Next week I’m back in NY, which promises to be a lot of fun. While I’m there I’m going to be giving a presentation to a bunch of account managers on ways to take themselves to the proverbial next level. I started my NY career as an account manager, and the powers that be think I could dispense some valuable wisdom.
I’m going to give it my best shot, but in preparing for the presentation I’ve thought a lot about what I did in that role to stand out. And I’m worried that it has very little to do with saying this or doing that and has a lot more to do with one’s approach to work in the first place.
Ever since I was in high school I observed that there is an enormous gulf between the people who succeed and those who flounder. And the differences have almost nothing to do with intelligence or God-given gifts. I know that trying to compete with the Michael Jordans and the Albert Einsteins of the world would be a fruitless task. But I don’t think I’ve met and Jordans or Einsteins in my life. I have, however, met a bunch of extremely successful people.
I think it has to do with mindset. I think behind it all there exists a desire to be great. And sadly, I don’t think that desire resides as strongly (or at all) in everyone.
I know a guy who manages to juggle (no joke) 300 to-dos simultaneously, managing not just his own projects but those of his entire company. And he does so almost effortlessly. His colleagues consistently wonder how he’s able to do it. They know that he works longer hours than everyone else, but I don’t think that’s the whole story. I really do think he cares more.
I’m married to a girl who is an economist. She almost graduated at the top of her college class, became bilingual, mastered the piano and won a national championship in dance in her spare time. She worked for a consulting company in NY for a year, and when she moved on they told her she was the best accountant they’d ever had. She’s never taken an accounting course in her life.
Granted, she is brilliant – I’m humbled daily when I listen to her talk about her day at work. But she decided long ago she wanted to be the best at everything that she did. More than anyone I’ve ever met, she’s able to set goals and tackle them until she pounds them into submission and comes out on the other side miles ahead of them. That has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with desire.
When I look back at the things I’ve done well, at the areas in life where I’ve succeeded, my smarts weren’t what did it. It was because I was driven. I learned design in college not because I needed it to graduate but because I knew it would make it infinitely easier to create deliverables that myself and my colleagues could be proud of. I spent hours every week at the local Barnes & Noble reading Seth Godin and Tom Peters books, not for a class or an internship (and certainly not to impress the ladies) but because I wanted to know what businesspeople were reading now – not what they learned 10 years ago that just made it into my textbook.
When I was an account manager, everything that is now remembered as being extraordinary was 5% skill and 95% thinking about what would make my client (whether my client was a school or my boss or the head of the company) happy. We started using a phrase back them “deliriously happy” – and as cheesy as it was, I really tried to live it.
I’d love to work for a company or be a part of a team where everyone approached their work with the same intensity. Alas, I’ve never seen it. And coming into this presentation, I’ve not the slightest idea how to infect other people with the desire to not just do a good job or avoid getting fired but to blow their expectations (assigned or self-imposed) out of the water.
I don’t know how to explain why it’s worth it to take that extra 5 minutes to take something from good enough to truly special. I don’t know how to convince people that they’re spending 50 hours a week for the next 40 years of their lives performing a job and they should want nothing more than to look back 40 years from now and say “I did a damn good job.” Even if it’s a simple Excel spreadsheet, or an email to a client.
But that is my task next week. And I’m going to do the best possible job I can. Not because anyone else expects if of me, but because I expect it of myself.
