I’m a suitable candidate to write about this subject because I’ve come from a place where really, you had to be family to like me. I had precious few friends growing up and had a very lonely childhood.
My family was often telling me that I’m very intelligent and talented and so I tried to make sense of people not liking me by telling myself they’re jealous, shallow, or whatever.
I was a good person inside, so the people who did give me the benefit of the doubt and took the time to get to know me really grew to love me, but few people did that.
Only within the last few years did I realise that relating to people is a skill and I can become skilled at relating to people if I make the effort to learn it.
I’ve learned some things on the subject and about myself which I’m sure you will relate to if you also have poor relationship skills.
Even if you’re a great people person, you will certainly benefit from this post in some way.
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About three years ago I started Israeli Special Forces hand to hand and weapons combat training. It’s painful, but it’s made a man out of me, and continues to do so.
Since starting I’ve never been more fit. One of my instructors is Idan. He was in the Israeli Special Forces for many years and was then approached to work as part of the Israeli Intelligence, the Mossad.
If you asked me to put money on a fight between Idan, man alone, and 10 of the biggest, strongest, angriest people you’ve ever met, one at a time or all at the same time, without a moment’s hesitation I would put my money on Idan, seriously.
Idan has taken the fighting style of the Israeli military, Krav Maga, and refined it into Kalah.
Apart from the many benefits, including confidence, greater ability to defend myself and my loved ones in this dangerous South Africa, fitness, spending time with my great friend Harry, developing a marketable skill, and learning how to do random crazy special forces stuff like jumping off of a moving ship, I have learned a couple of life lessons.
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This past Sunday night at church we had a guest speaker called Sy Rogers. He’s widely described as one of the best communicators in the world.
This post is just some random, largely unstructured thoughts about the new distinctions I made from listening to him and how I tie that in to what I already know about love.
Right from the start, let me give you the definition of what love is and is not: Love is not what you see in movies and popular culture. Popular culture has not the first clue about love.
According to Sy Rogers, love at it’s core is to value someone. I love this definition for it’s simplicity. Using this definition, it’s easy to spot love.
This has truly been a life changing distinction for me. Whenever I hear or read the word “love”, I now always replace it with the word value, and then I know how to act on the information.
It’s hard to know how to act when I say “You must love this person.” But it’s easy when I say, “you must value this person.” Read more »
I racked my brains trying to come up with a way to explain what I mean when I say character. What is a person’s character? When I say character in this post, I’m not referring to someone’s nature or their personality.
Here’s what I mean when I refer to character:
“Your character is to your inner being what your skeleton is to your physical being. It’s the framework on which all your progress is supported”
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I really don’t know why I think of things like this, but last night I was pondering the subject of conspiracies.
I like conspiracy theorists. I like the way their brains work. I think they keep people honest, cause they’re doubting Thomases by nature. They keep it real.
But as I was lying in bed, I realised that conspiracy theorists lack credibility because they make two mistakes in forming and communicating their theories.
The human mind has been designed to be on the look out for patterns, whether something as simple as patterns of clouds in the sky forming familiar shapes, or patterns in which events or situations make sense. It’s how the mind operates.
It’s fun and interesting to look at world events and various happenings around you and use that info to try and spot patterns, predict future events etc., but conspiracy theorists make some key mistakes in their otherwise fun, light-hearted efforts, and those mistakes are the reasons why most people look at them as freaks and weirdos.
The other day I was watching that movie with Michael Douglas where he’s part of the Secret Service. When one of the agents are killed a detective from the police department makes some comment about how or why he was killed, and justifies it with “It’s a gut feel”, or “it’s a hunch”.
The Secret Service agent remarks, “You know what I don’t like about hunches? The only evidence you see from that point on is the evidence that supports your hunch.” Read more »
Bartering is basically when you exchange your product or service for another company’s product or service, leaving cash out of the equation.
I love bartering with my whole heart. With the new toll fees on the N1, the increased fuel tax, the 50%-and-climbing increase in just the last year in electricity prices, and excessive service charges by South African banks and government-owned enterprises like Hellkom, bartering offers a way to do business that appeals a great deal to me.
When you exchange your product at your sell value, for another product at it’s sell value, there are more benefits than just having the product you wanted.
I love bartering, not just because I can leave Uncle Sipho (My South African equivalent to Uncle Sam, i.e. the tax man) out of the equation. It’s such a powerful concept. But I love bartering when it has some beautifying elements to it.
The beauty behind a well structured barter agreement is that it is a win-win, and it has profit within the profit. What do I mean?
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In part 2 of How to Become a Make-It-Happen Person, I mention the importance of having a detailed schedule. If you have that in place, you can then implement one of the most powerful concepts I’ve ever experienced in my life: Scheduling thinking time.
I mention this in part 3 of How to Become a Make-It-Happen Person, but I have since decided that because it’s such a powerful idea, it needs it’s own dedicated entry.
After a quick Google search, I’ve noticed that most people only apply a schedule to business, and those who have discovered the power behind scheduling thinking time only spend time thinking about business related stuff. But this idea doesn’t only apply to business.
Read more »
You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.
There are a number of keys that I’ve learned and continue to learn about making things happen in life.
One day I was looking at a guy in a Ferrari and started thinking – many people think that wealth and success in life is something some are just blessed with – a matter of luck and good fortune.
What a day when I realised that you can make anything happen as long as you have a strong enough realisation that you can. You might not be able to make it happen over night, but you can come up with whatever you need.
Here are some more keys to becoming a Make-It-Happen person.
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I was watching a gripping interview with Four-Star General Stanley A. McChrystal, the guy smiling in the picture. He’s the new Obama-appointed commander of US forces in Afghanistan.
You know, you can get a sense when someone speaks that, listen, now I must pay attention, this is not someone to be taken lightly. General McChrystal is clearly one of those.
He was talking, amongst other things, about how he creates the right culture in the units under his command and how the main difference between a great unit and an average unit is the expectations each member has for every other member in the unit.
General McChrystal has created a great culture of excellence, hard work, and reliability in his teams, but he now has the tremendous task of creating a favourable culture in an entire country, i.e. Afghanistan.
The strategy in a nutshell is, once you have an entire country with the right culture, in other words, an entire country accepting certain things as good, normal and beneficial to all, you can then start withdrawing the troops and they will gradually carry on and protect that culture.
So if General McChrystal has been entrusted by the US president to change the culture of an entire country (and he’s doing a great job so far), I think we can pay attention to what he has to say on the issue. Read more »
It’s Christmas time again.
I used to hate Christmas just because I hate being bombarded by the same old carols and adverts. I get so sick of them. But recently I’ve decided to drop my crap and embrace the Christmas spirit.
This time of year, people I’ve worked with send season’s greeting emails wishing me a merry Christmas and a prosperous new year.
As a side note…
I was compiling one of those same merry Christmas emails to send to my valued customers and then had a realisation. I removed all traces of merry Christmas, rewrote the email to wish them a prosperous 2010, told them a little about how we grew in 2009 thanks to their support, and saved the email in my drafts to send mid-January.
Why? Because if I send Merry Christmas, they say thanks, delete, go on holiday and forget me. If I send Prosperous New Year mid January, it’s the same best wishes from my sincere heart, but they’ll be reading it right at the point where they’re winding up to a new year.
Read more »
If you haven’t yet, read part 1.
“I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece. I challenge
you to join the ranks of those people who live
what they teach, who walk their talk.”
— Tony Robbins
I’ve listened to a lot of people talk about what they want to do but never doing it. Just yesterday I was speaking to my Brothers in Beat partner Harry. He was saying how you only live once and he wants to go work on an island or on a cruise ship.
After discussing the pro’s and con’s, I began to be convinced. For some reason the phrase “you only live once” hit hard. “…Plus we don’t have a family or anything that would keep us in South Africa”, Harry added.
I noticed he kept on talking about why he wants to do it, being quite repetitive, “The crime in South Africa, the cherries are full of it, the rat race of it all!”, for 20 minutes on and on.
Eventually I stopped him and said, “you keep talking about why you want to do it; Let’s talk about how we are going to do it”, essentially I was saying, “Let’s figure out what the action goals would be toward achieving our dream.” Read more »
I was reading a piece about Rupert Murdoch complaining about Google indexing their news articles and the newspaper companies losing out on revenue. Apart from saying that fighting against Google is committing suicide, I don’t want to talk about that issue; but Mr. Murdoch did say something that made me think.
He said he “couldn’t promise to meet his own deadline” – but did say it remained a work in progress and “we are all working very hard” on delivering the pay solution.
It made me think, does he know what a deadline is? What’s the point of a deadline if you’re already preparing to miss it?
The problem with deadlines is that they are essentially results goals, not action goals. You’re aiming to achieve something that you don’t necessarily have 100% control over.
I understand there’s a need for deadlines because a project cannot just continue indefinitely, but when I was working for a boss, I saw too many deadlines come and go and there was nothing I could do about it. Read more »
When I was 14, my grandmother bought a program off an ‘As Seen On TV’ advert called Passion, Profit and Power. I loved it. I devoured it. I listened to it over and over.
Then when I was 17, my grandmother bought another ‘As Seen On TV’ program by Tony Robbins called Personal Power 2.
Personal Power 2 was about 20 hours worth of listening but I managed to do it in about a day an a half – and I wasn’t forcing it on myself, I just couldn’t get enough. I had such a momentum, drive and ambition to be the best me that I could be.
In both those programs and most books I’ve read and tapes I’ve listened to since, the authors make it sound as if “setting goals and writing them down” has some sort of magical power – that by doing this, the ether or mother nature or God or the universe is mobilised to give you the results you want.
I set goals and to my great surprise they never happened, not even close. I would set goals like “by March I will be earning R10 000 per month. By August I’ll be earning R15 000 per month. By December I’ll be driving a Mercedes.” Read more »
I recently read something with which I didn’t quite agree.
“Fear is nothing more than F-alse E-vidence A-ppearing R-eal. A movie director once trained his actors to walk across a six inch beam supported by two bricks on the ground. When the beam was raised 30 meters off the ground the actors had difficulty crossing the beam. They found it impossible to cross when placed across a canyon. The beam hadn’t changed. The only change that took place was in the minds of the actors attempting to cross the beam. They lost their focus and allowed fear of falling to block their obvious ability to cross the beam.”
No, what happened is that they lost their frame of reference (the ground) and their rational fear of falling saved their lives. (Rational fear is vital to our survival. Irrational fear is a problem) Read more »
Leadership books and blogs deal with major attributes of being confident, but I want to consider the finer, often overlooked aspects.
I’ve found in my life that there are times when I just don’t feel confident. I’ll go out sometimes and feel and be confident, and other times I feel self-conscious and weak.
It’s strange and I don’t know why I sometimes feel more confident than other times, but I decided to make it my project. I’ve paid attention when I feel strong and when I feel weak. I’ve also looked at the leaders around me and noticed what they’re doing and I’ve made a few distinctions. Read more »
Someone who has made a profound impact on my thinking about business is Tom Peters. Tom Peters is my reason, no, my justification for being quite rebellious in my way of doing things in business. Tom Peters and his opinions on the fact that the internet and technology has changed all the old-established rules of the game – is my permission to disagree with people much MUCH! more successful than me.
As a silly example, I think that the big boss having his own holy of holies – his own private office – is total and utter BS! Sure enough, there are things he needs to discuss that can’t become public knowledge before the right time… but what is the board room for? The boardroom is for meetings, the office is for bending the secretary over. Ok, so the office isn’t such a bad idea. Just kidding.
But I digress…
Tom Peters believes that if today’s large corporations don’t DESTROY the way they do things now, and instead re-invent, or RE-IMAGINE their whole way of doing things to take advantage of the Internet and latest technologies, they won’t be here in 20 years time, or at best they will be a mere remnant of their former selves. Read more »
You’ve read the title: How to Become a Make-It-Happen Person. But I’m almost 100% sure that almost 100% of those who will ever read that headline will not even begin to grasp the immense power and potential that lies in that short phrase.
When I started Corporate Showcase Productions, someone once said “Reg is trying to start a video production business”, and I corrected them, “I’m not trying, I’m doing it.” I actually used stronger language than that because I felt strongly about it, because you see, a Make-It-Happen person aggressively, like a bulldozer, pursues the thing he/she wants to make happen. It doesn’t happen otherwise. Read more »
I’m a great fan of the German cars, Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, but in particular, Mercedes-Benz. Since childhood I believed that Henry Ford invented the motor car, and then I learned that Karl Benz actually did, way back in 1886 when Henry Ford was still playing with Lego. Not to get down on Henry, he did conceive the production line which sped up production of all cars.
I can’t remember when I started adoring and respecting Mercedes-Benz above all others, but I can tell you why…
They have put a couple of principles into practice and taken some decisions that I really respect and that I think we can learn from. Read more »
I’m aware that there are those who think all of us are just a huge collection of cosmic accidents, that our only purpose in life is survival and reproduction. I think that’s a self-centered, sad opinion to have and a sad premise to live your life by. There is a significant purpose behind our being on the planet.
Most of us don’t know what our purpose on the planet is but finding out is part of the fun, especially once you have some clues about how to go about it.
Here are a few hints to help you discover your purpose… Read more »
We are limited by what we think others think of us, more so than many of us realize and certainly more than we would like to admit. How we act and don’t act is largely dependent on how we think others expect us to act or not act, which is why we can be one person with some people, and a completely different person in front of other people.
Have you heard about Kitty Genovese, the woman who was killed near her apartment in New York? About a dozen people heard or saw this and yet nobody did anything to help.
Though information later emerged to show that this was probably not a good example of what is now termed ‘the bystander effect‘, it did prompt studies to be conducted which proved the bystander effect is real, i.e. our environment, not just our personality has a huge effect on how we respond to any given situation. Read more »
