Successes build strength and courage to try what is next. There is always success in failure… An idea you tried that didn’t quite pan out, but now you know. The code didn’t work as a product but could be a feature. The process that missed the mark, but exposed the cracks that you never saw before. There is success in everything, if you are willing to look for it.
You can probably do many things – and are great at all of them. It doesn’t mean you should be doing all of them… because you probably don’t have the cycles to do all of them as well as you can if you were focused on just a few. When you look at successful training programs – Salesforce, Google – they break their training down into manageable paths focused on answering the one key question…
If you aren’t contributing to the meeting, you might not need to be there. If the push is to still have you there, that means you are there in a support role to speak up when it comes to needing to hear another voice. But if you’re not even doing that, it means you are there because we don’t trust that you’ll get the information you need to do your job successfully. That’s the problem…
Incremental training investments will ALWAYS beat out the week-long conference, the half-day marathon leadership session, the full-day retreat – those are still good “things” to train at, but they are not the training that will push you forward. Kobe Bryant gives a great talk on this (less than 2 mins). I’m not advocating for getting up at 3am to train, but the message is pure and simple – you put in 30 minutes today, that’s…
Pick a day, any day. Move forward from it. Now when you cycle back to that day (or moment or month or whatever) identify how much you have grown, what you have accomplished, and where you are. Now you have measured your mark (by whatever metrics make sense). Now rinse, repeat and move forward.