STORIES

I am a little concerned that we’ve lost ourselves. Or maybe it is better put that we have buried ourselves so that nobody sees who we truly are. What I am trying to say is that we tend to view success largely based on superficial stuff and on-the-surface measurements. Money and fame and any other detail that is the narrative of society at large seems to be our focus. As time passes, I can’t help but think that real success is more about the inner mind, our unconscious reality, our intuitions and our character.

The Pareto principle—or 80/20 rule—asserts that a small amount of input or effort leads to the majority of results. So, most companies understand that 80% of their profits or revenue are generated by 20% of their clients. It also holds that a smaller amount of employees carry the larger burden for progress. The moral to the story for any business, organization or team would be to nurture and mimic the few—The Twenty—that get it right and then try to share it with others and multiply the effect.

Ignorance is not always blissful. I, for one, think that we could use a healthy dose of ignorance. I don’t subscribe to the need to know every little thing that happens in the world at a moment’s notice. In fact, if you turned off all of the digital noise for a couple of days, I suspect you would still know if anything really important occurred. Since when did it become everybody’s business to know everybody else’s business? It just seems like we simply know too much . And yet it is possible that we are more ignorant than we have ever been.

We are hearing a great deal about cancel culture these days. I hate that people are trying to cancel others. And while there may be some legitimate reasons in some cases, my hope is that kindness becomes the new order of the day. The world may have changed forever due to this pandemic and we really don’t have a clear picture of how things will look. We can, however, choose to see things in a more creative way.

I’m not interested in writing about what a tough year this has been. There is too much “I can’t wait until 2020 is over” going on these days. The bottom line is that the turn of the year will not magically wipe away the virus or the political angst that has weighed us all down. We cannot simply flip a switch to happiness and joy.

In one of my recent podcasts, I had the pleasure to talk with Michelle Seiler Tucker, author of “Exit Rich” and founder of Seiler Tucker Inc. We discussed the mindset required to build a business worth selling but it was a little expression she shared that impacted me the most. In an effort to explain the difference between working in the business versus working on the business, she said “it is hard to read the label from inside the bottle.”