My Coaching Books

I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy in my businesses, and I want to encourage you to not repeat my mistakes (and I believe that the same principles I’ll discuss in the context of business are equally relevant to your personal life and relationships):

I’ve recently come to the sobering realization that a lot of what I thought was productive work for many years was actually a lot of ‘busy work’ (not all of it, of course – or even most of it – but certainly more than I’d really like to admit). I’ve also come to believe that the old adage, “build it and they will come” should really be changed to “build it and bring ‘em to it – because they’re not gonna come on their own”.

For far too long I’d mistakenly thought that I could simply work hard and then rest on my laurels. I thought that I could learn everything there was to learn in my field(s), and that business would just come naturally as a result. But I was wrong: I’ve since learned in business that ‘building it’ is a critical piece of the equation – but that the equally-important second piece is ‘going after it and making it happen’.

What got me to the point I’m at now, is that in a couple of areas I do feel like I’ve examined pretty much all there is to be examined. This is not to say that I “know it all”, of course – but there is a concept known as ‘circular learning’ that has come into play in a couple areas of my life…

(Circular learning speaks to the idea that there’s ‘nothing new under the sun’: that if you follow a thread of knowledge completely enough, you’ll begin to see the same underlying principles repeating themselves. They’ll be assembled in different forms and colored with different language, of course – but it’s really all the same stuff after awhile).

Through this circular learning process I’ve come to realize that many of the principles that became clear after years of examination are pretty much the same principles I had learned soon after I had begun my journey. Granted, my skills are more refined now than in earlier years (and I don’t begrudge the expertise I’ve accumulated) – but I understand now that I could have been more successful, a lot more quickly, had I acted earlier and more aggressively on the principles I assumed were too incomplete and immature to be acted upon.

So my biggest mistake –and the lesson I want to share – is basically that I wasted too much time building, when I could have been getting better results by taking more action. The lesson is simply this: know what you know when you know it; take quick action based on what you know at any given time; and continue to learn and correct your course as you go!