The Midnight Rides of Paul Revere and William Dawes

On April 18, 1775 a stable boy overheard one British officer say to another something about “hell to pay tomorrow”.  This bit of conversation along with other evidence convinced revolutionaries in Boston that the British were finally about to make their long anticipated move.  It was believed that the British were planning to march on Lexington to arrest John Hancock and Sam Adams and then move on Concord to seize the store of arms that had been collected there by local revolutionaries.

The midnight ride of Paul Revere has become a part of the lexicon of American History.  The British expected little resistance and a swift victory.  Instead, they encountered a strong and organized defense and were soundly defeated.  Although this is an amazing story, it is not a complete one.

That night in 1775, Paul Revere did not set out alone.  He an one other, a local Tanner named William Dawes, set out with the exact same mission and message.  Revere was to take an easterly path north to Lexington and Dawes a westerly path north to Lexington.  They both arrived in Lexington, having delivered their messages but history does not remember William Dawes. He failed.  Despite having delivered the same message as Paul Revere, Dawes was unable to do so in a manner that spread the message in the way Paul Revere had done.  In the wake of Paul Reveres sales blitz from Boston to Lexington, his message spread out behind him like a virus, reaching thousands of people.  Dawes was so unsuccessful that some the towns he visited were later accused of being full of British sympathizers because they did not respond to the defense of Lexington and Concord.

Historians still argue over the reasons for Dawes failure but I believe the answer lies in the difference between the men themselves. I see it as a very simple matter.  I believe that Paul Revere was simply a more energetic, passionate and ultimately, effective salesman.  When you look back at the story of the midnight ride of Paul Revere in this way, it beautifully illustrates that messaging alone does not sell.  If it did, William Dawes would be as famous as Paul Revere, but clearly he is not.

Every day hundreds of thousands of sales reps leave their homes carrying a message.  If you are one of them, I challenge you to ask yourself every morning whether or not you are going to be forgotten like William Dawes or remembered like Paul Revere.  Will you do just enough to get through to the end of the day or will you execute your mission with passion and energy?  The choice, as it always is, is yours alone.

Choose well, be inspired and have a great day.

Hard Work and Enthusiasm

I am not necessarily a huge sports fan but I do enjoy watching sporting events.  I like the notion of competition and what it takes to be competitive at the highest level in a sport.  What is it that some teams have found that others have not, that makes them so consistently the best?  Some teams always seem to win while others just seem to find the magic formula for success to be too elusive.  I began to wonder about this and to think about coaches. I asked myself what seemed like a simple question. Who would win more often, a team with great talent and a mediocre coach or a team with mediocre talent and a great coach?

Despite the considerable amount of time I spent surfing with my good friend Mr. Google, I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer to this question. However, when I came across the name of John Wooden, I realized that I had found the inspiration for today’s Monday Morning Motivational Minute.

John Wooden was born on October 14, 1910 and died June 4, 2010.  He is one of only three men to be inducted into the basketball hall of fame both as a player and as a coach.  In 1948 he took a loosing UCLA program and immediately turned it around, eventually winning ten NCAA national championships over a 12 year period, seven of them in a row.  Within this period, his teams won a record 88 consecutive games and he was named National Coach of the year six times.

What struck me the most was not so much his winning record, which was certainly impressive, but the tremendous adoration and respect so many people both inside and outside of basketball felt for him.  He earned this respect because of who he was and what he believed in.  He thoroughly lived by his beliefs, and applying them in his life made him the success he was both professionally and interpersonally.  Lucky for us…  He wrote them down.

The John Wooden Pyramid of Success consists of 15 beliefs or building blocks upon which success is built.  Said differently, these are 15 beliefs that, if lived by, provide the structure upon which your own personal success can be achieved.  We don’t have time to cover all 15 building blocks so I will explain two of them. 

John felt that two of his building blocks were the cornerstones of the pyramid.  These were the strong foundation, the strength of which the other ideas must necessarily rest and depend upon.  He believed them to be, indispensably, the most critical components of success. 

They are hard work and enthusiasm.

Tiger Woods, Payton Manning, Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong are just a few individuals legendary for their commitment to hard work.  Legendary coaches like Vince Lombardi, Phil “The Zen Master” Jackson, Red Auerbach, Scotty Bowman and of course, John Wooden himself, all know there is no substitute. 

To John, enthusiasm means your heart is in your work.  Without it, you simply can not work to your fullest potential and perform at your highest level.  Separately, hard work and enthusiasm are powerful tools for success but together, they become an amazingly unimaginable force.

This is so important now, considering the difficulties many Americans face with the struggling economy. Despite the assurances by our leaders, and those hoping to be leaders, that they know exactly how to fix things if we just vote for them, many of us still have uncertainty regarding our future. But whether we want to hear this message or not, the simple truth is that the foundation of our individual success isn’t built on external circumstances.  It is built upon the two things over which we each have complete and absolute control. 

We can choose how hard we work and we can choose whether or not to be enthusiastic about it.

So, choose well, be inspired and have a great day.

Here be Dragons

This is a story about two young men, Alex and Bret Harris, twins, who, at the ripe old age of 16 achieved national recognition because of their movement to encourage teens to rebel against the modern teen culture of low expectations.  They started a simple blog and called their movement a “rebelution” spelled r.e.b.e.l. By the age of 18, they had launched their own website and their movement very quickly went worldwide.

At a time when most teenage blogs were and are little more than schoolyard gossip columns, these boys were talking about changing the world.  Most amazing was how they planned on doing so.  Their plan was wonderfully elegant in its simplicity.  They would change the world by changing themselves. They would become the best that they could be and invite the rest of the world to join them. They would… “Do Hard Things”.  This became their mantra and the title of their book.

If you were to ask them, they would be the first to tell you that they are not particularly more brilliant than other teens.  They have just committed to doing hard things, and their accomplishments represent the result of that simple commitment. Before their 19^th birthday, they had already become legal interns with the Alabama state supreme court and had been responsible for managing scores of grass roots volunteers in a statewide political campaign.

Stepping outside of their comfort zone, that comforting day to day rut of daily activities was the first and most important step. 

Taking those steps were no easier for them than they are for any of the rest of us, for a variety of reasons.  They challenge us because they are unfamiliar and are often frightening.  But when taken, they often become some of our proudest memories.  In any event, they always end up growing the scope and size of our comfort zone for the future.

Bret and Alex took that scary step into the unknown part of the map, at the very edge, where early cartographers wrote things like “here be monsters, here be flaming scorpions and here be dragons”.  This is the place of fear where failure, shame, embarrassment and discomfort lurk.  It is also the place where you find fulfillment, true accomplishment, pride and personal transformation.

It is truly embarrassing and very humbling to be reminded of that by a pair of 16 year olds.  It is a lesson I need to remember, whether it be in my personal endeavors or professional.  Whether regarding major life decisions or simple ones like the way to ask a customer for the business. Do our actions brighten our small corner of the world or darken it?

Modern culture seems to have accepted a scaled down version of how “your best effort” is defined.  Just think about the phrase, “Hey, I did my best”.  When you think about it, it is really more likely to mean “Hey, I gave it a shot. Oh well”.  Maybe my professional colleagues and I, as self–motivated sales reps, are better at this than most people but who knows.  Have all too many of us accepted a scaled down version of “our best effort”?   In the privacy of our own thoughts, only we know the honest answer to that question for ourselves.  Is our best, our best or is it just good enough to meet the basic expectations others require of us?  Society is perfectly happy with you if you meet expectations.  The real question you should ask yourselves is if you are happy with you!

So the message, as I see it, is to step off the map and visit the place where the scary dragons live, and do hard things.  It just may transform your life. 

Thank you everyone. Be inspired and have a great week.

Practice Makes Perfect

Breathing life into today’s motivational minute was a bit of a struggle owing to the difficulty I encountered while attempting to locate my muse. Although I thoroughly enjoy writing these every week, sometimes inspiration can prove to be rather elusive.  When I finally found what I had been looking for, that is to say, when I found my muse, I discovered her curled up among my CDs listening to the Beatles.

If you have ever been told, or have ever told anyone that practice makes perfect, I hope this story will help you understand that you don’t know the half of it until you know the story of the Beatles.

The Beatles arrived in the US in February of 1964 and started what was to be called the “British Invasion” and transformed the face of popular music in America. That is the part most everyone already knows.  The remainder of the story is less well known.

By the time of their arrival in 1964 the Beatles had already been together since 1957.  In 1960 they were still a struggling high school rock band, but they were able to take advantage of a very fortuitous yet unglamorous opportunity.  A strip club owner in Hamburg, Germany named Bruno had a unique idea.  His idea was to bring in cheap, unknown bands to play in his clubs and offer non-stop, live music all day long.  As chance would have it, he came to Liverpool looking for talent and met a local entrepreneur who agreed to find bands for him.  Being fortunate to both live in Liverpool, and to be known to this entrepreneur, the Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg.  They played not only for Bruno but when other strip clubs started copying Bruno’s very successful idea, they played for them as well.  The pay was awful and the audiences were understandably unappreciative.  The only thing these clubs really offered the young band was time, lots and lots of playing time.

Sometimes they would play for 8 hours straight.  They would do this 7 days a week while in Hamburg.  Between 1960 and the end of 1962, the Beatles traveled to Hamburg five times.  On the first trip they played 106 nights for at least five or more hours a night. On the second trip they played 92 times and they played 48 times on the third trip for a total of 172 hours on stage.  The last two trips in 1962 involved another 90 hours of performing.  They played a total of 270 nights in just under a year and a half.  By the time they had their first real success with Sergeant Pepper and the White Album (yes album); they had performed live on stage, in one venue or another, an estimated 1200 times.  That was nothing short of extraordinary.  Most bands then and now never even perform 1200 times in their entire careers.

According to Phillip Norman, the author of the Beatles biography, Shout, “They were no good on stage when they first went to Hamburg and they were very good when they came back”.

They learned stamina, discipline and hundreds of title tracks from all genres of music which they played along with all of their own original material.  By the time these “kids” from Liverpool came to America, they were quite possibly the most experienced stage performing musicians the music world had ever seen, or likely ever will again. 

What I like about this story is that the “secret” to their success isn’t even a secret.  It is the simplest thing in the world, practice, practice, practice.  It’s also a message that is so universally adaptable to any of our lives endeavors.

Be inspired, practice more and have a great week.