The Ultimate Discovery: Undeveloped Potential

“We’re tied with straw and think it’s chain.” Danny Cox

I was the new manager of the company’s top office out of thirty-six offices. Three months later we were thirty-sixth and all because I made a common managerial mistake––trying to get everyone to be like me. And my boss was looking for my replacement!

Somerset Maugham, the great English author, once said, “Adversity puts iron in your flesh.” Another one of my favorite authors, a man by the name of Orison Swett Marden, said, “Adversity sometimes strips a person, only to discover the person.” Well, through adversity I discovered quite a lot about my self. I went back to square one and started learning not only about my own potential, but also about the potential of the people who worked for me. And the biggest lesson I learned was that salespeople can get better––right after the sales manager does.

There are universal applications in that principle. Employees get better right after managers do. Kids get better right after parents do. Students get better right after teachers do. Audiences get better right after speakers do. Customers get better right after salespeople, sales managers, upper management, receptionists, secretaries, order clerks, and anybody else who happens to be in the company get better. That’s a lesson we often learn the hard way, through adversity.

It turned out that I didn’t lose my job. I started studying and listening to the people who worked for me, and I stopped trying to turn them into reproductions of myself. I started encouraging a more creative approach to the problems we faced. And 120 days later, we were back up to Number One.

That was a moment to be savored, not only because of the sense of achievement, but because it would then be possible to ease off a bit and relax after that incredible climb back to Number One. Or so I thought. There’s a certain danger in taking that kind of attitude. If I had hung on to it, you know what would have happened, don’t you? Our sales would have plateaued back out and you’d be reading a book by some other author, not me!

Well, my salespeople and I started talking about this phenomenon. It can happen to anybody working in any job at any level: When you get to a certain way of doing your job, it’s tempting to just quit getting better at it. That is what is called a self-imposed barrier.

Nobody builds a self-imposed barrier for you. You build it for yourself. A self-imposed barrier is not a wall around your life; it’s just the margin of your life. It’s the dividing line between developed potential and undeveloped potential. It marks the spot where you’ve stopped growing. These barriers can rise up at just about any level, whether it’s low, medium, or even high productivity!

Immediate Action: Think of a time when you’ve told someone––perhaps a friend or family member––“Come on. You can do better than that.” Did you ever hear that person reply, “No, I can’t––I’ve never done this job better than that.” The truth is, that’s not a reason. That’s not even a good excuse. It’s only the flag atop the so-called barrier. It shows where the new potential starts.

Point to Ponder Before You Go On: Phillips Brooks, the minister who wrote “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” had a powerful thought: “When you discover you’ve been leading only half a life, the other half is going to haunt you until you develop it.” He was absolutely right!
No-limits thinking is the kind of thinking that’s dedicated to finding a way to live a full life––so that the unexplored half of your identity, the half you can develop but don’t, doesn’t come back to haunt you.

Go ahead! Pull the trigger and ride the bullet!

Go Fly a Kite: The Problem-Solving Process

The Niagara River gorge is 800 feet wide with a 400-foot-wide river channel. Water rushes through the channel at 24 miles per hour. Engineers in the middle of the nineteenth century faced a major challenge when assigned the task of building a railroad suspension bridge across the chasm. No boat could withstand the current and drag a cable across the rushing waters. There was no helicopter in those days to chopper a cable across.

So, creativity came to the rescue. A contest was held in which the first young person who could fly a kite across and have someone grab the kite string on the opposite cliff would receive a prize of ten dollars. Homan Walsh, nine years old, flying his kite from the American side, was the first to have a companion secure the kite string on the other side.

In 1915, Edwin Markham told the rest of the story like this:

The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge,

Before he swung his cable, shore to shore,

Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite

Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands

To grasp upon the further cliff and draw

A greater cord, and then a greater yet;

’Till at the last across the chasm swung

The cable--then the mighty bridge in the air!

By 1855, trains were crossing the

1160-foot-long bridge, 230 feet above the river, and it all started with a kite string. Can the difficulties we face be that insurmountable? We have many more resources available to us now. Symbolically, we need to get more kite strings across our problems. Don’t wait for the kite that will fly the bridge across. Nevertheless, now, as then, long journeys begin with small steps. More than anything else, we must not lose our perspective or, more importantly, our sense of humor in the face of problems. At a glance, the six-step problem-solving process looks like this:

Step One—Identify the problem.

Step Two—Gather all relative information.

Step Three—List all possible solutions.

Step Four—Test possible solutions.

Step Five—Select the best solution.

Step Six—Put the solution into action.

A Thought to Ponder:

1. Decide

2. Begin

3. Don't Stop

Declaration of Personal Responsibility

Several years ago, and all in one afternoon, I wrote what I call my “Declaration of Personal Responsibility.”

The inspiration for this piece was from a man who was in one of my audiences. After the program, he said, “I hope the guy on the white horse gets here soon because I need help. I gently explained that if his problems were going to be solved he’d have to do it himself because the “guy on the white horse” is nonexistent.

My Declaration is in two of the books I’ve written. Dr. Robert H. Schuller asked me to use it in one of his best sellers. Other authors have used it in their books.

Og Mandino, who wrote the worlds best selling. “The Greatest Salesman in the World,” framed a copy of my Declaration and hung it above his desk. He told me he read it every morning before he started writing. His favorite paragraph was the next to the last one that begins “With Personal growth comes a fear of the unknown…”

I’d love to hear which one is your favorite.

My Declaration follows this letter. May I challenge you to write your own Declaration?

Higher up and farther on! The best is yet to be!

Danny Cox

Declaration of Personal Responsibility
By Danny Cox

I currently possess everything I've truly wanted and deserved. This is based on what I have handed out to date. My possessions, my savings and my lifestyle are an exact mirror of me, my efforts and my contribution to society. What I give, I get. If I am unhappy with what I have received it is because, as yet, I have not paid the required price. I have lingered too long in the "quibbling stage."

I fully understand that time becomes a burden to me only when it is empty. The past is mine and at this very moment I am purchasing another twenty-four hours of it. The future quickly becomes the past at a control point called the present moment. I not only truly live at that point, but I have full responsibility for the highest and best use of the irreplaceable now.

I accept full responsibility for both the successes and failures in my life. If I am not what I desire to be at this point, what I am is my compromise. I no longer choose to compromise with my undeveloped potential.

I am the sum total of the choices I have made and I continue to choose daily. What I now put under close scrutiny is the value of each up-coming choice. Therein lies the quality of my future lifestyle.

Will my future belong to the "old me" or the "new me"? The answer depends on my attitude toward personal growth at this very moment. What time is left is all that counts and that remaining time is my responsibility. With a newfound maturity I accept full responsibility for how good I can become at what is most important to me.

With personal growth comes a fear of the unknown and new problems. Those problems are nothing more than the expanding shadow of my personal growth. I now turn my very real fear, with God’s help, into a very real adventure.

My life now expands to meet my newfound destiny. "Old me" meet the "new me."

Copyright 1984

All Heroes Have Heroes

My boss had just told me he was looking for my replacement. I had taken the company’s top office to the bottom of the 36-office chain in the three months I had been the manager.

Learn fast was the answer, but how? No time to join a college management class or try to find one seminar with all the answers. Were there answers around me that I wasn’t aware of? Yes, was the answer. “Don’t sit down in the meadow and wait for the cow to back up and be milked––go after the cow,” was the way a philosopher from a century ago put it. I launched my “cow hunt” by scouring local newspapers and magazines looking for stories of successful business leaders, perhaps someone who started out with nothing or led a turnaround in a company. When such a person was found, I called him or her, told them my failure story and my determination to rebuild and invited them to lunch. My motto was “Take somebody to lunch before somebody else eats yours.” My learning curve and action curves went way up.

With the help of these one-on-one mentor lunches, seminars I attended and books that I devoured we were back up to #1 in 120 days.

Caution: When contentment in the way you’re doing your job sets in, progress stops. Habit’s goal is to freeze you at your current level of competence. Remedy? Keep learning.

Develop a custom designed personal growth curriculum. Begin by asking yourself two very important questions. Be sure to take notes so you can use this as your growth plan.

1. If I could spend ten days on the beach with ten great people that I could REALLY learn from, one person per day (living or dead) whom would I pick?

2. To help me focus my learning, what’s the one thing I find most interesting about each one?

NOTE: The question is not “What’s the one thing they have in common?”

• Remember these are not your ten favorite celebrities but people you can really learn from.

• Take your spouse or a good friend out for dinner and play this two-question exercise. See if you can

guess three of their ten. There’s a great victory if you know three of theirs.

Now start researching on the Internet for each of your ten. Take notes. How about books on your heroes? Maybe documentaries.

Once you’ve learned all you can remove, that name and replace it with another.

If you’re involved in this with someone who knows you well, you’ll find conversations become very interesting as each of you reveal what you’ve learned from the heroes.

There is a legend that “when God was equipping man for his long life journey of exploration, the attendant angel was about to add the gift of contentment and complete satisfaction. The Creator stayed her hand––“No, He said, “If you bestow that upon him you will rob him forever of all joy of self-discovery.”

Higher up and farther on! The best is yet to be!

Danny

Unlocking Your Powerful Creativity

For anything to be truly successful, Walt Disney said, it must have three things, which are a unique factor, a “word of mouth” factor and a flair factor. In other words, do it so different that people will talk about it and, finally, do it big, do it right and give it class.

Creativity means creating new things or arranging old things in a new way. It could mean more than “thinking out of the box.” It could mean tearing “the box” apart.

A short parable, written by George McDermott explains this process.

Creativity Likened Unto a Coffee Bean

One day…a long time ago…in, say, a million B.C. somebody figured out that you could put things in water and boil them, then throw out the water and eat the things.
(Somebody also figured out that that was called cooking, but that’s a minor-league creativity.) Well, Cooking was very nice, but it was still a relatively new invention, and they hadn’t worked all the bugs out yet. For instance; coffee beans, even after people cooked them, still tasted crummy. So everyone gave up on coffee beans…at least until some genius had a flash of inspiration. “Hey, maybe Cooking doesn’t always work the same way, “ he said. “Sure, the beans taste lousy, but we haven’t tried drinking the water we cooked them in.”
If that doesn’t sound like significant genius to you, ask your self these questions: Have you ever-tried eating coffee grounds? Would the taste inspire you to drink the water?

The creative process consists of five steps:
1. Gather raw material, i.e. previous work done by others but given up on.
Talk to others who have solved similar problems. Unleash your curiosity.

2. As these raw material pieces are absorbed, start the “kaleidoscope” process. Turn these pieces over and over in your mind. See how these pieces keep repositioning themselves in relation to the others. Look for the coming together like a jig-saw puzzle.

3. Drop the whole subject. Relax. Put the whole project out of your mind. Don’t worry because your subconscious is effectively working on it, even if you go to sleep.

4. Eureka! Wow! Bingo! The idea appears at the most unexpected time. Say to yourself: “But don’t forget there is a fifth step.”

5. Verification. Is it suitable for the situation? Is it feasible? Will it be acceptable to those who use it? When Thomas Edison’s laboratory team had a break through he always challenged them by saying, “There’s always a better way. Find it.”

The best way to sum this up is with this piece from Apple Computer’s “Think Different” campaign.

Here’s to the crazy ones,
The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently

They’re not fond of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
Disbelieve them, glorify them, or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them

Because they change things,
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

And it’s these people who are crazy enough to think
That they can change the world, and they actually do.

(Used with permission and blessings of Apple Computer Co.)

FEAR VS COURAGE

"Once when Marshall Ney was going into battle, looking down at his knees which were smiting together, he said, 'You may well shake; you would shake worse yet if you knew where I am going to take you.'" Orison Swett Marden

What or who builds self-imposed barriers? A stonemason named Fear, one who is highly skilled in building powerful barriers from nonexistent stones. Where does this craftsman live? In our minds. He's always there, but it's up to us whether he lives in the back of our minds or the front of our minds.
Fear is the sworn enemy of adventure, which is perhaps the most exhilarating force driving no-limits achievement. And Fear goes exactly where we tell him to go.
We move Fear from the back of our minds to the front of our minds by shifting our concentration away from our own courage, and choosing instead to focus on that which frightens us. Not only does that action change Fear's location, but through the process of concentration, it means we actually start to strengthen Fear. Fear has no strength of its own; its only strength is that which we choose to give it.
When Fear defeats us, it does so because of our own mental focus. And unfortunately, the strength we pass along to Fear is the very strength we need to overcome it! If, on the other hand, we choose to push our goals, wrapped in courage, to the forefront of our minds, then barriers break.
You already possess sufficient courage to initiate this process and see your personal adventure through. A person may not be born with an overabundance of talent, but he or she will certainly possess all the courage needed, whether used or unused, to develop the talent that is there. Long after passing on to the next world, we will be remembered by family and friends, not necessarily for our inborn talents, but for the amount of courage we used, especially during our times of trial. The strength and vividness of the memories our loved ones and friends hold of us after we are gone will be directly proportional to the amount of courage we have chosen to use.

Immediate Action: Starve your fear! Feed your courage! Embrace your adventure!

Point to Ponder: "Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered. No one was there." (From above the fireplace at Hinds' Head Hotel, near London.)

Excerpted from Danny's book, "There Are No Limits: Breaking the Barriers to Personal High Performance."

The Courage of a Five Year-Old

Some people are content with just wishing for things hoping that the Fairy Godmother will drop it in their laps but she never does. Then these “wishers” get depressed because once again, the Fairy Godmother has let them down. But it wasn’t her that let them down, was it?

Like me, you’ve probably walked in to a sales office and there’s a salesperson reading the local sports page or perhaps doing something that is really mentally taxing such as playing Solitaire on his computer. Hanging above his desk is a picture of a Rolls Royce.

When I ask him what’s the purpose of the picture, he answers proudly, “That’s my goal!”

At this point I like to ask the “wisher” this question, “What do you have to do extra today to make sure that it is in your driveway someday?” The answer is generally, “I …I don’t know. Somebody just told me to hang that up there and one day it would be in my driveway.”

High achievers know that you have to work hard and smart. You have to step out courageously, with creativity, and perhaps sell others on helping you achieve that important goal.

My Grandson, Rex, was five and in Kindergarten when he was overtaken by a serious case of Spring Fever. He walked in to the kitchen and said to his mother, “Mom, it’s too beautiful a day to go to school. Let’s go to the beach!”

She said, “Look, Rex, I’ve got to go to work and you’ve got to go to school.” The little salesman decided to up the ante. “Then let’s go to Disneyland. Think of the fun we could have there today.”

Frustrated with his persistence she said, firmly, “Rex I’ve got to go to work and you’ve got to go to school.”

Good salespeople hang in there, always ask good questions. He looked up at her and said, “Why?”

She decided to appeal to his sympathies. “If you don’t go to school, they could put me in jail.”

He looked at her for about two seconds, put his hands on his hips, tilted his head and asked, “For how long?”

Rex knew to achieve a goal you have to pay a price. And that’s the same for all of us.

The best is yet to be!

Danny

P.S. Take a look at the "Fearless Leader Kit" on the Home Page of my web site. Scroll down for link to my web site.