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HUDDLE TIME
Success Isn’t an Entitlement
Everyone wants success. They might want it in different forms, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want to be successful at something in their lives. I believe everyone is entitled to pursue success; but success itself is not an entitlement.
Success is largely determined by our hard work and our choices. I know many people who work hard but make bad choices. It’s amazing how many of them think they deserve success because they feel they’ve worked hard. On the other hand, I don’t know many, if any, successful people who have made good choices but didn’t work hard. I knew someone who was constantly lamenting her “bad luck.” She wasn’t happy with her job. Her personal life was in shambles. She was almost thirty, hadn’t completed college, and constantly had money problems. She often blamed situations or other people for the various predicaments she was in. However, the glaringly obvious truth was that although she worked fairly hard, she continually made horrible choices. One day she would complain about money; the next day she’d buy something totally extravagant and unnecessary. The following week she’d complain about not being able to get a good job while showing up to work an hour late for personal reasons. From time to time she’d talk to me about her issues, and I’d point out the choices she made that led to her current problem. Each time she’d seemingly acknowledge the connection, but the truth is she never took ownership of the real problem: her choices. She once lamented, “Why me? I deserve better!” I didn’t offer my opinion, but what I wanted to say was, “Everyone feels like they ‘deserve better’ at some point in life. Now stop complaining, and start doing something about it!” Working hard is only one part of success. Making good choices is the second. It truly takes both to achieve success. As the CEO for an international business, I know the choices I make are sometimes pretty important to the business. They can impact hundreds of employees, franchise owners and associates, as well as tens of thousands of clients around the world. Years ago, I was talking to a friend about some tough decisions I had to make. He gave me some great advice. He said, “Not every decision you make has to be a good one. Just make sure you make more good ones than bad, and when you make a bad one, minimize the impact by fixing it quickly.” This squarely hits the point about working hard and making good choices. Not long ago I was talking to someone I’ve known for years about the growth of my business and some other goals I’ve met and he said, “Man you’re lucky. It must be nice.” I responded to him by saying “Yeah, I’m lucky; let me tell you the secret to my luck. First, I went to college for ten years. During that time, I started my own business and worked really long hours for two decades. Along the way, I mortgaged my house a couple times for the business, and I wrote five books. You can have this kind of luck, too. All you need to do is apply this kind of effort to whatever you do.” He laughed and said, “Okay, okay, I get it!” Did he really? I don’t think so. He hasn’t changed his behavior or started making different choices. If being successful was easy, everyone would have the success he or she thinks is deserved. For most of those two decades I mentioned above, I didn’t feel very lucky or successful. It took time, effort, hard work and adequate choices before I felt any modicum of success. The problem is that many people want to go from point A to point Z and bypass the challenges in between. The other day I asked my nine-year-old son to quote the mantra of success I’d been teaching him. He replied, in a young boy’s slightly bored sing-song tone, “The secret to success without hard work and good choices is still a secret, Dad. Can I go out and play now?” OK, maybe nine is a little young to start the training… but, maybe not. HUDDLE TIME
Be a Personal Marketing Champion
The BNI marketing program will work for virtually any businessperson who sets his or her mind to working the program. BNI is a sophisticated and highly effective marketing system that is supported by a business franchise structure. The program entails word-of-mouth referral marketing through a variety of individual networks of people. Each member looks for opportunities to refer their network partners to an appropriate BNI member.
This last part is what requires individual determination, creativity, tenacity and commitment. Members always have to be on the look out for referrals. Finding referrals for members is what fuels the program. The speed of this marketing system is highly dependent on the effort exerted by members to find lots of high quality referrals. We want you to succeed. As a marketing organization and business, BNI's success is contingent on your success. BNI staff members are doing all that is possible to bring to your chapters the most support, guidance and direction to increase your business. However, the program will only work if you work at it. Think about converting your BNI chapter into a "marketing engine" for your company. Your BNI chapter should not be thought of as a volunteer activity or an interesting add-on. It is your marketing thrust. You get out of it what you put into it. Without a marketing engine, your business will stay in the parking stall. The fuel for your BNI marketing engine is you. The speed of your marketing engine depends on how much fuel you add. Imagine a highly successful athlete. Let's say a NBA basketball star or an Olympic Gold Medal runner. Did the NBA star or the gold medalist, succeed by reinventing basketball or running? No. Did he or she become a champion by sitting on the sidelines watching the game? No. Champions succeed by following the guidelines of their coaches. Over time, and with lots of practice, tenacity and desire, they became champions at their sport. If you want more information about how to speed up your marketing engine, speak to your BNI Directors. They have the information you need. Follow their guidance. It really works, as is demonstrated by the member comments in this and other issues of SuccessNet. One chapter in Vancouver, Canada, tracks their net commissions and finds $40,000-50,000 more money in their pockets each month through BNI referrals. How fast is your chapter fueling the marketing engines of your member? BNI is not passive marketing. The program requires active participation by each member. The most successful members are very effective at utilizing all of the component parts to the BNI marketing system. I am sure that if you ask a member for suggestions, you will get many. Realize that when you meet a BNI member who generates lots of new business through the BNI process, you are also meeting a personal marketing champion. Let's all work together and aim to be champion personal marketers. HUDDLE TIME
Survival of the Weakest In networking, your weakest relationships could prove the strongest
Your relationships can be classified as either “weak ties” (people whom you know superficially) or “strong ties” (your close allies, friends, and family). Professor Mark Granovetter, now chair of the Stanford University sociology department, first identified the importance of weak ties in his seminal 1974 book, “Getting a Job: A Study in Contacts and Careers.” He distinguishes strong ties by the amount of time the two people spend together, the emotional attachment and the degree of reciprocity. Many people intuitively believe that they will most likely get their next job or client through their strong ties. However, in his research, Granovetter found that weak ties were far more effective for finding a job than strong ties. Some of the other activities that benefit most from weak ties are getting the latest news and publicizing a new restaurant (word of mouth marketing). It is often someone that you just happen to meet who will know of that perfect job opening for you. You never know. You never know whether that great job, customer or valuable piece of information is going to come from someone you just met or someone with whom you have a long-term relationship. Successful businesspeople tend to have a broad network of both strong and weak ties. Weak ties are important because they usually bring new information. They tend to consist of people very different from you so they provide access to knowledge, markets and people to which you would otherwise have no access. By contrast, strong ties tend to be people who are similar in gender, race, socioeconomic background, cultural background, religion and various other attributes to the owner of a given network. Therefore, they are redundant to a greater degree. In addition, weak ties are easy to maintain, and therefore it is far easier to have many weak ties than many strong ties. Although your weak ties can produce great value, it is typically the strong ties that provide you with a sense of camaraderie, comfort and security. But this does not mean that stronger are more valuable. Strong and weak, in this context, simply imply different types of relationships. It is neither one nor the other, but the combination of strong ties and weak ties that creates a high-value network. With effective use of online business communities, you can rapidly acquire thousands of weak ties with targeted segments of the global population, while at the same time developing strong ties with specific individuals. The power of the Internet for interpersonal networking is that one can rapidly acquire thousands of weak ties, which was much harder to do historically. Although some believe that the Internet is unsuitable for the development of strong ties, this is untrue. Many users use e-mail, video chat and other Internet technologies to deepen the relationship significantly before ever meeting in person. The interpersonal communication paradigms that framed the communication studies of the 20th century do not necessarily hold true for those who have grown up in the Internet age. The Internet provides a mechanism for starting and sustaining long-distance relationships with both your strong and weak ties. |
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