2-3-4 Friday

‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’

1 thought

Let me introduce to you the story of 2 friends.

Jonah was always the playful one. One afternoon, he poured baby powder all over the floor of the back of the classroom, and declared,

let’s skate!

As they did that, he began pushing people over and laughing.

One of his favorite pranks was taking a ball, standing at the second level, and kicking it with all of his might to see how far it could fly.

One afternoon, after committing one too many pranks, the principal asked to see him. The principal told Jonah in no uncertain terms that if he was called up again, he would be expelled.

The future didn’t look too bright for Jonah.

James was studious and smart. He was always asking questions in class. He was seen as a natural leader, and became the rugby captain.

Who would you have thought would have succeeded?

In conventional terms, both did. James became a doctor working in local clinics, whilst Jonah became a businessman. Jonah has businesses in 5 different countries today.

What surprised me though was the fact that Jonah still succeeded despite his early ‘screw-ups’.

It was not how high he reached.

It was how fast he recovered.

If you were one of the teachers, you would have written Jonah off. You would have had in mind,

ah another one of those bright kids who played a little too much and didn’t make much of their potential.

But Jonah didn’t write himself off. He continuously learnt from the many mistakes he made over the 8 years he spent in business, eventually creating businesses that made him very wealthy.

Very often, we are tempted to write ourselves off after setbacks. We can look at a bad performance appraisal, our boss not liking us, as a marker for how high we might rise in future. It’s not that their feedback is wrong.

It’s that whatever they say about you, is an assessment. It’s not fact. It’s not deterministic.

It’s what you do with it that counts.

1 talk

Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop.

The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

• Adam Grant

1 tip

This is something deeply personal to me because like Jonah, I was written off by 346 employers before I finally decided that I would make things happen on my own.

In my first job, I was told that I should ‘get better, or get sacked’. In my second full-time job, I was asked to resign.

And in my work now, I often see people who are written off in conventional terms.

We can all see what’s happening around the world to know that the next 5 years are different from the rules-based global order that many grew up in. What is uncertain is what the world will look like, but what is certain is that

1. People will continue to need to grapple to exist
2. People will need to adjust much swifter to the changes around them.

So we shouldn’t really keep looking at the people who’ve risen to places that we want to, and try to model them. Rather, we should study how people have recovered despite their trying personal circumstances to where they are today.

One thing that you could immediately do is this.

Learn to learn. A simple start can be keeping a decision diary, recommended by Peter Drucker in his seminal paper ‘The Effective Executive’.

Rather than trying to constantly do more, record down

1. Major decisions you are making
2. What you’re expecting from them
3. How it turned out

This can help you to quickly see how you’re making decisions, and make them better.

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love