Become an Artist and Other Secrets to Success
Three keys to Success:
#1. Become an artist.
Paint a picture of personal success in your mind. Avoid artificial goals like money, power, and prestige. Paint with colors that express your values.
Try things like generosity, adding value, relationships, challenge, making a difference, and growth.
You never succeed when living someone else’s values.
The thing about pictures they never told you: The pictures you paint in your twenties and thirties lose they’re luster in your forties and fifties. What matters now, might not matter then.
Let go of dreams that don’t matter anymore or risk irrelevance.
#2. Enjoyment matters.
I’ve seen miserable “successes”. Reaching the C-suit and being miserable isn’t success.
I carry some give-away money. I enjoy meeting a need or giving a generous tip. I do it because I enjoy it.
Serve in ways that bring you pleasure.
Enjoyment is energy.
#3. Push through pain and adversity.
Life pivots on pain-points. Pain is good. I wish enjoyment was all that mattered.
Don’t worry about seeking pain. Aspiration is painful.
Pain is the point where ordinary becomes extraordinary.
The way you process pain determines the quality of your life and leadership.
7 benefits of pain:
- Adversity clarifies what matters.
- Failure expands compassion and deepens authenticity.
- Mistakes teach you what works, if you own them.
- Resistance points the way to extraordinary. Ease is the path to average.
- Defeat sweetens success.
- Confrontation softens your edges and hardens your resolve.
- Pain says your pushing yourself.
Leaders who avoid painful problems never maximize their potential.
7 questions successful leaders ask:
- What is your personal picture of success?
- What acts of service do you find most enjoyable?
- What difficult conversation are you avoiding. Avoiders spiral inward and collapse.
- How are you pushing through reluctance?
- What painful situation do you need to address?
- What painful decision are you avoiding?
- Who might know?
What are the keys to success?
Great post! I especially like the 7 benefits of pain. Thank you!!
Thanks Michelle. It a pleasure to be of use. Cheers
The artist formerly know as Mr. Control. Letting others define their success rather than me…it only took about 15 years for me to figure that out. All I have to do is point to the ending desired. It’s much less stressful and much more thrilling to succeed as a group where all the group has contributed. Less pain, reluctance, inauthenticity…more camaraderie, understanding, and mutual appreciation.
Thanks for mentioning this, Dan. Oh yeah…and RIP Prince, too!
Thanks D.R. I totally agree, but must confess that my “Mr. Controller is like a cat with 9 lives.
I would love to know people’s personal strategies for the questions 3-6 above (they seem to be getting at basically the same thing). I can feel resistance gather physically when I really don’t want to deal with something and I would love to know if you folks have some useful ways you have used to push past it. Thanks!
Thanks Katie. I find reluctance and avoidance to be a double edge sword that blocks forward movement.
I neglected another important question to help leaders get the most out of pain. “What makes you believe things will be different? This question takes us beyond wishful thinking.
In some ways, wishful thinking is the bane of progress. What are real reasons, not wishes and hopes, for reasonable confidence that things will be different next time.
I’m also a huge fan of imperfect. What imperfect behavior will you try next time.
Pushing through resistance is hindered by a need for perfect/complete solutions.
Best for the journey.
Hi Katie,
The Buddhist way is to ‘label’ fear: “fear, I am feeling fear, why am I feeling fear?” In the same manner with feelings of resistance.
Try this when you start to ‘feel’ the resistance moving in; pause, and invite it in for a talk, be brutally honest with yourself during this talk; your answers will come, you will move beyond it.
Dan, another practical post by you, filled with sage advice. While I find value in most, if not all of your posts, every once in a while, one really resonates with me. Serendipitous given today’s events for me. Thank-you.
Hi Dan,
I think one of the sweetest keys to success is never forgetting where you have come from. Second, has got to be perspective; I am recalling an ad with a picture of a tree in four different seasons, same tree, different seasons. It makes sense. People are the same, we have different seasons. Third, one of my favorite, Habits, begin with the end in mind.
Move through the seasons of your life, and your career with a flexible perspective…and never forget who you …were.
Dan, Norm King’s comment above also nailed it for me….I just posted this on FB for my 22 & 21 year old sons to read. Thank you!