Becoming A Top Leader Series - Part 4 - Winning The Invisible War

Welcome to part four of the Becoming a Leader series. Moving on. Number four. Four is fun because big hitters know they are operating, they are winning. If they're going to win, they've got to win. In the invisible world, you're doing things, you're making products, you're doing service. But the way you get those things done at a level that's cause going to cause you to rise to the top has nothing to do with what you can see. And here's what it has to do. They operate in the unseen, the invisible. They're looking behind the obvious. They operate in the worlds of attitude and momentum. Now these are great concepts, great words everybody uses. Nobody except those at the top really focus on them. But the people that go to the top know that growth comes in surges. Now can you Surge is kind of an invisible. The force that creates. See, growth comes in surges. Now when the surge comes, bam, you see bigger numbers, bigger income growth, bigger production, more activity, more people. Yeah, you see that. But what is the force that produces that? What's the force that causes those numbers to go up? Do you know? I just told you, attitude and momentum. Attitude that keeps people in the frame of mind to not only do work, but do the right kind of work and the right of spirit that creates and maintains the momentum of activity that your organization needs to move past everyone else. So what happens is they're always trying. What they do is they look at the numbers and they see, are we going up, Are we going down? What is happening right now? And you take the world as you find it. People move to the top. Don't try and explain, make excuses, live in denial or whatever. They take the world as they find it right now and they deal with that. And they know if this is going to turn around, it's going to turn around because the leader does something in the arena of getting attitude back up that turns into activity and activity, of course, you can see. You can see people running around. You can see things being made. You can see activity is tangible. But the attitude, that's the invisible world. But then it goes into. That'll turn into momentum. And the leader knows if things are going up right now, don't take it for granted. It's much easier to deal with a weed with the first blade of weed comes through your lawn than when it spreads and takes over your lawn. So what you want to do is keep an eye on things to keep attitude up. Much easier to deal with the attitude activity issue when it starts to stall. You know, if it Starts to go. And maybe you're still growing, but you're not growing as much here. You're growing at this kind of level now. You're growing at that kind of trajectory. You're starting to flatline. And then you're going to head here, then you're going to head, start to head down. And then boom. It's like a roller coaster ride. It picks up. Mom, remember this word? Momentum. So the top people, here's what they're doing. The they are looking how can they keep. When they get a surge, how can they keep it going? And when it starts to taper off, how can they get another one going? And they know to cause that, they've got to be able to control the spirit, the energy, the excitement, the focus, the hope of their people. Because constantly ratcheting up, that will ratchet up activity, which actually gives you your result. Now here's the trick, like getting your car up to 70 miles an hour on the interstate. You don't need to go any faster, but you're not going to get where you want to go as quick as you can. If you go slower, you keep your eye on the throttle, on the speedometer to keep this thing growing it the way you want to grow. So it's like driving a car 70 miles an hour. What you want to do is in running an organization or a business, here is the field that you want to reach and you want to maintain. And what it is is that you are. Here's the magic sense, you know, the invisible feel. Because great. You know, it's like this where he keeps saying fundamentals are taught greatness is caught because greatness is doing something with the fundamentals. And you have to operate off of a feel. And the feel comes from. Do you feel that you got that where you are doing you and your people enough activity on a daily basis to grow, which is to win. Because that's really what winning is, is growing. Because if you keep on growing, pretty soon, pretty soon you're going to be wind up beating everybody else anyway. And you can't be satisfied just beating everybody else because you could be beating them and then not growing. And sooner or later you're going to go slump. So to keep growing is to continue to win. But when you are doing enough activity on a daily basis to grow, that's all you can do. Art Williams wrote a book one time, all you can do is all you can do. You can't predict how the economy is going to go. You can't predict the surprise. That's going to happen to you in life. You can't predict what's going to happen to you or your people, your health, your families, you know, your schedule, interruptions. But the one thing you can do is organize yourself so that you're doing enough of the right kind of activity, doing enough of the right kind of activity on a daily basis to grow and to win. Let's just say you started. If you started working out, you go to the gym, you get a workout program. Are you automatically from the time you start, really in the routine and the pattern, or does it take a while to get into the routine, hitting the gym, getting on the machines where you know this stuff, and you go from machine to machine, or from, you know, weights to weights, or station to station, where you know what to do, you know the timing to do it, you know the kind of feel, the stretch you want to get in the body, the right. And then you move on. You got a feel for how much rest recovery time you need. It takes a while of doing it before you get into that pattern. You start where they give you a checklist, they walk you around the machines, they give you all these things, and you go to these 10 things and you fill the box. See, that's the kindergarten. But eventually you see the people that are really in shape, they design their own. Eventually they work into their own program. They find from doing this what really works for them, and they develop their own routine. And what they're looking for is how many times per week, how much of this, how much of that. See, there's some people, like, if you're trying to do bodybuilding, some people can develop, they have no control over, but their quads grow faster than their arm. Other people, you see the guys in the gym with the muscle shirts doing the arm curls, but they've got the long pants on, get the muscle shirt on the top, they got long pants on. Never see them in shorts. You know why? They got skinny legs and. And they've got a routine where their lower legs don't grow as fast as their bicep and their upper body. Now what they should be doing is less of the upper body and more of the leg workout. But no, they want to hide from it. They'll never get the body they want because they won't get the routine built and designed to give them that kind of thing. And that's the way it is in business. You don't want to take the easy way to. The people who go to the top don't spend all their time on just what they're good at, on what comes easy for them, their skill, talent, of course they do it. That's how that's their main thing. But they're constantly working to develop and improve the other areas. And they get a schedule where on a daily basis they're doing enough of the right kind of activity that'll take advantage of what comes easy and to improve what comes hard so that the overall result will give them growth. Now, how that applies to your world, I don't know that you're supposed to figure that out. But what you're working for is an invisible number, an invisible feel, a sense. And it may change with a season, with the beginning of the month, you might start with certain things, the end of the month, you might shift other things. But you have that fence, that sense, that feel. What happens when you get a big organization? You got a lot going on. You don't have time to go with checklists all the time. And look, you've got so many decisions to make, so many people to keep up with. And let's face it, well run businesses grow, which means every month, the rest of your life, you could be in a situation where you've got more things to keep up with, more people to keep up with than ever before. That is what we call a happy problem. See, you want to be dealing with happy problems in your life. The problems of growth, it's still a problem. How are you able to deal with the happy problems and keep growing is because you do it off feel off instinct. You just walk it. You sense things. Now how do they people get to this and make sure that they've got enough of the right kind of activity? Well, one thing is they do not do. What they do is they overdo. Have you built a house? Did you estimate, you design your dream house, estimate the cost that thing is going to cost, I don't know, X amounts of dollars at least 30% more than you expected. Might cost a lot, might cost a whole lot more than that. Have you ever tried to get a project done? Have you ever noticed the projects, how long you thought it was going to take? And it took a whole lot more than that. Notice the government, you know they're going to build a new fighter jet. They'll allocate a hundred billion dollars to develop these things to get the first 25 built. By the time they get them built, it cost $350 billion. Well, they had some cost over on some surprises. They didn't really. You really don't know how to estimate. When I Left Georgia to go to North Carolina. And we packed up, I got a little rental truck for a 72 hour rental. And I figured, well, I'll pack it up overnight, drive to North Carolina and dump it off. And the deadline was Saturday, Saturday at 2pm now in Greensboro. I was in Atlanta and it was going up to Greensboro, North Carolina. Well, of course like most projects and most things we do in life, when you're moving forward in your life, you've never done it before. I'd never packed up a household full of stuff and moved it up to another place. So people called and they said, hey, so what day is this? 72 is three days. So I guess this is like Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Yeah. So I'm getting this thing of people say, well hey, we'll come over and help you load. And I'm thinking, no, we got this. I just got a little duplex, no problem. Appreciate the help. I know people don't like to help help you move and stuff like that. No, we got this, no problem. So what happened was started loading, I don't know whatever three days is from this. Might have been 96 hours, might have been four days. But that truck rental had to be back at the U haul place or by 2pm Saturday in Greensboro, North Carolina or was going to cost me extra money that I did not have. You know how it is when you get started, every dime is important, every dollar. So I started packing and so what Mr. Stupid did was pack the mattress. Our mattress. I packed first so it could go in the back of the thing. You know, we could pack it. And I was thinking, you know, three, four hours we'll be loading up, I'll drive overnight, we'll be up to North Carolina and have plenty of time to turn this in. And all I had to do was call the people friends we had made up at the on one of our scouting trips up to the church in North Carolina and let them know when we would be there. And they promised they would have a bunch of guys there to help us unload. Do you know when I got this thing finally packed, me and my son Adam was 5 years old. He was the main one who helped me pack. My wife is inside putting it in boxes and we had to get it in the truck and everything. We went round the clock. In fact, when we got so tired we couldn't sleep, we slept on the floor because again I packed the mattresses. I think it was, it was something like now it's a six hour drive to Greensboro, North Carolina. You know, when I Think we got, we finally got this thing done like 5am in Atlanta. I finally cranked that truck up after packing round the clock almost three days. Took the six hour drive hauling it. We got there around noon. Fortunately they had a half a dozen guys and they had that thing unloaded in a little over an hour. And I was barely able to make the deadline. Why? Because I had underestimated the time it was going to take to pack. Now folks, that's not unusual in life. We make that mistake over and over and over again. But the people who go to the top and we do it in all phases of life, they have learned doing is just the starting point. Doing is usually not going to be enough. Well, they want to have enough, so they don't do. They overdo as a result, you know what, they create a margin for error. We see it all the time. People miss contests by one sale. People miss qualifying for things by one, you know, an hour, something like that. You need a margin for error because in life things go wrong. You know why you need a margin for error is we are aren't God. You know, you find a lot of people, the top are very humble because they know they're not that special. They, they've got to compete in a world of unknown. We don't know the future. So we need to give ourselves a buffer. You always need a buffer. You need it in your finances. That's why the first step, before you say, before you invest money, you need an emergency fund with your personal finances. Three, at least three months of income emergency funds sitting over there for why emergencies? For surprises. Then you could start saving and investing for the long term. But in all areas of life, you need a buffer. If you're supposed to get to a meeting, who are the people that are always late? The people who are always late are the people who never give themselves a margin for error. The people expect if something starts at 8 o', clock, they plan to be there by 7:45. They might not get there till late, but they were shooting for 7:45. Why? Margin for error. So don't take this for granted, folks. This is so simple that it's the make or break thing in so many people's lives. People here expect perfection. They go month after month, year after year in their life and they expect things to be perfect. Expect the vacation to be perfect. They expect to get their promotion at work perfectly. They expect every project, expect the kids to be perfect, expect perfection. Well, that's up here. Wrong one. They expect perfection, expected to be perfect. These people not here know they've been beaten too many times. That's why you see people that winners are people have been beaten over and over again just like everybody else. But they got tired of it, and they made the changes that would cause them to not get beat. See, and one of the changes they make is now they overdo things. They don't expect perfection. They give themselves a margin for error. And so when they're competing against people who are just doing. Who are not allowing for the margin for error, they wind up beating them. And then these people look at the people on top, say, you must be better. No, no. We just did things differently. Hopefully, that'll be helpful to you. That's number four of the things I noticed about the people who rise to the.