you. In “The Last Lecture,” Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch put it this way: “Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.”
The notion of irreverence can be liberating because you feel like you can do anything. Sometimes, doing something unknowingly is the best action you can take. Many times I’ll be at some event where I won’t know exactly who I’m in the room with. I know that I’m in good company, but I don’t know who the power players are exactly. When I treat everyone, even the power players, as regular people and have genuinely engaging conversations with them, I have been able to establish some of my strongest relationships.
Lives built around people, causes, cultures, and businesses with similar values, goals, and perspectives create an ever-expanding network for serendipitous opportunities and chance meetings with new, like-minded people. My advice is to engage yourself with the outside world and to grow your network when and wherever you can. The world is a remarkable place, and there is no telling where our lives will take us next.
I am Lauren Maillian Bias, and I am an entrepreneur.
Who are you, and how will you get to where you want to go?
FOR REFLECTION
Make sure that your networks align with your interests, values, and goals and complement your weaknesses.
Challenge your network and ask that they challenge you in return.
Be open with your network about your dreams and desires—there may be synergy worth exploring!
Build rapport through one-on-one interactions, but occasionally curate the like-minded people in your network for dinner or drinks. The power of collaboration will quickly expand your networks of friends and future colleagues, accelerating the serendipitous encounters by design along the way.
Engage in genuine conversations. People are people no matter how accomplished they are.
CHAPTER 3
Make No Small Plans
(Don’t Just Wing It)
FOR EVERY SUCCESSFUL MAN OR WOMAN, there are plenty of others who, for some reason or another, don’t make it. The reasons for failure in business—and in life—are many. In fact, when you run down the list of possible problems, obstacles, and missed opportunities, you’d think it’s a miracle that anyone succeeds at all. But succeed they do. And although on some rare occasions, people succeed merely because they happen to be in the right place at the right time, in my experience, you’ve got to plan to be a success if you want to ensure that you will be a success. This is true whether you’re an entrepreneur starting up a new venture, a manager in a large corporation hoping to land a promotion, or an active volunteer in a community-based organization. Success is not synonymous with winging it. Like I said above, you’ve got to plan for your success, not just hope for it. You’ve also got to be ready for the inevitable failures—see Chapter 14 for more about that.
I have found that one of the most powerful (and as it turns out, one of the simplest) actions you can take to get you on your path to success is to simply set goals. But not any old goals will do. I personally need huge, aspirational goals that excite and motivate me through any ups and downs that I may encounter—they are the light I expect to see at the end of the tunnel. Here’s how I approach this task:
Find a quiet, comfortable place where I can avoid interruption for an hour or so.
Begin to form a picture in my mind of what I want to be doing six months from now, a year from now, five years from now—and where I want to be doing it.
Allow my mind to wander without limits and to consider all the possibilities for how I can attain the vision of my future—especially the ones that seem most nearly impossible to attain, but with the greatest potential rewards.
Choose the one path to the future that gets me most excited and motivated, and turn it into an aspirational goal.
Set smaller, readily attainable goals that define the exact path I will follow along the way to achieving my aspirational goal. It’s not these smaller goals that keep me motivated, however, but more the process of setting the lofty, aspirational goal and then coming as close as I possibly can to achieving it.
I’ve been responsible for my actions—both the successes and the mistakes—since I was a teenager. I juggled school and a modeling career, achieved grades that made my parents proud, and pulled down the kind of summer income from my lemonade stand that most children only dream of. I learned to negotiate for myself, first as a model negotiating with my agent, and ultimately with clients. I next developed an interest in investing in real estate, so I learned how to create plans to turn properties that were depressed into lucrative assets.
Lauren on … Taking Risks
When pursuing an opportunity, ask yourself, “Will it have been worth it even if I fail?” Once that answer is clearly a resounding “yes,” the potential risks morph into rewards, such as acceleration and expansion of business experience.
I know no other way than to thrive under pressure, but I always have a plan about what my end goal is. The plan to get there may not always be as methodical, but the purpose in my journey is clear and my contingency plan if all else fails is even clearer.
I have lost count of the number of times I’ve talked to someone in the corporate world who’s thinking of starting his or her own business. In almost every case, the person thinks that starting a business is going to be easy—come up with a great idea for a new product or service, throw together a website, and wait for those orders to roll in, right? Wrong. The dream is often not as great as the promise. You’ve got to have the right idea and the right mind-set—you’ve got to think like an entrepreneur. And you’ve got to have a plan.
When I talk about having a plan, I don’t mean that you’ve got to devote a year of your life creating a 359-page document that details every single action that you’re going to do to build your business and make it run. That’s not necessary. When I talk about having a plan, I mean that you’ve got to have a clear vision of what your business is going to be, and then a simple schedule of milestones and benchmarks that you create, even if you’re only creating them for yourself.
Having a plan also means that you know and are very clear and comfortable with your personal goals and your non-negotiables, and that any opportunity you accept aligns with those values and furthers your personal goals. My most prominent non-negotiables are
anything that compromises my integrity;
not having the level of autonomy that allows me to control the majority of how I schedule my time;
inflexibility for an indefinite period of time;
lack of complete transparency in a partnership; and
unclear benchmarks and milestones by which to measure expectations and gauge success.
Don’t constantly recalibrate your barometer for success, despite all temptations. If you attempt to recalibrate your goals after each accomplishment, your benchmarks will get thrown out of whack and you will never feel proud of the progress you have made and all of the efforts you put
