20

SEIZE THE DAY!

Seize the day; put no trust in the morrow.

—HORACE

You may be familiar with the quote from Horace in its Latin version, “Carpe diem,” made famous in the movie Dead Poets Society, starring Robin Williams. The ancient Roman was telling us that nothing gets done tomorrow. You have to act today if you expect to accomplish your purpose in life. But while you must act today, you must keep your eye focused on tomorrow and the next year and the next decade. If your vision does not extend beyond today, then you will become mired in failure, because success in life cannot be achieved in a single day.

Bill Walsh, the National Football League Hall-of-Famer and Stanford University coach, put it very effectively:

Perhaps the secret to effective action lies in how you interpret the length of the “day” in Carpe Diem. If it’s a moment, or a day, you’re cutting down on the odds for success. But if you recognize that in business as in sports (or all of life, for that matter), there’s a “season” made up of several opportunities, those odds go up considerably.¹

But the opportunities are like baseball pitches: You have to swing at them if you expect to hit the ball out of the park. So Walsh adds:

The key to success is reaching out, extending yourself, striking, and then, if you fail, bouncing back and doing it again— being so resourceful that finally when the moment comes again you won’t hesitate.²

Hesitation results from an uncertainty about where you want to go and what you want to do to get there. To seize the day, you must have a purpose, a vision, a set of goals and a plan for reaching them. You must begin climbing the six steps on the stairway of success. So let us review them with a view toward seizing the day.

STEP ONE: DECISION

Decide today that you will be in control of your life; that you will craft your own definition of success and will do whatever is necessary to achieve it.

Use Figure 1-1 to identify your strongest talents. Then use the forms at the end of Chapter 2 to identify your congenial competencies, your compatible careers, and your congenial roles.

Have you forgotten what those terms mean? Here are the definitions:

• A congenial competency is an activity that allows you to use your best talents in an enjoyable and satisfying way. Remember that you are most likely to succeed when you’re doing something that you enjoy doing and that you do well.
• A compatible career is a line of work that allows you to use your congenial competencies in a profitable way.
• A congenial role is a position within a compatible career that lets you follow your preferred behavior pattern and disposition most of the time.

Your preferred behavior pattern refers to your usual way of responding to people and events in your life. Generally, people respond in four basic modes, one of which they prefer in most situations. Those modes are:

• Top gun: The dominant, take-charge type whose chief motivation is to win. Top guns make excellent leaders and long-range planners, but are often short on diplomacy. They believe in stating their wishes directly, and they relate to tasks more than to people.
• Engaging: The friendly, sociable type whose chief motivation is to be admired. Engagers are excellent at organizing and motivating people. They are adventurous and fun-loving. They believe in stating their wishes directly, and they relate to people more than to tasks.
• Accommodating: The steady, reliable type whose chief motivation is to be liked. Accommodators relate well to those who follow the other behavioral modes. They make excellent mentors. They prize security and dislike conflict. They believe in stating their wishes indirectly, through hints and suggestions. They relate to people more than to tasks.
• Meticulous: The logical, pragmatic type whose chief motivation is to do things correctly. They excel at problem solving. Meticulous people strive to meet their own inner standards. They soak up information and are excellent at making sense out of complex data. They enjoy working alone. They tend to state their wishes indirectly and relate to tasks more than to people.

Determine which of those descriptions most closely fits your personality, and look for activities that will allow you to follow your preferred mode profitably while doing the things you do well and enjoy doing. Next, decide which values mean the most in your life, and develop a set of principles in support of those values. Then decide on the rules of conduct that will support these principles. Again, let’s define our terms:

• A value is something you hold dear.
• A principle is a broad, fundamental truth.
• A rule of conduct is a guide to behavior designed to implement a principle.

List the things you value in each area of your life: your family, your career, your social life, your civic life, and your spiritual life. Then decide which principles support these values and which rules of conduct you will follow to support these principles.

For instance, in your family life you may value family closeness. You may develop these principles in support of family closeness:

• Mutually enjoyable activities promote family closeness.
• Good communication is essential to family closeness.

You may then frame these rules of conduct for yourself:

• Each day I will do something enjoyable with my family.
• I will share my hopes and dreams and my challenges with my family, and will create a nonthreatening environment in which they can come to me with their hopes, dreams, and challenges.

Based on the values you have identified, decide which principles you will place at the center of your life. Use them as guidelines for all the decisions you must make.

Identify the areas of your life that concern you, and perform situational triage. Divide the situations that confront you into these categories:

1. Those you want to influence and can
2. Those you’d like to influence but can’t
3. Those that are not worth influencing

Focus your efforts on those situations in the first category. Develop strategies for dealing with those in the second category. Don’t waste your time on situations in the third category.

STEP TWO: COMMITMENT

To seize the day, you have to make an irrevocable commitment to act. You do this by wiping the slate clean, creating a new script, and embarking on a course from which there is no turning back. What’s past is past; what’s done is done. The important thing is what you can do now to achieve the future you want. This requires a willingness not only to accept change, but to pursue it proactively.

You now have a set of values supported by firm principles, and you have developed your own rules of conduct in support of those principles. You know where you want to focus your efforts to achieve the future you desire.

Now you must create the future. You do this by picturing in your mind the future as you want to see it. Mentally experience the sights, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells of the environment in which you choose to live. Create a future that will excite you and that will be in harmony with your deeply held values.

After you have created your vision, describe the future you desire in a written mission statement. This will serve as a constant reminder of what you have determined to accomplish. After you’ve created your future, cross your Rubicon. This means committing to a course of action from which there is no turning back. Unless you are willing to commit yourself totally to your vision, your resolution will fail at the first sign of adversity.

STEP THREE: PLANNING

You now have a vision, and a mission statement that describes the future you have created. Your next step is to plan to turn the vision into reality. Your plan should specify the actions you must take to realize your vision. It must set a timetable for taking each action. And it must be flexible enough to allow for course corrections along the way. To plan effectively you’ll need to do these three things:

1. Set goals.
2. Set priorities.
3. Develop strategies.

You begin by breaking the mission into doable segments. Let these be your goals. Set long-term, intermediate-term, short-term, and immediate goals, including the goals you must attain immediately if you are to embark toward your vision. Start with the vision and plan back to the present. Do this for every aspect of your life. Set measurable goals, so that you’ll know for sure when you’ve attained them. Advertise them. When you know that others are aware of your goals, you’ll have a greater incentive to reach them.

You set priorities by listing the situations that you have decided to influence after performing situational triage. You then evaluate these situations, asking yourself, “What is most important?” and “What is most urgent?” Important choices move you toward your goals. Urgent choices demand immediate attention. Good planning involves reducing urgent choices to a minimum and concentrating on important choices. List these choices in the order of importance and address them one at a time.

After you have set your priorities, develop strategies for reaching your goals. Strategies should specify the actions to be taken, the people who are to execute them, and the time frame in which they are to be executed. They should set deadlines for completion and establish criteria for determining when the actions have been completed.

STEP FOUR: PREPARATION

Success requires preparation. You must get ready to march toward your vision by acquiring balance in your physical, mental/emotional, social, and spiritual lives. Physical health requires a good balance between work and recreation, exercise and rest, sleep and wakefulness. It also requires a balanced diet.

Mental/emotional balance requires that you recognize and appreciate your own self-worth while respecting the worth of others. It means learning to deal with the ups and downs of life without being thrown off-balance. It requires that you learn patience and forgiveness and acquire a sense of humor. It means taking charge of your own life and accepting responsibility for your successes and failures.

Social balance enables you to become a participating member of society. It means cultivating a supportive circle of friends in your family, your workplace, your community, and your leisure activities.

Spiritual balance requires that you get in touch with your core values—the things that make you who and what you are. Spiritual values transcend the material artifacts that we can touch and see. They take us into the realm of beauty, inspiration, and love. Material success may result in the accumulation of possessions. But only spiritual success will enable you to enjoy them.

After you “get ready” through acquiring balance, you must “get set” by motivating yourself and minimizing the restraining effects of stress. You can boost your morale by cultivating sources of morale-boosting endorphins—substances secreted by your body to reduce pain and tension and give you an overall good feeling. Family closeness, involvement in worthy causes, relationships with supportive groups, and vigorous exercise can all cause your body to produce more endorphins.

You can generate positive stress by accepting an exciting challenge, by upgrading your estimate of your own capabilities, and by following the doctrine of “and then some.” When you follow this doctrine, you give a challenge everything you’ve got, and then some.

Both pain and pleasure can create positive stress. When the pain of staying in a rut is greater than the pain of getting out, you will make a positive change. When the rewards of getting out of the rut are appreciably greater than the rewards of staying in it, you will also make a positive change.

Pride and fear can be positive motivators. You succeed because you don’t want to experience the pain or the humiliation of failure. You can also acquire positive stress by giving yourself a stake in the outcome. Whether your investment in an endeavor is monetary or emotional, your investment will give you an incentive to succeed.

Managing negative stress means dealing with the frustrations that arise when our bodies build up energy to confront a challenge and are unable to use it in constructive ways. One of the best remedies for negative stress is action. You feel stressed out when you are not in control of events. Your stress diminishes when you can see that your actions are helping you gain control. Honesty is another good antidote to stress. When you’re being yourself, you don’t have to deal with the constant fear that you’ll be “found out.”

Good exercise, a balanced diet, and a supportive network of friends are also helpful in managing stress.

STEP FIVE: EXECUTION

Executing your strategies for success requires a spiral movement: First you act. Then you learn from your actions. Next you apply what you’ve learned through further action. Then you learn from your action and once more apply what you’ve learned. You continue the spiral until you have achieved your goal. Action requires that you assemble your physical, financial, and human resources, then begin executing your strategies one by one, always asking yourself, “What needs to happen next if I am to reach my goal?”

We learn through productive failures. In a productive failure, you don’t achieve your objective, but you come away with new knowledge and understanding that will increase your chances of success on the next try. To learn from mistakes, you need measurable goals and a learning mentality. A learning mentality means that you are alert for every opportunity to learn something new and useful, whether through formal courses or purposeful learning by doing. You must also seek positive and negative feedback, and develop a system for decision making.

STEP SIX: RECOMMITMENT

Achieving your vision doesn’t mean you’ve reached the end of the line. It simply means that you’ve come to a new starting place. Once your desired future has become your happy present, look around for other visions to create. The future is still in front of you, and you can either accept whatever fate throws your way or you can once more create the future you want.

For the foreseeable future, you will be living in a world whose dominant characteristic is change. To be successful, you must learn to change with the world. By gearing your life to the concept of change, you can create a personal vision that enables you to ride the changes to the future you desire.

Most people, at one time or another in their lives, find themselves in an environment that seems to confine them to their current level of achievement. They may be content to remain in that environment, but the era of change makes that a hazardous choice: The environment is subject to change or even destruction.

When you think you’ve reached the point at which you can stop all forward progress and stand pat for the duration, you’re in danger. Look about you for another exciting challenge. Form a new vision, and commit once more to its fulfillment. When you do that, you will create for yourself a future of never-ending challenge, achievement, and excitement. May the future you create exceed your fondest expectations!