History is NOT Destiny

Little Jimmy was born to a single mother.  He was passed back and forth between her and his stepfather; one day, the stepfather asked the mom for the $98 of child support she owed him, and,when she refused, he took Jimmy and dropped him off at social services. “Mom” took him back. Then, one day when he was 11, put him in the car and drove him to a group home.  There he would be beaten by his fellow orphans on a regular basis; after one especially violent episode, he called his mother to ask her to pick him up.  She hung up on him.

Nine months later “mom” took him back–to live with her and her abusive boyfriend.

In almost every aspect, this story is a recipe for tragedy.  But not this time.

Little Jimmy started attending a regular Wednesday night prayer meeting at a local church to get away from mom’s boyfriend and to get a free meal.  One night he shared his story with the prayer group, and the leader of the group took him into her home, changing his trajectory.

Little Jimmy graduated from college two years ago with a double degree after also having played Division One sports in two sports.  “Little” Jimmy is Jimmy Graham (all 6-foot-6, 260 pounds) of the New Orleans Saints.

Your own history may be as horrible as Jimmy’s (we hope not, but . . . ); but even so, that does not have to dictate who you are and who you become.  Your choices become your destiny, from this day forward.  Don’t try to pretend it’s anything else.

–The Gurus of Get It

Sometimes the Rules Change

In 1905 Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Special Relativity, which held, among other things, that the Speed of Light was the inviolable speed limit of the universe: no object could travel faster than the speed of light.  And his theory held up for over a century.

Until September.

That is when researchers in Europe reported that they had successfully shot neutrinos from Switzerland to Italy at speeds slightly in excess of the speed of light.

And generations of frustrated physics students do dances of rejoicing.

Rules of the universe rarely change, but they do.  Think of Galileo and the Earth as the center of the universe.  The real prize goes to the people who can imagine the next ten questions that come out of revolutionary discoveries and figure out what to do with that information.

Is that relevant to your life?  Maybe–had you gotten into real estate investing four years ago, working on the understanding that real estate always makes money, it would have been a smart move.  Until in September, 2008, it wasn’t, and hasn’t been since.

We want you to be bold and firm in holding on to your Vision.  But don’t be so rigid that new information fails to get you to think differently. Remember: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

The Gurus of Get It!

Keep Your Eye On The Ball

One of the little tips that came through our research over and over again was the importance of dealing with people.  And just in case you don’t believe it, this came to our attention today:

IN early 2009, statisticians inside the Googleplex here embarked on a plan code-named Project Oxygen.

Their mission was to devise something far more important to the future of Google Inc. than its next search algorithm or app.

They wanted to build better bosses. . .

But Mr. Bock’s group found that technical expertise — the ability, say, to write computer code in your sleep — ranked dead last among Google’s big eight. What employees valued most were even-keeled bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, who helped people puzzle through problems by asking questions, not dictating answers, and who took an interest in employees’ lives and careers.

People spend a lot of time developing expertise, they invest in training sessions to increase their expertise, and then they try to hire people to surround them who have necessary expertise.  And all that is just wonderful . . .

Just keep in mind that sometimes the best way to get the job done is to ask the right person in the right way to do it for you.

The Gurus of Get It

Leadership and Perseverance

We at Get It live here in Denver, and the number one topic of conversation around here for the past week has been the promotion of Tim Tebow to the starting quarterback of the Denver Broncos. 

And to be sure, his first game was quite a bit short of a thing of art.  For 57 minutes he and the rest of the team looked out of sync, uncertain, and at times, completely inept.  And then Tebow and the rest of the team managed to string together three minutes of absolutely inspired football to tie the game and send it to overtime, where they managed to win it.

57 minutes of garbage–at that point a lot of people would be so consumed with self-doubt that they wouldn’t be able to function.  But one of the great qualities of people who Get It is that they persevere: they keep coming back and striving for the goal even after being turned away many times.

And in that persevering, they show others the way to persevere; and when many strive together to overcome great odds, it creates a synergistic momentum towards accomplishment; that inspiration, to become more than they could be alone, is the essence of leadership.

 

Check Your Attitude at the Door

There was a movie made in 1991 called “City Slickers,” starring Billie Crystal and Bruno Kirby.  It was your basic buddy movie, built around the idea that three guys would get away from their lifeless existences each year by planning an elaborate adventure vacation.  To sum up, when the Billie Crystal character returned home after the most recent adventure, his wife greeted by saying, basically, if you want to quit your job, go ahead.  To which he replied “No. I’m just going to do it better.”

Sometimes, in spite of all the advice we’ve been dispensing for three years now, you find yourself stuck in a rut.  Whether that’s in a job, or a relationship, or whatever, you realize that you don’t enjoy what you’re doing and you don’t particularly care, and you just want out.

And sometimes, you’re right.

But sometimes the problem has nothing to do with the job or the relationship–it has to do with you! 

So before you go making wholesale changes in your life, the sorts of things that cannot be undone, make absolutely certain that the problem is not in you.  Maybe you don’t need to do something different . . .

You just need to do things better.

the Gurus of Get It

Be Open To Surprise (from Samuel Barber)

The other day we were listening to one of our favorite pieces of classical music: the “Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber.  People of our generation are probably most familiar with this piece as it was one of the central musical ideas in the 1980s Vietnam War movie “Platoon,” but the piece stands on its own exceptionally well.

The piece starts very quiet and pensive, and gradually grows in drama and dissonance until all the strings are practically crying out in anguish, until it resolves in a powerful, satisfying consonant chord.  And then silence.

Yes, right after the high point, silence. A rest. And then a quiet return to the original themes.

We remember the first time we heard that piece and what a shock to the system that sudden silence was, and how completely profound that moment of “non-music” was to the performance of that piece of music. The surprise and satisfaction of that use of “negative sound” was awesome. Nobody puts a piece of music on to hear how the performer uses silence–but the best ones really know how to do it!

Now, we know that not everybody gets as excited about classical music as we do, but there will be similar moments in your everyday that can have the same effect.  You glance into a grove of trees you’ve seen a million times, but just once you see a baby deer walking through; a family goes by you in the grocery store, but this time you look close and see that a small child is busy taking care of his infant sister; a pile of leaves drifts by on a breeze, but this time you pause and catch the faint scent of a burning fire.

You will always be able to find great things when you set out to look for them.  But we think the world is a far more interesting place if you try to keep your mind open for the beauty of moments unlooked-for. 

The Gurus of Get It!

Past as Prelude

There’s a scene in “The Lion King” in which the wise baboon, Rafiki, confronts Simba about running away from the past.  To make his point, Rafiki, hits Simba on the head with his staff.  When Simba asks “why’d you do that?”, Rafiki laughs and simply says “What difference does it make? It’s in the past!”  To which Simba replies “Yeah, but it hurts.”

The past has no power over your life other than the power that you give to it.  If your past is filled with bad memories or bad choices, then it is likely that the past still contains some pain for you.  But what difference does that make?

As Rafiki points out, you have two choices: keep thinking about the pain, or learn from it, and move forward.

Your history is what made you who you are today–the good, the bad, and the ugly.  If you are in a position where you are trying to take control of your life and move forward (by doing things like reading this blog) then you have obviously come to a pretty good place.  Accept the lessons your life has dealt you and use them to push yourself forward, but don’t give them any more power than that.

The Gurus of Get It

The Physics of Your Life

We wrote last week about the ‘flywheel,” which, once set in motion by a lot of energy, stays in motion.  This operates on one of the central tenets of Physics: a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an external force.  Once a body is in motion it has a degree of momentum, which creates inertia.

Your life has its own inertia.  The choices you make, the things you put your energy into, tend to set you in a certain direction.  If you’re smart, that direction is a good one, and you find yourself gradually getting closer to your objectives.  If you’re foolish, that direction could be just about anywhere.

The great part is that Physics teaches us that you can change your direction if you don’t like it.  The not-so-great part is that changing directions–changing inertia–requires a new and sometimes extraordinary input of energy on your part.  Sometimes that energy is simply sweat and hard work; sometimes it will be psychic energy, as you try to deal with yourself in new and honest ways; and sometimes it will be purely emotional energy, as you disentangle yourself from destructive patterns and relationships.  Probably it will require some combination of the three.

But rest assured, change will not happen without you acting.

The Gurus of Get It!

Challenge: Pull Your Weeds

One of the things we find most frustrating about yard work is the ever-irritating presence of weeds in the lawn.  Especially in an odd summer like this, in which one month was the rainiest on record, and then this month is the hottest on record, it seems like the only things hardy enough to survive the erratic conditions are the weeds.

And, to be fair, some of the weeds actually can  be attractive to look at (the kids in particular love dandelions), and you have to give them credit for survival. Sometimes they even start out innocently enough, and so it’s easy to overlook them early in the season.

The problem is that weeds grow, and weeds don’t share well, so as they grow they steal all of the resources of the lawn and systematically kill whole sections of the lawn.

Yep, you guessed it–another metaphor!

Your life has plenty of weeds in it, too.  For some it’s a “friend” who does nothing to feed your ambitions but instead drains your energy; for some it may be a bad habit or an addiction; for others it may be a hole in your training or an emotional impediment to moving forward. Whatever the case is, kill it!  As soon as you see and recognize that weed, you have to act to get it out of your life. And it may take a few tries to make it happen.

But the alternative is a dead lawn of dreams.

The Gurus of Get It

Keep Turning the Flywheel

A flywheel is a mechanical device that requires a great deal of energy to alter it’s rotation.  Thus, from standstill, it is very difficult to get moving, but once it is moving it provides for more motion than you would have otherwise thought it would.

Your Plan may resemble the flywheel in a lot of ways.

We have been there–the amount of energy it took us to get from “hey, wouldn’t this be a useful thing . . . ” to actually starting to put coheerent thoughts together  in the first skeletons of the Get It! book was substantial.  The way we wrote the book (late at night when both our families were asleep) and the learning to mesh two individuals into a cohesive creative unit took some major adjustments on both our parts.  But once we figured out how to deal with those two issues, the book started writing itself.  There were many nights that we would start with a snippet of an idea, and three hours later it had not only grown into a major section of the book, but it had done so while fitting in to our overall scheme like a puzzle piece.

Whatever extraordinary investments of energy or psychology you have to make at the beginning of a project should never deter you from pursuing a Dream.  The flywheel will start–trust it, and then ride the momentum!

The Gurus of Get It!