most people fear and avoid this question.
It’s a LOT easier to get people to focus on...
-The technology platform
-The technique
-The fad
-The industry
-The trend
...than to read the label on their own bottle.
But some people DO get it.
When Scott Schang and I created SuperConductor, we spent months baking “who is the user and how do they roll?” into
e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. The tool doesn’t make a single recommendation without considering the Marketing DNA and history of the client asking the question.
Josh Long, Robert Michon and I reviewed our AMN members yesterday. Our focus: How *their personalities* determine their best course of action.
What burden are you carrying that’s not yours?
Who are you trying to be, that you are not?
Answer this ONE question, and adding some zeros to your income might not be as impossible as it seems.
Perry
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