SUCCESS IN EVERY MOMENT
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 § Leave a comment
Seeking success and practicing success are not the same.
Please see previous post for context.
A CEO might say, “Once we have received the venture capital investment, we can build the technology platform that will satisfy our users and we will be successful.”
Or, “Once we get featured on Oprah, our sales will take off and we will be successful.”
Or, “Once we are through this recession, demand will pick up again and we will be successful.”
(For the CEO these stories will often go hand-in-hand with stories about waiting for personal happiness and life balance – “And once we are more successful I will work less and pay more attention to my partner, kids, friends, health, etc.”)
Just as with seeking personal happiness, achieving success this way can prove elusive:
A. Hoping for external circumstances to work out in your favor is not a strategy for success, it’s just a gamble.
B. The market gives it and the market takes it – maybe today you get lucky with Oprah or the VC and the day after it’s your competitor.
Buying lottery tickets can pay-off big time, but it’s not what value creation is made of. Focusing on external milestones can be a big distraction for the CEO and a drain for the organization. It distracts from value creation that you can control.
What if you define success by the values with which your team works and interacts, the conduct of your organization, the courage with which you make strategic decisions and pursue a new solution, the value you build for the customer, the way you align the organization with the impact it seeks?
The CEO/manager that focuses on these questions can have a successful day every day.
CEO seeking success
Honey: “Honey, how was your day?”
CEO: “Crappy. Oprah that bitch still hasn’t called us back about being on her show!”
CEO practicing success
Honey: “Honey, how was your day?”
CEO: “Excellent. The team is gelling, we had a great conversation about the feature set and we committed to drop the upgrade in favor of the earlier beta-launch.”
Please consider where your business strategy includes statements of hope about how your circumstances will align and change. Strike those out. Your successful strategy is made up of how you respond to circumstances, not how they form you.
HAPPILY EVER AFTER IN THE MOMENT
Monday, April 30, 2012 § 1 Comment
Seeking happiness and practicing happiness are not the same.
People pursue happiness in their own ways. Some seek it in wealth, in beauty, in fame, or in power. Some feel they have recognized those goals as false promises. Instead they seek happiness in making the world better in their own garden or in the global community. Others seek it in the creation of a harmonious family or community. Another seeks it in achieving excellence in meditation or yoga.
The language of goals that need to be achieved to finally be happy and content repeats itself; just the goals themselves are exchanged: “I will be happy and content, once I have a million dollars/ created an NGO that stops the killing of whales/ have three kids/ can hold downward dog with no hands.”
Mostly the stories are more intricate and often not articulated – but there are images: “once I get the promotion, I can move into a slightly nicer apartment and work a little less to be able to do some sports. I will lose a bit of weight and feel better about myself, be sexy and get a great partner and be happily ever after.” Or: “I always feel good after doing yoga. Once I get my yoga-teacher-certificate, I can be in that state of mind all the time and be happily ever after.”
From the outside looking in, we can see with all those storylines, happiness will be elusive. Sometimes life’s a bitch and the first million Dollars is hard to come by. And worse, once the first million dollars is there, we will want the second. Once we can sit in lotus, we find it unsatisfying that we cannot levitate.
“Nothing makes us as unhappy as the constant pursuit of happiness.”
Buddha suggested that happiness is a state mind, not a situation. While circumstances have an influence on our state of mind, they don’t control it. Practicing happiness is the practice of our attitude in response to all circumstances. It’s inside, not outside; it’s right now, not projected into the future.
The revelation that we are waiting for something to fall into place to be happy often hides in a story of plausible conditions and correlations. “Well, I am just waiting for X, so I can do Y.” is often the beginning of that story. If you hear yourself saying sentences like that, please ask yourself the question: “why am I waiting?”
Business Buddhism 