Sweet Spot for Success

Finding the Place Where Your Talent and Passions Meet

James D. Denney and Pat Williams

• Publisher: Revell
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780800727383
• eBook ISBN: 9781493414871
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

From the age of seven, Pat Williams's greatest passion was baseball. However, after two years in the minors, he had to admit it was not his greatest talent. But when he combined his passion for sports with his greatest talents--leadership, salesmanship, and promotion--he found his sweet spot for success. What followed was a phenomenally successful career and a lasting impact on the world.Through engaging stories and inspiring examples of those who have found their sweet spot for success, Williams shows readers how to identify their greatest talent, pursue their greatest passion, and multiply their efforts through teamwork. They'll discover how to maximize their natural gifting, focus their enthusiasm, and leverage their talent and passion into a lifetime of success. Perfect for graduates going off to college or work, or anyone who is still looking for a career that satisfies their soul.

1
Standing at the Intersection

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

Attributed to sculptor and painter Michelangelo

I CAN TELL YOU the exact moment my passion hit me.

The date was June 15, 1947, and I was seven years old. That was the day the course of my life was forever set, and nothing would ever deter me from that course.

On that day, my father took my sister Carol and me to Shibe Park in Philadelphia for a doubleheader, the Cleveland Indians versus the Philadelphia Athletics. Up to that time, I had only heard baseball games on the radio. I had never seen one with my own eyes, and I had no idea what to expect.

The moment I entered that historic ballpark, my senses were overloaded by the intense green of the grass, the fresh green paint on the ballpark walls, the brilliant white chalk lines on the field, and the crystal-clear blue sky overhead. I remember my father explaining the game to me, pointing out the scoreboard and the on-deck circle, pointing out the different players on the field and in the dugout. I was drawn into the suspense of the pitchers dueling with batters—and the intense action of a big hit and the poetic beauty of a double play.

To this day, I remember those sights and sounds, and my first taste of ballpark hot dogs and Cracker Jack. I remember cheering until I was hoarse. And that night, when I went to bed, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up—a ballplayer, a major leaguer.

That was my dream. That was my passion.

I pursued that passion all the way through elementary school and high school and into my college years at Wake Forest University. After four years catching on the Wake Forest team, I signed with the Philadelphia Phillies organization. In fact, I signed my contract in the office of Gene Martin, the Phillies farm director, and his office was located at Shibe Park—the very ballpark where my passion for baseball was born.

The Phillies organization gave me a $500 signing bonus on the spot. I had never seen so much money in my life. I knew I had the passion. I believed I had the talent. I was on my way to a big league sports career. First stop: the Phillies farm club in the Florida State League, the Miami Marlins.

What happened next? I’ll return to that in a moment.

The point is that, throughout my life, my boyhood passion for sports has served and continues to serve me well. My talent and my greatest passion intersected on the field of athletic competition—and I have had an exciting, rewarding career in the sports world for nearly fifty years.

Your Sweet Spot in Life

You are a unique and irreplaceable blend of interests, experiences, abilities, passions, and talents. There is nobody else in the world like you. Every day when you get up in the morning, you have to decide how to put your passions, your talents, and your time to the highest possible use. My goal for you is that as you read this book, you’ll ask yourself, “What do I care about?” “What am I truly passionate about?” “What do I do well?” “What is my greatest area of talent?” The answers will energize you and organize your days so that you can reach your highest goals.

If you follow your passion and focus your talent, you are going to have a special “something” that defines you, that sets you head and shoulders above the crowd. You’ll become noticed as someone who makes a rare contribution to the world, a person who makes a difference. You’ll have something to offer that no one else has. You’ll achieve a level of distinction that few other people ever know. As my late friend Zig Ziglar once said, “You are the only person on earth who can use your ability.”

Robert Tuchman graduated from Boston University in 1993. His goal was to become a sports journalist. He had a degree from one of the top sports journalism schools in the country. Upon graduation, he made all the right moves in pursuit of his dream. He recorded a demo tape and assembled a résumé with references and testimonials from his internships. He sent his package to hundreds of TV stations—and got no response.

So Tuchman took a position in the stockbroker trainee program at Lehman Brothers, the New York City investment banking firm. Tuchman’s managers promised him and his fellow trainees that if they passed the brokerage exam, they would be offered full-time jobs as brokers with their own clients. Time passed, and Tuchman later recalled, “I quickly realized that, regardless of what I had been promised, management had no intention of promoting any of the trainees up the ladder, no matter how good we were. . . .That’s when I started to dream of moving on.”1

Robert Tuchman knew he had the talent to be a successful broker at Lehman Brothers or any other firm. In fact, it angered him to know that he was more talented and capable than most of the people he worked under. Yet he knew he didn’t have a passion for selling stocks. Every morning, he opened the sports pages and read about all the people making a living in the sports world—sports reporters, sports agents, sporting event promoters—and he wished he could earn a living following his passion. “I could be a stockbroker,” he later recalled, “but I didn’t love the idea of being a stockbroker.”2

Finally, Tuchman came to a decision: he had to find a way to connect his career to his passion for professional sports. He didn’t know how he was going to do that, but he was determined to make it happen. To motivate himself, he asked himself the question, “Why not me?” He was sure that the people who worked in the sports world were no smarter than he was, no more talented than he was, no more energetic than he was. If they could do it, why couldn’t he?

Armed with that motivational insight, he made the life-changing decision to leave his job as a Wall Street broker and accept a job with a Chicago-based company called Sports Profiles. The company needed an advertising sales rep in New York, and he took the job without any base salary—100 percent commission. The job was an eye-opener, because Tuchman discovered that his clients were interested in something called “added value.” They wanted tickets to sporting events, travel packages, and similar perks more than they actually wanted to buy advertising.

A light came on. Tuchman realized he had stumbled onto a business idea that no one else was doing. Instead of using perks to sell advertising, why not sell the perks themselves? He asked himself, “What if I could combine my passion for sports with my sales ability?”3

Robert Tuchman decided to combine his greatest passion with his greatest talent. The result was a company built around selling corporate sports travel packages. Robert Tuchman was twenty-five years old when he founded his company—Tuchman Sports Enterprises (TSE)—in his one-bedroom apartment. His office furnishings consisted of a phone and a fax machine. Two years later, TSE was included on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately held companies—and in 2006, Tuchman sold his company to Premiere Global Sports for a sum in the millions of dollars.

Tuchman founded his company after asking himself, “Why not me?” So my question for you is: Why not you? You may have loads of talent for the job you’re now doing. You may have a good retirement waiting for you (if you can just hold on for another fifteen or twenty years).

But is there an idea or a dream that has long been your passion—only you didn’t dare let go of your “sure thing”? Tuchman, in his book Young Guns: The Fearless Entrepreneur’s Guide to Chasing Your Dreams and Breaking Out on Your Own, recalls that many people told him he was crazy to leave the security of Lehman Brothers to pursue his passion for a career involving sports. After all, Lehman Brothers was a stable and secure industry giant, founded in 1850. When Tuchman left the company, he had no way of knowing that, on September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers would file for bankruptcy—the largest bankruptcy filing in US history, and one of the tipping points that led to the 2008 global financial meltdown.

Often, a career path that seems safe and secure is actually fraught with peril—and sometimes a seemingly crazy decision to strike out on your own and follow your passion can be the sanest, safest course imaginable. There are no guarantees in this world—not even when your company has been around since 1850.

Jim Collins is a Stanford-trained business consultant who has worked for organizations as diverse as CNN, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Girl Scouts, and the Marine Corps. He’s the author of a number of business bestsellers, including Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t and Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (with Jerry I. Porras). When I was researching this book, I was surprised to discover that Jim Collins has an almost identical formula for success to the one I have followed all my life. On his website, I found a three-part formula for success similar to my own intersection of talent and passion:

What are you passionate about?

What are you genetically encoded for? (In other words, what is your natural talent?)

What can you get paid for?4

The first two questions determine whether or not you have what it takes to be successful—great passion and great talent. The third question is a practical one: Is there a market for your passion and your talent? This is an important consideration.

You may have a passion for carving bars of soap into miniature replicas of the works of Michelangelo—and you might even have a great talent for it. But if you can’t find anyone to pay you handsomely for your soap masterpieces, all the talent and passion in the world won’t make you successful. So Jim Collins’s third question is an important consideration.

When I combined my passion for sports with my talent for management, marketing, and speaking, I never doubted that I could get paid to do it. I had known a number of people in the Philadelphia Phillies front office for years, and I had been mentored and taught by some of the best in the sports management business. I knew there was a good living to be made in the front office.

And when Robert Tuchman launched his business selling corporate sports travel packages, he had already been making money selling sports travel packages as “added value” inducements to get people to buy advertising. He knew there was a market for his business. He knew he could get paid to merge his greatest passion with his greatest talent.

So as you are asking yourself, “What is my greatest passion in life? And what talent do I have for pursuing that passion?” make sure you are thinking in terms of dollars—and sense. Make sure there’s a market for your greatest passion, and that someone will pay you to leverage your greatest talent.

When you have found that perfect intersection of passion and talent, and you know that you can make a living doing what you love, you have truly found your sweet spot in life. You are poised to achieve great things—and to reap great rewards.

The Barber with a Passion for Books

Rueben Martinez was born poor, the son of immigrant parents, in the tiny mining town of Miami, Arizona. Almost all of the jobs in the town were related to copper mining. Rueben possessed a curious mind. He was hungry for learning and loved to read, yet he had two strikes against him: the town had no public library, and Rueben’s parents disapproved of reading.

“My mom couldn’t stand me reading,” he recalls. “My dad disliked it.” His teacher would lend him a book every Friday for him to read over the weekend. One Saturday afternoon, his mother caught him reading and she sent him out to clean the yard. So Rueben hid the book under his bed and went out to do his chores. Two hours later, he returned to his room—but the book was gone. He searched and finally found what was left of the book amid the ashes in the woodstove.

“It just broke my heart,” he recalls, “but I started reading more because of it.”5

Forced to read in secret, Rueben had several hiding places where he stashed books and sneaked away to indulge his passion for reading. Every morning, he woke up early, sneaked over to the neighbor’s porch, and read the morning newspaper. Then he carefully refolded the paper so the neighbor wouldn’t suspect. One morning, the neighbor caught Rueben—but to the boy’s surprise, the neighbor was pleased that Rueben was so hungry for knowledge, and he encouraged Rueben to keep reading.

At age seventeen, Rueben left Arizona and moved to Southern California. He fell in love with the California climate, the Pacific Ocean, and the California culture. He took an assortment of jobs—machine operator, factory worker, grocery clerk—and one day an ad for a barber college captured his attention. Most of the jobs he’d had in the past were dirty jobs that got his clothes grimy. But barbers always wore clean white smocks.

After completing barber college, Rueben Martinez opened his own one-chair barbershop in downtown Santa Ana, California. It turned out that he had quite a talent for cutting hair. He also had an intense passion for reading. He decided to combine his talent with his passion—and he hoped to pass that passion on to his customers, especially the Mexican-American young people in his community.

He moved bookcases into his barbershop, and stocked them with volumes from his personal library, all in Spanish. His books included novels ranging from the Cervantes classic Don Quixote to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, plus Spanish translations of American books, and important works of Spanish-language nonfiction. He would lend the books out to his customers free of charge. In 1993, he began offering Spanish-language books for sale.

Rueben Martinez became a tireless advocate for reading. He urged parents to read to their children, and he encouraged young people to make reading a lifelong habit. Eventually, his bookshop outgrew the barbershop and became the focus of his business. He moved to a larger storefront space around the corner and devoted the new store completely to books (including books for children) and the display of local art. He called his new store ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Standing at the Intersection
• 2. Identify Your Talent
• 3. Identify Your Passion
• 4. Focus Your Talent
• 5. Focus Your Passion
• 6. Energized with Confidence
• 7. Multiply Your Success
• 8. Guiding Others to Their Success Intersection
• Notes
• About the Authors
• Back Ads
• Back Cover