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The Art of Achievement
Mastering The 7 Cs of Success in Business and Life
Tom Morris
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eBook - ePub
The Art of Achievement
Mastering The 7 Cs of Success in Business and Life
Tom Morris
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About This Book
The author of Making Sense of It All and Plato's Lemonade Stand offers a roadmap to help readers make the most of their daily lives. Throughout the ages, plenty of people have written and spoken about success and excellence. But leave it to contemporary philosopher and popular business speaker Tom Morris to gather the best of it into a universal tool kit for achieving nearly any goal. From a clear CONCEPTION of what we want, to a stubborn CONSISTENCY in pursuing our vision, to a CAPACITY to enjoy the process, The Art of Achievement outlines a simple framework that will lead readers down a road of excellence. Peppered with quotes from great thinkers and successful people, such as Plato, Aristotle, Einstein, and Churchill, The Art of Achievement helps readers map out new paths to better health, greater efficiency, and deeper satisfaction. "As with those of all great philosophers, Tom's words of wisdom are timeless. He conveys ancient wisdom with energy and humor and brings practical philosophy into today's world of business—with huge impact." —John Dillon, chairman and CEO, International Paper " The Art of Achievement is an exciting book that can help you and your business. It is full of valuable ideas that can propel you to a life of true significance." —Bruce L. Hammonds, COO, MBNA America Bank, N.A. "Some of the best advice I could give my two children is to read The Art of Achievement. This is more than a book about success in business—it is really about success in life. It is powerful, thought provoking, and exhilarating to read. If you have never before been exposed to Tom Morris's 7Cs of Success, this book will change your life." —Jim Smith, president and CEO, Aurora Foods "In his book True Success, Tom Morris taught me the meaning of the word enthusiasm and its full meaning and power in daily life. That alone was enough to make me a lifelong fan. Now, in his new book, The Art of Achievement, he's done even more—actually changed my life. I feel as if I was just on the verge of making a momentous leap in my life, and his book iced it for me. Now I am going for it!"—Steve Leveen, president and cofounder, Levenger
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Desarrollo personalSubtopic
Éxito personalPART 1
THE ART OF CONCEPTION
Nature scarcely ever gives us the best; for that we must have recourse to art.
Balthasar Gracian (1601–1658)
CHAPTER
1
Taking Aim: Targeted Living
CONDITION 1 OF THE 7 CS:
We need a clear Conception of what we want, a vivid vision, a goal clearly imagined.
HAVING GOALS
Aristotle has taught me we all need a target to shoot at. We must have goals to guide our actions and energies. The Greek word for target was telos. Human beings are teleological creatures. We are hard-wired to live purposively, to have direction. Without a target to shoot at, our lives are literally aimless. Without something productive to do, without positive goals and a purpose, a human being languishes. And then one of two things happens. Aimlessness begins to shut a person down in spiritual lethargy and emptiness, or the individual lashes out and turns to destructive goals just to make something happen.
The soul that has no established aim loses itself.
Michael de Montaigne (1533–1592)
Most of us have had goals set for us from our earliest years. Our parents gave us instructions; then our teachers did; and finally so did our employers. It’s perfectly natural to receive goals from other people. A society can’t exist without the sort of cooperative ventures between people that often require one’s passing on goals to another. All training, education, and leadership involves setting goals for others to pursue.
But even within that structure, when we have overall work targets given to us, we need to be active ourselves and engage creatively in personal goal setting to move us in the direction of those externally established targets, and to augment what we’ve been asked to do. No other person knows all our talents, experience, and desires. No one else can possibly guess everything we are capable of contributing. It’s up to us to take the initiative, exercise our creativity, and put our personal resources into action in such a way as to add positive value to whatever we’re involved in, to delight the other people around us, and to satisfy ourselves as well.
There are aspects of our lives where no one else can establish goals for us. It’s up to us what we do with our time and energy. If we waste the opportunity to structure our lives creatively within this realm of freedom, we’ll never experience the happiness available to us.
Purpose is what gives life a meaning.
C. H. Parkhurst (1842–1933)
I don’t mean to imply that everyone should carry around a planner with each fifteen-minute period of the day structured around goals. That might be fine for some personality types, but for most of us it would amount to replacing our humanity with a page out of a robotics manual. We don’t need to burden ourselves with too much structure. An afternoon on the sofa, a day at the beach, or a week relaxing in the mountains can be exactly what you need. I’m just pointing out that, as the ancient Greeks realized, we can do more with our lives, for our world, and for ourselves than we think if we creatively use the time and energy we’ve been given in pursuit of positive goals that are our own.
THE DILEMMA OF GOAL SETTING
There is one apparently paradoxical feature of goal setting. But behind it is a positive insight. Here’s the paradox. Goal setting can appear to bind you to static commitments in a world that’s quite dynamic. Suppose you set yourself a goal that looks reasonable today. How do you know that tomorrow it will still make sense? How can you be sure that in the process of pursuing it, you won’t see something else that you’d rather accomplish instead? You may come to regret the exclusivity of attention that establishing and pursuing your goal required. You may find yourself moving down a road you end up not liking at all. In a world of flux, it initially seems that we need the structure imposed by goal setting, but it’s perhaps this very flux that renders such an activity inappropriate.
I’m all mixed up and I can’t keep up with everything that’s happening.
Elvis Presley (1935–1977)
The problem is that when you are moving in the direction of a goal, you always begin to see things you otherwise would not have been positioned to notice, things that you could not have been aware of when deciding which goals to pursue. But these new perspectives may help you see, among other things, that you have set yourself the wrong target. This paradox goes back to a simple fact: Except in the case of fairly trivial goals, we can never know enough at the time of initial goal setting to be sure we have indeed set for ourselves the right goal, one that we’ll want to stick with, and one that is truly appropriate for us. In a culture already shy about making commitments, this little insight can be very troubling.
Some people recommend that we not set goals at all, but rather just go with the flow as we drift through life, and concentrate on merely enjoying the ride. Their view often seems to be that goals stultify and cut us off from all the richness that life might otherwise have to offer if we were just more open.
So far as a man thinks, he is free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Goal setting is not a science. But it is an art. It can be a dynamic activity that’s extremely flexible and adaptive. When we set goals, we don’t chain ourselves down. Our chosen objectives aren’t carved in stone. They just give us direction as we move into the future. We set goals the best we can, with the information we have, and then find that as we work toward them, we gather more information that either helps us refine them or else leads us to better goals instead.
A former student had always wanted to be a country music star. So she set some personal goals and moved to Nashville. She was a good singer, but not great. It took little time for her to realize she was just not talented enough to attain her childhood dreams. But in the course of pursuing the goal of vocal stardom, she had met a lot of musicians and people behind the scenes of the music industry. Among other things, she had never before known there was such a job as that of a music business attorney. The more she learned about the business, the more she came to realize the important role a talented lawyer can play in the lives of the singers she had so long admired. And the talents of a music business lawyer were qualities she had in bountiful measure. So, with a few years of extra education, this once aspiring singer was busy cutting deals and facilitating careers for some of her favorite performers. She was a part of the world she loved, and was doing something she was very good at. Should we conclude that her initial goal setting in the direction of becoming a recording star was an embarrassing waste of time? Not at all. If she hadn’t set those goals and acted on them, she might never have discovered the other vocation that was ideally suited for her. Formulating objectives and taking action on them had brought her into a position for seeing where her future truly lay. That is often an unexpected yet powerful way that goal setting can work in a life.
Life is a series of surprises.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The main point to notice here is that a great deal of the information out there in the world concerning what we ought to do can’t be accessed while we sit still, or even when we just drift with the flow of events that happen to come our way. It’s only when we’re focused and engaged, structuring our attention and our action, that we put ourselves into the best position to learn what life has to teach us. In fact, the very best way to learn anything is to engage in a ongoing, directed process of healthy goal setting and pursuit.
THE HIGHEST FREEDOM
Does the enterprise of goal setting encroach on our freedom? The worry that it does is just based on a misunderstanding of what freedom really is. Freedom from having any goals whatsoever is freedom from having any meaning in your life; it’s freedom from success, from happiness, and from the deepest sort of fulfillment a teleological, essentially purposive, being needs.
The only point of “freedom from” is to provide for “freedom to.” Freedom should not be thought of fundamentally as a negative concept. Having goals we set for ourselves does not take away any freedom that it’s good to have. On the contrary, it is the main sort of activity for the sake of which we are free. A life wholly occupied in “going with the flow” will never give us what we most truly need.
Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.
R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943)
That doesn’t mean that it’s never good to “go with the flow.” A measure of this can be part of an intelligent process of dynamic, teleological living. Sometimes we should be loose and noncommittal, adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward how things are developing. We may need to stay open to where a new and unexpected flow of events might be leading. In even the most active life, nonaction is sometimes called for, as we allow our previous efforts to bear fruit, or as we watchfully wait for the next opportunity to leverage our energies well.
The major texts of eastern philosophy have wise advice on the path of patience and the episodic need to wait and just be. We sometimes need to shake loose from an urge to make things happen in order to discover how things ought to happen. We don’t always have to be taking charge, planning everything, and forcing all the issues. But we do need to give ourselves the overall guidance and empowering structure of regular goal setting and goal renewal to keep us intelligently on our proper path. There are times when it’s difficult, and even premature, to form precise long-term goals. But even in those circumstances, we can and should set goals—goals of watchful waiting, attentive yielding, and educational probing.
In healthy goal setting, we both lead and follow. We take charge in some respects, and respond in others. This is part of the inner art of goal conception, and it is a balance that can propel us toward appropriate achi...