style="font-size:15px;"> Need to develop:______________________________________________
3. Possess:____________________________________________________
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4. Possess:____________________________________________________
Need to develop:______________________________________________
The point of the exercise is that we can often control those traits that will make us “heroes” – emulating those we really admire for their deeds, behavior, and impact.
But we must become accustomed to an environment that we create and realize that this environment also influences us, a reciprocity of influence. Churchill, commenting on Parliament and its difficulties in taking action, said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.”2 What we're espousing is perhaps more of a halfway house, in which we build, digest, build, digest, alter, remove, build, digest, and so on.
The preceding exercise was designed by my (Marshall's) great friend Ayse Birsel.3 It changed my life. As it turns out, all of my heroes were teachers. They included amazing leaders like Frances Hesselbein (Presidential Medal of Freedom award winner and former CEO of the Girl Scouts), Alan Mulally (2011 CEO of the Year in the United States and former CEO of Ford), as well as wonderful professors such as Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis. What did my heroes have in common? Not only were they fantastic coaches and teachers, they were extremely generous! None of my heroes ever charged me for any of the countless hours of help that they graciously gave to me. Although I have always thought of myself as a generous coach and teacher, I decided that I could do better. I decided to “adopt” 15 coaches and teach them all that I know for free – with the only price being that they would agree to pay it forward and do the same for others when they grew older.
I made a short video about my idea and posted it on LinkedIn. It went viral, and well over 100,000 viewers watched it. Over 12,000 people applied for the 15 positions! I decided to expand the project to include 100 established coaches and 100 aspiring coaches. I am happy to say that this is project is now a large part of my life, and I love it! (Thank you, Ayse Birsel, for this great exercise!)
In the hit musical show Man of La Mancha, there is a moment only to be found on Broadway in which the character Don Quixote walks to stage center and everyone knows what's about to happen: The actor (I was fortunate enough to see Richard Kiley in the original production and Brian Stokes Mitchell more recently in the revival) sings “The Impossible Dream,”4 a paean to the heroism of tilting at windmills. Some of the ideas expressed:
To fight those who were thought to be unbeatable
To bear more sorrow than seems bearable
To seek out areas where brave men don't dare tread
To reach the most distant star
You get the idea, and it's one hell of a theatrical moment. But it's not very helpful in setting or fulfilling your aspirations! Broadway musicals, like motivational seminars, can be inspiring – their intent is to immerse you in someone else's version of reality, with the hope that you'll be moved by the theatrics and grandeur in front of you.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with an enjoyable night at the theater, or spending a day or two at a motivational seminar – if it inspires you to live a better, happier, more thoughtful life. Many smart people with excellent intentions run these seminars, and in general they do more good than harm. The problem comes when we, the audience, rely on motivational experiences to give us all the answers. The fact is that these seminars can give us a lot – but not everything. The fundamental work of changing our behavior for the better is ultimately our own responsibility.
Cervantes invented Don Quixote, a character emblematic of people who believe they can do anything because of their deep belief. While people who believe “I can do it!” are more likely to do it, we have also seen many people delude themselves into thinking that a positive attitude can replace hard work. A great example of combining positive attitude and hard work occurred when NASA scientists saved the Challenger. They did not give up. They had a “We will do it!” attitude. They also had the years of training, the intelligence, and the dedication to make it happen. (I heard one of those engineers speak to a small group once holding a small piece of an O-ring. Now that was a motivational speech.)
A standard feature in old horror movies was the buzz saw that kept getting closer and closer to the hero. Although we knew the hero would somehow escape due to ingenuity, the arrival of the cavalry, or a deus ex machina, we still cringed.
Today we might cringe at the spinning wheel of social media, which is constantly gaining speed. We seek to be part of the latest, but there is so much “latest” that it's hard to stay constantly connected. We're driven to have the attention span of a water bug. We're immersed in an ADD world.
What has this to do with aspirations and metrics?
We may feel as if we don't exist if we're not a part of this spinning wheel of information. The centrifugal force threatens to throw us off, so we cling with all our might, trying to follow and be a part of a thousand issues for a second each. (Have you seen the Twitter members who “follow” 90,000 people? Try to follow even 25 daily and read their tweets, then add in the other social media platforms, and you have a full-time job.)
The inertia is bizarre: The more you get, the more you get! So we become overwhelmed with examples, advice, and claims that are never vetted, validated, or verified. At one point, people sold books and tapes through infomercials that showed how the average person could make millions by flipping houses or selling detergents. Pyramid and Ponzi schemes (sometimes politely called multi-level marketing) lulled people into the belief that they could make six figures by merely attracting people to become representatives of the organization selling phone cards or cleaning materials or breadboxes. Of course, the only people making real money were the authors of these schemes and the broadcasters.
Today, the phenomenon is multiplied a zillionfold with the unceasing, untiring, always increasing speed of the wheel of information that constantly spins in front of us. We don't really know what makes sense and what does not, what's real and what's a lie. If we are not careful, instead of becoming highly skeptical of most things, we can tend to accept almost whatever is in front of us.
As Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist noted, “What you see is all there is.”5 After all, experienced investment firms and government regulators for years accepted the ludicrous claims of huge returns in a down market from Bernie Madoff, who operated the most notorious of contemporary Ponzi schemes, and whose operation ruined tens of thousands of lives and careers.
Thus, our aspirations and goals are seldom purely our own. They are tainted or even created by the furious pace, noise, and general uproar around us – around the spinning wheel, the buzz saw. Why else would people watch scripted “reality” shows of little consequence?
We've lost our sense of perspective.
Yogi Berra famously said that when you come to a fork in the road you should take it.6 We know that's logically impossible, but we also know that the road of life is filled with unexpected twists and turns that can be terrific opportunities or harmful detours. It's easy to wander down interesting
Winston Churchill, House of Commons speech, 1944, quoted in
Ayse Birsel,
Mitch Leigh (composer) and Joe Darion (lyrics), “The Impossible Dream,” from
Daniel Kahneman,
Yogi Berra,
