What Qualities Distinguish Greatness? What separates Great People from Average People? Be a Winners who establish the habits of discipline and risk taking.
Sunday, June 21st, 2009What Qualities Distinguish Greatness
Summaries
1. Winners do things they don’t like to do. Average people follow their natural likes and preferences.
2. Winners establish the habits of discipline and risk taking. They have no fear of failure. They recognize that failure provides the greatest feedback as long as they own the loss and fail in a learning posture.
3. Failure is our teacher. Regret is our enemy.
4. There is no comparison between what’s lost by not trying and what’s lost by not succeeding.
What qualities do all winners have in common? Is it hard work? YES! Although, there was a time in my life when I thought that hard work was an attitude, I’ve come to understand that hard work is a skill. The willingness to work hard is the ticket allowing us play in the game. Hard work is a prerequisite to personal success . . . but not a differentiator.
Was it luck? The answer to that is also YES! Vince Lombardi’s famous quote, “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation,” says it so well. I believe luck is when the window opens for you to apply hard work.
While I do believe both hard work and luck are part of it, they are not the only factors. As I continued on my discovery journey, I kept searching for the answer. Was it attitude, concentration, desire, faith, integrity, motivation, persistence, responsibility, vision, wisdom? The answer was always YES! But, I knew it had to be more than that.
I finally found the answer in this line from William Ian Graves:
“Winners do things that they don’t like to do; average people only follow their natural likes and preferences.”
Think about it. Have you ever accomplished anything of significance in your life without being out of your comfort zone? The answer is absolutely not! We’ve all participated in this semi-scary experience but how many of us have established it as a habit? Not many!
Intuitively, I believe most people in this world are average. In the Pete Luongo statistical world, I would suggest that seventy percent of the people in the world are average, ten percent are winners, and twenty percent fall into the bottom third, with fifteen percent of them suffering the indignity of being born into a circumstance that they can’t get out of, and five percent, who could but won’t (the worst kind).
Most people are average, and that’s because they only do what they like to do. What separates the heroes from the rank and file? First, they are in the right circumstance, and second, they have established the habit of discipline. Said another way, winners have established the habit of doing things they don’t necessarily like to do, but because they recognize that it’s an absolute requirement to accomplish those goals, they do them. History is filled with thousands of examples. All of the winners I’ve known established the habit of doing things they didn’t like to do as they pursued their goal.
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
The other half of what defines greatness is establishing the habit of risk taking. I believe the greatest tragedy in someone’s life would be if the last five words out of their mouth were, “I wish I would have!”
Arnold Bennett, British novelist in the early 1900s maybe said it best: “The real tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never once in his life braces himself for that one supreme effort, who never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.”
Teddy Roosevelt had it right in his book on leadership when he said, “Credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood: who strives valiantly . . . who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known victory nor defeat.”
Failure is our teacher. Regret is our enemy. Failure is a natural consequence of trying. The point isn’t whether we have failed or succeeded but rather what have we learned from it. It’s been my experience that great leaders, great salespeople, and great athletes all have an incredibly high tolerance for failure because they recognize it provides them with their greatest feedback loop. Think about the experiences through which you learned the most. Probably your best lessons were learned not when you were successful, but when you failed to meet a goal or objective.
To gain a positive lesson from a failure, you must own the loss. You’ve got to fail in a learning posture. It only becomes valuable when it’s treated as a measure of strength.
