“Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.”
Warren G. Bennis

Conceptual: The tired, almost clichéd advice of Jim Rohn (and others) to always seek to “add value to the marketplace” is never out of style. Whether you work for yourself, or you work for a company, the only real long term success strategy is to be worth more to the people paying you than the money they’re paying you. A Christopher Walken character said: “I figured out real early that most places pay you just enough so’s you don’t quit, and most people work just hard enough so’s they don’t get fired.” That’s a bad strategy. When you keep your eyes open to the opportunities around you, there are dozens & hundreds of places where you can add value. Where you can tighten things up, improve processes, and generally add value. But your eyes have to be open to those opportunities, which means that you can’t just be sitting on your ass doing nothing. You have to be looking for them. When you’re on your own, the challenge is to demonstrate to people/companies that you have the goods. I’m facing that in one of my markets now, and it’s a challenging. But in other areas, I’m working in, it’s much easier, because I’m able to get access to decision makers and/or company insiders (sometimes, that just means an employee – other times, it means a C level exec). In those cases, it’s not nearly such a battle – which suggests that some of the best places to start looking for opportunity is where you have contacts. All you need to do is be able to have an intelligent discussion about business concepts with friends – that’s really all it takes to launch awesome opportunities a lot of the time).

Okay – let’s get tactical, and move to an example.

Tactical: Develop both “hard” and “soft” skillsets. This is one of the things that’s foremost on my mind right now, because it’s where I’m putting together most of my income streams, and because it’s what I see in the biggest successes I know. Tie that in with keeping your eyes open for ways to add value, and you’re made in the shade.

Here’s what I mean:
Hey, whiz kid – the fact that you can make a webpage isn’t impressive. There are about a billion other people who can do it better. The fact that you can intelligently discuss business concepts and/or convey concepts well isn’t impressive either –  everybody’s got an opinion, and everybody thinks everybody elses stinks. But what happens when you can demonstrate to somebody that not only do you understand what makes their clients tick, but you can also apply that knowledge and build them a site that exploits every ‘tick’? Well, then you’ve got a MUCH better hook. You only develop hard skills by DOING. You see what works. You evolve. Instead of reading your 2,000th book on how to swim, you actually go jump in the water for the first time. You take on a project that lets you put what you’ve learned to use, and you see what areas you need to get better at. Or need to develop in the first place. The market is evolving faster than ever – single skill sets are basically useless at this point. But luckily, there are SO many ways to add value, that almost any combination of 3 or more will make you VERY unique – IF you hone them. And in my humble opinion, the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ skill sets go together very well. Understanding people, developing ‘people skills’, generating a good theoretical framework for how businesses, groups, and individuals operate is important. But when you can marry those things to measurable & deliverable results,
and do it in unusual combinations, THAT’S where you can achieve huge success.

Stay tuned for my next  post as I will shed light on how I’ve personally been working on developing million dollar habits. Until then, I would like to leave you with an inspiring video that sheds light on our deepest fears.