Embrace the new frontier

Embrace the new frontier

Fortunately, for all of us, a new frontier is upon us. Because our nation,
and world, has entered the information age, the old patterns for living
are gone.

An article by business writer John Huey appeared in the June 27, 1994
edition of Fortune. In it, Huey observed, "Let's say you're going to a
party, so you pull out some pocket change and buy a little greeting card
that plays 'Happy Birthday' when it's opened. After the party, someone
casually tosses the card into the trash, throwing away more computer
power than existed in the entire world before 1950."

In the old paradigm, forged in the Industrial Age, we human beings
became less and less useful and adventurous. We found lifelong
employment in guaranteed jobs and did our jobs the same way until
retirement. Then, once we reached retirement age, we became
thoroughly useless to society and lived lives dependent
on the government, our relatives, or our own savings that we
accumulated in our "useful" years.
Now, with the technological explosion and entry into the Information
Age, employers are no longer as interested in our job histories as they
used to be. They are now more interested in our current capabilities.
One of the romantic appeals of the early Daniel Boone and Davy
Crockett frontier days in our nation was the usefulness of individuals. If
you were living out on the frontier, farming, cooking, and hunting, and
you turned 65, it would never occur to anyone to ask you to "retire."
We have finally come back to those days of honoring usefulness over
age and status. For example, if my company is trying to enter the
Chinese market to sell its software and you, at age 70, can speak fluent
Chinese, know all about software, and have energy and a zest for
success, how can I afford to ignore you?

Bill Gates of Microsoft has said, "Our company has only one
asset—human imagination." If you took all of Microsoft's buildings, real
estate, office hardware, physical assets—anything you can
touch—away from the company, where would it be? Almost exactly
where it is now. Because in today's world a company's value is in it's
thinking, not in its possessions.

This is great news for the individual—because usefulness is back in
style. If you can cultivate your skills, keep learning new things, study
computers, learn a foreign language, or become expert in a foreign
culture and market—you can make yourself useful.
The great basketball coach John Wooden recommended that we live by
this credo—especially apt for the new technological frontier: "Learn as
if you were to live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow."

Gone are the days when your employability depended primarily on your
job history, your school ties, your connections, your family, or your
seniority. Today your employability depends on one thing—your
current skills. And those skills are completely under your control.
This is the new frontier. And where we once entered retirement age
nervous about the "wolves at our door," today, with a commitment to
lifelong growth through learning, we can be as useful to the world
community as we are motivated to be.
The more we learn about the future, the more motivated we become to
be a valuable part of it.

Keep changing your voice

Keep changing your voice

There have been times when I have been told that I am lucky to have a
good speaking voice. And some people are impressed that I rarely use a
microphone in my seminars, even with hundreds of people in the
audience.

People will conclude that I have been "blessed" with a powerful set of
vocal cords. But it is not true. As I related in an earlier chapter, my voice used to be no better than a feeble monotone. That is, until I got motivated to change it. There were two
instances that inspired my system for developing my voice. The first
was a magazine interview I read many years ago about the actor
Richard Burton (who had perhaps the most mesmerizing speaking voice
of all time—listen to the Broadway recording of "Camelot" and hear
him as King Arthur speak and "sing" his songs.) In the interview, Burton
said that his voice was how he made his living, so he made certain that
each morning while showering he sang a number of songs to keep his
vocal cords strong and supple. Later, on a television talk show, actor
Tony Randall told the host how he developed his trademark sing-song
acting voice: "I took up opera," he said. "I found that singing opera did
more for my stage voice than anything else I ever tried."
Those two interviews have stayed in my mind ever since, and I always
carry a number of tapes and CDs in my car to sing along with. I crank
them up good and loud (this is best done while driving alone) and sing at
the top of my lungs. I make certain that I do this every day, even when I
don't feel like singing. In the words of William James, there's another
benefit: "We don't sing because we're happy, we're happy because we
sing."

Prior to a major public speech, I'll often get to my location more than an
hour ahead of time and then just drive around the neighborhood singing
like a madman. (Sometimes I worry that my host client might drive by
and spot me in my car singing along with Elvis and looking dangerously
psychotic. But the benefits are worth that risk.) I find that when I drive
and sing like that my breathing is better, my timing is better, and when I
speak, my voice effortlessly fills the hall.

You might think, "I don't speak for a living." So such a weird practice
might not be necessary for you. But we all speak. A pleasant, relaxed,
and strong speaking voice is a priceless asset to anyone whose job
involves communicating with other humans.

When referring to people whose speaking voices are pleasing to listen
to, many people use words like "melodious" and "well-modulated." This
is a good hint to tell if someone is complimenting a great speaking voice.
You are not stuck with the voice you have now. Start singing, and soon
you'll be creating the voice you'd like to have. The stronger your voice,
the stronger your confidence and the stronger your confidence, the
easier it is to motivate yourself.

Storm your own brain

Storm your own brain

The term "brainstorming" is now very well known in American business
life.

I first learned it many years ago when I worked as a copywriter in an ad
agency. Whenever we would get a new account our agency's president
would get us all together to "brainstorm" for creative ideas for the
client.

The main rules of the brainstorming session are
1) there are no stupid
ideas—the more unreasonable the better—and
2) everyone must play.

I have sometimes facilitated brainstorming sessions with business
managers. We go around the table and each person puts out an idea and
the facilitator writes it on the flip pad. We go around and around until
all the reasonable ideas are exhausted and the unreasonable ideas start
to flow. It is usually among the unreasonable ideas that something great
is discovered. Brain-storming works so well because the usual restraints
against stupidity are lifted. It's okay to be unreasonable and far out.

What most people in business don't realize is that this powerful
technique can be used by an individual, alone with himself or herself. I
first discovered this while driving in my car a number of years ago
listening to a motivational tape by Earl Nightingale. He talked about a
system he had learned that worked wonders.

On the top of a piece of paper you put a problem you want solved or a
goal you want reached. You then put numbers 1 through 20 on the
paper and begin your brain-storming session. The rules are the same as
with a group session. You have to list 20 ideas, and they don't have to
be well thought out or even reasonable. Give yourself permission to
flow. Your only objective is to have 20 ideas scrawled down within a
certain short amount of time.

If you do this for a week, you will end up with 100 ideas! Are all of
them usable? Of course not, but who cares? When you began the
process you probably didn't have any usable ideas.
I have used this system myself over and over with really great results. It
works so well because it relaxes
the normal tensions against creative, outrageous thinking. It invites the
right side of your brain to play along.

Recently a friend called for some advice about his career. He was in
show business and had developed his act to the point where he was one
of the top performers in the nation. His problem was marketing and
self-promotion. That part of his career was lagging behind his talent.
"What if I told you that there is someone who can give you 100 specific
marketing ideas tailored to your precise career and audience?" I asked
him. He was very interested.

"You, yourself are that person," I said.
I then told him about the list-of-20 self-storming technique I had
personally been using for a number of years. He eagerly jotted down the
rules of the game and got busy playing.
Two weeks later he called me very excited about the results. "I've got
some really great marketing ideas right now, more than I've ever had in
the past," he said. "Thanks."
Self-mentoring is the best mentoring you can get because your mentor
knows you so well. And although it's often beneficial to get specific
outside personal coaching, the best coaching teaches us to look within.
A great mentor once said, "The kingdom of heaven is within you."

Make trouble work for you

Make trouble work for you

One evening, many years ago, my then-14-year-old daughter Stephanie
went for a walk with a friend, promising me she would be back home
before 10 p.m. I didn't pay much attention to the clock until the 10
o'clock news ended and I realized that she hadn't come home yet. I
started to get nervous and irritated. I began pacing the house, wondering
what to do. At 11:30 I got in my car and started cruising the
neighborhood looking for her. My thoughts were understandably
anxious, part fear and part anger. Finally, at 11:45, I drove back past my
own house and saw her silhouette in the window. She was home and
safe.
But I kept driving. I realized that I was thinking completely
pessimistically about the entire incident and I needed to keep thinking
before I talked to her. As I drove along I observed all the pessimism I
was wallowing in: "She doesn't respect me. She can't keep a promise.
My rules and requests mean nothing. This is the tip of the iceberg. I'm
going to have problems with her for the next four years at least. Who
knows where she went and what she was doing? Were drugs involved?
Sex?

Crime? I'm losing sleep over this. This is ruining my peace of mind and
my life. Et cetera."
By recognizing how pessimistic my thoughts were, I was able to let the
thoughts play completely out before taking a deep breath and telling
myself, "Okay. That's one side of the argument. Now it's time to explore
the other side." One of my favorite tricks for flipping my mind over to
the optimistic side is to ask myself the question: "How can I use this?"

How could I use this incident to improve my relationship with my
daughter? How could I make my rules and requests more meaningful to
us both? I began to build my case for optimism. I realized that great
relationships are built by incidents like these. They are not built by
theoretical conversations—but by difficult experiences and what we
learn and gain from them.
So I decided to drive a little while longer and let her wait inside. I was
sure that by now her sister had told her that I was out looking for her, so
she was now the one pacing and anxious. Let her sweat a little, I
thought, while I continue to think things through.

I continued to reflect upon my past relationship with Stephanie. One of
the great aspects of it was Stephanie's honesty. She had always radiated
a quiet and confident kind of serenity about life, and found it easy to be
honest with her own feelings and honest with other people. Whenever
there had been incidents with other children, teachers, or other parents
involved in some misunderstanding, I could always count on Stephanie
to tell me the truth. Asking her about what happened always saved me a
lot of time.

As I drove the dark neighborhood I also ran through my happiest
memories of Stephanie as a little girl, how much I loved her and how
proud I was of her when I

went to her concerts or talked to her teachers. I recalled the time in
grade school when I embarrassed her by asking her principal if he would
consider re-naming the school after her. (She had just won an academic
award of some kind and I was intoxicated with pride.)
Finally my mind was completely won over to the optimistic side. "How
can I use this?" gave me the idea that this incident could be made into
something bigger than it seemed—a new commitment to each other to
keep agreements and trust each other.

When I finally got home I could see that she was scared. She tried to
blame the incident on her not having a watch. She wanted me to
appreciate that, somehow, she was a victim of the whole incident. I
listened patiently and then I told her I thought it was a much bigger deal
than that. I talked about my relationship with her and how I had
cherished her truthfulness throughout her childhood. I told her that I
thought we might have lost all of that tonight. That we might have to
figure a way to start over.

"It's not that big a deal," she protested. But I told her that I thought it
was a very big deal, because it was all about our relationship and
whether we were going to keep agreements with each other.
I told Stephanie I wanted her to be as happy as she could possibly be,
and the only way I could really help that happen would be if we kept
agreements with each other. I told her how scared I was, how angry I
was, how her staying out had ruled out a good night's sleep for me. I
asked her to try to understand. I talked about our life together when she
was a little girl, and I reminded her how extraordinarily truthful she was.
I mentioned a few incidents when she got in trouble but how I had gone
right to her for the truth and always got it.

We talked for a long time that night, and she finally saw that coming
home when she says she's coming home—indeed, doing what she says
she's going to do—is a really "big deal." It's everything.
Since that incident and conversation, Stephanie has been extremely
sensitive to keeping her word. If she goes out and promises to be back
at a certain time, she takes along a watch or makes certain someone
she's with has one. The "incident" that night is something neither of us
will forget, because it got us clear on the idea of trust and agreements.

You could even say that it was a good thing.
We have heard of so many incidents where bad events in retrospect
were strokes of great fortune. A person who broke her leg skiing met a
doctor in the hospital, fell in love, married him, and had a happy
relationship for life. Because most of us have experienced a number of
these incidents, we're aware of the dynamic. What seems bad (like a
broken leg) turns out unexpectedly great. We begin to see the truth that
every problem carries a gift inside it.

By choosing to make use of seemingly bad events, you can access that
gift much sooner. By asking yourself "How can I use this?" or "What
might be good about this?" you can turn your life around on a dime.

Put on a good debate

Put on a good debate

Negative thinking is something we all do. The difference between the
person who is primarily optimistic and the person who is primarily
pessimistic is that the optimist learns to become a good debater. Once
you become thoroughly aware of the effectiveness of optimism in your
life, you can learn to debate your pessimistic thoughts.

The most thorough and useful study I've ever seen on how to do this is
contained in Dr. Martin Seligman's classical work, Learned Optimism.
The studies done by Seligman demonstrate two very profound
revelations: 1) optimism is more effective than pessimism; and 2)
optimism can be learned.

Seligman based his findings on years of statistical research. He studied
professional and amateur athletes, insurance salespeople, and even
politicians running for office. His scientific studies proved that optimists
dramatically outperform pessimists. So what Norman Vincent Peale had
been saying for years in his books on the power of positive thinking was finally proven to be scientifically
true.

Peale had based his books on testimonials and supportive biblical
passages. The problem with that was that the people he needed to reach
the most—skeptics and pessimists—were precisely the kinds of people
who would not be anxious to take anything on faith. But once you've
digested the remarkable writings of Seligman, you can go back and read
Peale with a new sense of excitement. If you don't accept his religious
references, it doesn't matter—the personal testimonials are stimulating
enough to give his writing great power. Although his most famous book
is The Power of Positive Thinking, I have derived much more
motivation from Stay Alive All Your Life and The Amazing Results of
Positive Thinking.
If you are now skeptical about your power to debate your own
pessimistic thoughts, keep in mind that most of us are already great
debaters. If somebody comes in and takes one side of an argument, we
can usually take the other side and make a case, no matter which side
the first person took. Debate teams have to learn to do this. Team
members never know until the last second which side of the argument
they will be debating, so they learn to be prepared to passionately argue
either side.

If you catch yourself brooding, worrying, and thinking pessimistically
about an issue, the first step is to recognize your thoughts as being
pessimistic. Not wrong or untrue—just pessimistic. And if you are going
to get the most out of your bio-computer (the brain), you must
acknowledge that pessimistic thoughts are less effective.
Once you've accepted the pessimistic nature of your thinking, you are
ready to take the next step. (This first step is crucial though. As
Nathaniel Branden teaches,

"You can't leave a place you've never been.") The second step is to
build a case for the optimistic view.


Start to argue against your first line of reasoning. Pretend you're an
attorney whose job is to prove the pessimist in you wrong. Start off on
building your case for what's possible. You'll surprise yourself.

Optimism is by nature expansive—it opens door after door to what's
possible. Pessimism is just the opposite—it is constrictive. It shuts the
door on possibility. If you really want to open up your life and motivate
yourself to succeed, become an optimistic thinker.

Motivation comes from thought.

Keep thinking, keep thinking

Motivation comes from thought.

Every act we take is preceded by a thought that inspires that act. And
when we quit thinking, we lose the motivation to act. We eventually slip
into pessimism, and the pessimism leads to even less thinking. And so it
goes. A downward spiral of negativity and passivity, feeding on itself
like cancer.

I like to use this example in my seminars to illustrate the power of
continuing to think: Let's say a pessimist has made up his mind to clean
his garage on a Saturday morning. He wakes up and walks out to the
garage and opens the door and is shocked to see just how much of a
mess it is. "Forget this!" the pessimist says with disgust. "No one could
clean this garage in one day!"

And at that point the pessimist slams the garage door shut and goes back
inside to do something else. Pessimists are "all-or-nothing" thinkers.
They think in catastrophic absolutes. They are either going to do
something perfectly or not at all.

Now let's look at how the optimist would face the same problem. He
wakes up on the same morning and goes to the same garage and sees the
same mess and even utters the same first words to himself, "Forget this!
No one could clean this garage in one day!"
But this is where the key difference between an optimist and a pessimist
shows itself. Instead of going back into the house, the optimist keeps
thinking.

"Okay, so I can't clean the whole garage," he says. "What could I do
that would make a difference?"

He looks for awhile, and thinks things over. Finally it occurs to him that
he could break the garage down into four sections and do just one
section today.

"For sure I'll do one today," he says, "and even if I only do one section
each Saturday, I'll have the whole garage in great shape before the
month is over."

A month later, you see a pessimist with a filthy garage and an optimist
with a clean garage.
There was a woman in one of my seminars in Las Vegas who told me
that this one concept—the optimist's habit of looking for partial
solutions—had made an interesting difference in her life.
"I used to come home from work and look at my kitchen and just throw
up my hands and curse at it and do nothing at all," she told me. "I'd
think the exact same thing as the pessimist in your garage story. Then I
decided to just pick a small part of the kitchen and do that, and that area
only. It might be a certain counter, or just the sink. By doing just one
small part each night

I never resent the work, it's never overwhelming, and my kitchen
always looks decent."
Pessimists like to set their problems aside. They think so negatively
about "doing the whole thing perfectly" that they end up doing nothing
at all!

The optimist always does a little something. She or he always takes an
action and always feels like progress is being made.
Because pessimists have a habit of thinking "it's hopeless" or "nothing
can be done," they quit thinking too soon. An optimist may have the
same initial negative feelings about a project, but he or she keeps
thinking until smaller possibilities open up. This is why Alan Loy
McGinnis, in his inspiring book The Power of Optimism, refers to
optimists as "tough-minded."

The pessimist, as far as the use of the human mind goes, is a quitter.
Recent studies show, says McGinnis, that optimists "excel in school,
have better health, make more money, establish long and happy
marriages, stay connected to their children and perhaps even live
longer."

To witness one of the most profound illustrations of the practical
effectiveness of optimism in American history, you'll want to rent the
movie, Apollo 13. Although the job of bringing those astronauts back
from the far side of the moon looked daunting and overwhelming, the
job was accomplished one small task at a time. The people at Mission
Control in Houston who saved the astronauts' lives did so because even
in the face of "impossible" technological breakdowns, they kept on
thinking. They never gave up. They looked for partial solutions, and
they declared that they would string these partial


solutions together one at a time until they brought the men home safely.
While the astronauts' lives were still in doubt, there was one glaring
pessimist in Houston ground control who made the comment that he
feared that Apollo 13 might become the "worst space disaster" in
American history. The ground commander in Houston turned to him and
said with optimism and anger, "On the contrary, sir, I see Apollo 13 as
being our finest hour." And he turned out to be right, which illustrates
the life-or-death effectiveness of optimistic thinking.

Whenever you feel pessimistic or overwhelmed, remember to keep
thinking. The more you think about a situation, the more you will see
small opportunities for action—and the more small actions you take, the
more optimistic energy you will receive. An optimist keeps thinking and
self-motivates. A pessimist quits thinking—and then just quits.
In the Broadway musical South Pacific, the heroine sings apologetically
about being a "cock-eyed optimist." She admits she's "immature and
incurably green." This was an early version of a blonde joke. She
confesses, as the giddy song soars melodically, that she's "stuck like a
dope on a thing called hope and I can't get it out of my heart...not this
heart."

That's how our society has viewed optimists—they are dopes. Society
thinks optimistic thinking is something that comes from the heart, not
the head.

Pessimists, on the other hand, are "realistic." In fact, pessimists will
never tell you they are pessimists. In their own minds, they are realists.
And when they run into habitual optimists they sneer at them for always
"blue-skying" everything, and not facing grim reality.
Pessimists continually use their imaginations to visualize worst-case
scenarios, and then concluding that those scenarios are lost causes, they take no action. That's why
pessimism always leads to passivity.

But even lying on his couch, bloated with junk food and foggy from too
much television, the pessimist knows somewhere in his heart that his
"what's the use?" attitude is not effective. He is living a life that is
reflected in what Nietzsche once said: "Everything in the world
displeased me; but what displeased me most was my displeasure with
everything."

Optimists have chosen to make a different use of the human
imagination. They agree with Colin Wilson's point of view that
"imagination should be used, not to escape from reality, but to create
it."

Think outside the box

Think outside the box

Once I attended a new business proposal presentation by Bob Koether,
in which he had his prospective customers all play a little nine-dot game
that illustrated to them that the solutions to puzzles are often simple to
see if we think in unconventional ways.

As people laughed and tore up their puzzles in frustration when Koether
showed them the solution, he stood up to make his final point.

"We restrict our thinking for no good reason," said Koether. "We do
things simply because that's the way we always did them. I want you to
know that our commitment in serving your company is to always look
outside the box for the most innovative solutions possible to our
problems. We'll never do something just because that's the way we have
always done it"

To many business leaders pitching a lucrative account, this kind of
puzzle-solving exercise would simply be considered a clever
presentation. But to Bob Koether, it was a symbolic expression of his
whole life in business.

Once, on a Xerox-sponsored trip in Cancun, Mexico, Bob and Mike
spent the day out in treacherous waters on a fishing boat. After coming
ashore, they retired to Carlos O'Brien's restaurant for tequila and beer
and a period of reflection on their lives in sales thus far.


"We knew that as well as we had done, we would never own boats like
the one we were just in if we remained at Xerox," said Bob. "We talked
about possibilities in the bar, and it wasn't long before we noticed some
black T-shirts on the wall with the word infinity on them. Then, for
more than two hours, Mike and I discussed just what the word infinity
meant. Out of that discussion, a dream was born, a dream that took
shape in the form of Infinity Communications."

Bob Koether and his brother believed that there was one vital area in
which Xerox was underperforming—and that was customer service.
What if, they asked, a company's commitment to the customer was
infinite? Not boxed-in, but unlimited in its possibilities for creative
service?

With that concept as motivation, the two brothers formed "Infincom"
(short for Infinity Communications)
in the state of Arizona, and within 10 years they grew from six
employees and no customers into a $50 million business with more than
500 employees. And for the past three years straight, the Arizona
Business Gazette has ranked Infincom the number-one office equipment
company in Arizona—ahead of Xerox.

All of us tend to look at our challenges from inside a box. We take what
we've done in the past and put it in front of our eyes and then try to
envision what we call "the future." But that restricts our future. With
that restricted view, the best the future can be is a "new and better
past."

Great motivational energy occurs when we get out of the box and
assume that the possibilities for creative ideas are infinite. To realize the
best possible future for yourself, don't look at it through a box
containing your own past.