the best way to predict your future is to create it

A vision builds trust, collaboration, interdependence, motivation, and mutual responsibility for success. Vision helps people make smart choices, because their decisions are being made with the end result in mind. As goals are accomplished, the answer to “What next?” becomes clear. Vision allows us to act from a proactive stance, moving toward what we want rather than reactively away from what we don’t want. Vision empowers and excites us to reach for what we truly desire. As the late management guru Peter Drucker said, “The best way to predict your future is to create it.” 

Ken Blanchard

Leading at a Higher Level: Blanchard on Leadership and Creating High Performing Organizations (Revised and Expanded Edition). FT Press, 2009. p.18

detailed imaginary worlds

When we are children, we invent these detailed imaginary worlds that the child psychologists call “paracosms.” These landscapes, sometimes complete with imaginary beasts, heroes and laws, help us orient ourselves in reality. They are structured mental communities that help us understand the wider world. 

We carry this need for paracosms into adulthood. It’s a paradox that the artists who have the widest global purchase are also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes. Millions of people around the world are ferociously attached to Tupac Shakur’s version of Compton or J.K. Rowling’s version of a British boarding school or Downton Abbey’s or Brideshead Revisited’s version of an Edwardian estate. 

Millions of people know the contours of these remote landscapes, their typical characters, story lines, corruptions and challenges. If you build a passionate and highly localized moral landscape, people will come. 

David Brooks

"The Power of the Particular." New York Times. June 25, 2012.

as little effort as possible

When it becomes obvious that profit, which is a legitimate goal, is the driving reason for being in business, everyone – stockholders, top managers, employees, customers, suppliers, and the community – quickly becomes self-serving. They focus on their own agenda and personal enrichment. Employee loyalty and passion often go out the window as the point of work becomes simply to get as much as you can for as little effort as possible. 

Ken Blanchard

Leading at a Higher Level: Blanchard on Leadership and Creating High Performing Organizations (Revised and Expanded Edition). FT Press, 2009. p.xvii

you can’t wait for the sun to rise

At the end of a recent podcast interview, the host asked me, “What’s the best advice you ever got?” Before I tell you what I said allow me to rewind to 2007 when I had another career decision to make: hold on to a large, steady paycheck as the vice president of a global PR firm or commit full-time to my growing writing and public speaking business. At the time I was doing some freelance writing and I interviewed the real-life Chris Gardner, the man who actor Will Smith portrayed in the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness... Gardner told me the true story of how he spent nights in the bathroom of a subway station along with his 2-year-old son. In the daytime Gardner would put on his one suit, drop off his kid at daycare and take unpaid classes to become a stockbroker. You can guess how the story ends. Gardner rose to the top of his firm and became a multi-millionaire.

I knew the Oakland, California subway station Gardner had slept in because I passed it each day on my train trip into San Francisco. I had plenty of time to contemplate the advice he gave, words that changed the course of my career. “How did you find the strength, the spirit, to keep going?” I asked Gardner. “Carmine, here’s the secret to success: find something you love to do so much, you can’t wait for the sun to rise to do it all over again.”

Each day when I rode past the station I would think about those words. It forced me to question my choices and the daily trips into the city, which I dreaded. I wasn’t waiting for the sun to shine; I was waiting for it to go down so I could head home. I quit the PR firm, trading the stability of a salary for the instability of a start-up. Last week I was invited to BookExpo America, a prestigious book industry conference in New York, to sign copies of my sixth book. Gardner’s advice had changed my life and my business.

The most inspiring leaders are those who don’t work at a job but pursue a calling. In doing so they inspire the rest of us to be our best selves and to match our skills with our passions. They give us confidence to pursue our dreams.

Carmine Gallo

Homeless Man Turned Millionaire Offers The Best Advice I Ever Got. 6/11/2012. Forbes.

let them happen organically

Sometimes great innovations happen because they’re driven by exceptional leaders. Other times innovations happen because great leaders knew when to step aside and let them happen organically. This latter type of change only happens when true leadership exists – the type that recognizes initiative, fuels it, and gives it boundaries without killing the enthusiasm behind it.

Dennis Goin

3 Leadership Tips for Creating Organic Change. Forbes. 11/19/2012