Own your room
If you are not reading Chris Guillebeau’s blog The Art of Nonconformity, you should be. Chris regularly writes on three topics: life, work and travel.
His view on work, and life, is that you don’t have to live your life the way people expect you to and if you don’t decide what you want to get out of life, someone else will do it for you.
Chris’ writings on personal responsibility and excellence are some of the best I’ve read and reflect the nature and spirit of the topic I try to impart on this site. In a recent post talking about personal responsibility and “showing up”, Chris had this to say:
To be truly awesome, you have to go above and beyond the efforts of those around you, look for alternative solutions, and refuse to back down from the truth. There’s a whole article about it for those who are curious.
But it all starts with showing up. Or, as a friend of mine puts it:
“I’m sorry you feel bad about not meeting your goals– what I would suggest is that you begin meeting your goals, in order to feel better.”
Insight such as this is difficult for some people to accept. Just imagine the excuses you’d hear:
But that’s not fair! But I tried to do it and something else came up! But some things are out of our control!
You can probably think of other excuses – in fact, you’ve probably heard them many times over. Thankfully, for those of us who do take responsibility, there’s good news on two levels. The first good news is that we automatically stand out. In a world of buck-passers, those who decide to take responsibility are unusual. Yay. You get the yellow jersey by default. (You still have to win the race, but no one is surprised when you do.)
But on a deeper level, the bright side of taking responsibility is that you can own your own success. Sure, other people helped you get there, but you were the one who actually crossed the finish line. You showed up. You did it. If you have to own the struggle and failure, integral parts of any goal worth pursuing, surely you can also own some of the success.
Remember this: many people can help you achieve success, but no one else is RESPONSIBLE for your success.
I can’t speak for you, but for me this is pure inspirational genius.
I was reminded of this post last night. I was attending a meeting of a local angel investor group. There was an entrepreneur making a presentation in support of an investment decision by the group. I love watching these presentations – I pick up so many ideas on what does and doesn’t work in a pitch presentation; especially in situations like these when it’s an actual, real-live pitch with money at stake!
The presenter was doing a good job; clearly he had done this before. But then I noticed he was doing one of the no-no’s we coach our entrepreneurs about: he was constantly looking back at his slides. He hadn’t fallen into the trap of reading the slides, but he was looking at them quite a bit.
Normally this is a very bad thing. In this case, the presentation ended up being very well done. The difference? The entrepreneur took responsibility for his presentation’s success. He was confident. He was credible. He was prepared. And it was very apparent he was passionate and believed knew he was going to be successful. To Chris’ point above, that kind of attitude stands out, mostly because it is too often seen. For the fifteen minutes he was presenting, he owned that room.
The entrepreneur was approved for funding. One could say it was because of a good product and sound business model. One could say it was because of a positive report out of the due diligence team. I would say while those were supporting factors, his funding was approved because he took responsibility for his success.
Whether you are an entrepreneur or someone simply interested in your own personal excellence – take responsibility for your success.
Own your room.
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