I'll bet that you want to be successful. In fact, I will also wager that
you have spent a lot of times asking yourself the question,
“how can I be successful?” “What is success?”
“How can I achieve the dreams that I have within myself?”
And I just want to begin this talk by congratulating you
because if those are questions you've asked, if those are thoughts that you have gone
through your mind, I want you to know
that you have probably within you a restlessness and a potential that says to me
that you have not yet achieved your maximum success,
you have not yet probably arrived to your greatest potential.
And that's why we're spending time together, because I have a passion,
a great passion in my life to help people be successful.
There's no greater joy that I have than to walk along
beside somebody just like you and find out where you are and then say,
“ok, this is where you are, but this is where you could be”.
And you look at me and say, “John, that's exactly what I want,
I want to go there, I want to be there, I want to arrive to that destination”,
and together we kind of we kind of work it out and we make it.
You see, the first mistake that people make about success
is that they somehow think that it's a destination.
So they'll come up to me and they'll say,
“John, how do I become a success?” “How do I arrive to my dream?”
And I can tell that they look at success as something out there,
they're here and success is out there and so somehow
they think that over time I suppose that if they do the right things
they can get there and the first thing I want you to know
that success is not a destination, it's a journey. Think of success as a process.
Let me illustrate and explain it this way. If you go to college,
you work hard and in four or five years depending on what kind of degree you're working on
and in today's society sometimes six or seven years,
but eventually comes the day of graduation and you're all excited
and your family is there and your friends are there
and you're there with your classmates and you got your cap and your gown
and you know that there's going to be a time in that ceremony
where you're going to walk across stage and the president,
provost, somebody's going to shake your hand, hand your diploma, congratulate you and
you're going to get off the other side they are going to have presents
waiting for you, and they'll be taking pictures,
and everybody will be shaking your hands saying, “congratulations today, you became a success,
you're a college graduate”. Now, now, my friend,
you did not become a success the day that you got your diploma.
Now, what you did have happen to you in that ceremony is
you got recognized for success. The diploma is recognition
of what you have done the previous four or five years.
You see, you were a success in your freshman year when you decided to not drop out of school
like some of your other classmates and decided to stick to it
and you were a success every time you studied for a test
and you were a success every time you did a project
or did a writing assignment. You see, you're a success all through school,
you're a success every day, success is a daily thing, not a destination thing.
The day you got the diploma you just got recognized
for the success that you already were. Now, that's very essential.
Because so many times people have a tendency to devalue the moment, today.
What they do is they greatly value the destination,
and so they kind of talk about, “well, when I get there, or if I arrive there,
or when I do that, or when I accomplish this”. And they don't understand
that success is a daily thing, and I'm here to share with you
that the secret of success is determined
by your daily agenda. In fact, I wrote a book
a few years ago called, “Today Matters”, I'm passionate about that
book because what it does is it helps you, it helps me to understand
that we make decisions and then we manage decisions.
And too often we think, “I will make a decision”, for example, you're saying,
“I'm going to make a decision to be a coach, or I'm going to make a decision, you know what?”
“I'm going to make a decision to be a public speaker,
I want to be a communicator”. Well, congratulations,
you've made a wonderful decision, coach, speaking, good decision.
But that won't make you a successful coach, that won’t make you a successful communicator,
it's not the decision that makes you. You've got to make the decision by managing it
and you manage the decision on a daily basis, in other words, what you want to be tomorrow,
you've got to do today. You visualize tomorrow,
that gives you hope, that's your motivation and that's your dream,
nothing wrong with that, you visualize tomorrow, but you value today.
What's that mean? That means that what I do every day
is either getting me closer to that vision, that dream, that goal,
or it's really driving me farther away from it.
You see, every day we are either repairing or we’re preparing.
You see, if I messed up yesterday, guess what I get to do today, fix yesterday,
in other words, if I didn't do the right thing yesterday,
what I got to do today is I've got to repair, I've got to go back, make amends, backtrack,
put the car in reverse, put my life in reverse, I've got to go back there,
I've got to repair, now every day I spend repairing, I'm not spending preparing.
You see, we repair when we fail to manage the decisions that we've made.
We prepare when we on a daily basis manage the decisions that we've made.
So your footprints to success are really footprints of success.
Because every step that is made and taken based upon the goals that you have for your life
and you're managing those goals correctly, every step is the progressive
realization of success in your life. And by the way, you'll get the diploma,
you'll get the certificate, but when you get that
you didn't arrive, it just is another step in preparing you to reach your potential.
Children, kids, adults, they're in pursuit of knowledge.
Here's what I know about knowledge, it's there for us to attain,
it's there for us to achieve, it's achievable by any person,
but it's what we do with what we know that makes us successful.
In other words, knowledge itself won't make you successful.
I know a lot of people who know a lot of things, but they don't do much.
In other words, they know what to do, but they don't do what they should do
and they don't even do what they already know. And I think sometimes we look at
knowledge as an end in itself, “if I could know these things,
I'll be successful”. And what I have discovered is,
knowing them is just the first step, doing them, knowing them, doing them,
what do I know, what do I do? These are the two steps
that help us to be successful. You know, when somebody says, take one step
and you can make progress, that's not true, if you only take one step, you get stuck.
It's the continuing stepping, knowledge and doing, “what I know and what I do”,
that continuous stepping that makes us successful in life.
So take what you know and then ask yourself, “now, what can I do with what I know
so that I can help people and add value to their lives?”
Each one of us should live our life as if, we'll never learn everything we need to learn,
we'll never be able to accomplish everything we wanted to accomplish,
we won't be able to experience everything we wanted to experience,
we should live our life every day hungry, understanding that we are to live until we die.
See, I think success can't be summarized in a flippant
degree or program or diploma or arrival, I think today, if you are learning to coach,
if you are learning to speak, if you're doing the things that
are essential to the decisions and you're managing those
decisions well, can I say something to you? Congratulations, you are already a success.
Now, guess what? Over time, it shows up.
You've heard the expression, you maybe have even said it yourself,
you've heard the expression I'm sure, “I've worked all my life to become
an overnight success”. That's the way it works.
All of a sudden, somebody recognizes you, all of a sudden somebody congratulates you,
you didn't get good at that moment, you've been good for a long time,
it just showed up some day. So, as I walk alongside of you
the reason we have tools and resources and helps and principles that we teach
is because every day we want you to learn, every day we want you to grow,
every day we want you to absorb, every day we want you to
do the things that will help you to someday be the person that you want to become.
The journey is a delightful experience. That's what I want for you.