Once you say, I want to accomplish, achieve, succeed at, or attain this, whatever this is. You then need to go look for the greatest example to the this. Then you need to actually do the homework to understand what allowed the this to succeed.
So if it’s owning your own business. If it’s having the highest sales within your department. If it’s ascending in a corporate environment faster, and bigger, and better than anyone else by creating substantive value for the organization. All these things start with a higher level of awareness. So the word I would use would be awareness.
And the awareness is, what do I want to be doing in 10 years from now? Who do I want to be like? What do I want my quality of life to be personally, professionally, and financially? Then you have to go out and find those examples. And that becomes your intentionality.
It’s OK to show up at work every day as an intern. If you know that you want to be a VP one day and you start spending your time not just doing the work in front of you, but by spending time studying those who have what you want, all of a sudden your work becomes a lot more intentional. And who wants to work without intentionality? Without purpose? Without meaning?
It’s easy to study examples of people who have ascended inside an organization from an intern to a VP. They likely rose to that position by having these characteristics: by being dependable, by being accurate, by being timely, by being articulate. So if those are the characteristics of the person you want to be like in your future, then you have to become intentional about being that way today.
And even as a receptionist: if the “only” thing you’re doing is answering the phone, you have to be so intentional about doing those things methodically and making yourself available and friendly to the people that you want to ingratiate yourself too so that they recognize you. And then you want to be able to overachieve so they say, “man, I hired this person to do something as simple as answer the phones for our organization. And they do such an amazing job at that but they’re also doing 10 things that we didn’t hire them to do because they’re asking people, ‘Can I help you? Can I help you?'”
Imagine for a second that you came into work on a weekend, and this has happened inside of Audigy many times, because there is a critical project that needs to get done with a tight deadline.
And imagine walking in and having the person answering the phones working with your executive team on an elite project. Your first thought might be, “Why is this person here?” right? So you go ask a couple of people and they say, well, she heard that we’re going to have to work over the weekend. And one of the things she heard is that we needed to really be able to, in real time, build presentations to support the data we’re putting together.
And unbeknownst to any of us, this individual has been putting themselves through school for the last nine months building those unique presentations so they offered to come in and help. All of a sudden the receptionists whose job was to “just” answer the phones, is now sitting at the table with an executive team that need her exact skill set.
So I think my advice to anybody that’s thinking about excelling in doing anything, is first understanding, at least minimally, what you want to accomplish over what period of time. Goal setting is very important. Then modeling your behavior and your contribution after someone who’s been a high-impact player and attained what it is you’re trying to attain. Whatever that is. Then having the discipline, the grace, to ingratiate yourself to others to want to work with you, want to develop with you, and want to teach you because you make yourself available and you make yourself front and center to support them in whatever they’re doing.
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