THE PLAY OF THE WEEK
There was a time when I read five or six business books a month. I sounded really smart in conversations, but I didn’t really execute. I could be smart and broke, or I could actually start to apply what I learned.
About 12 years ago, I got a contract to do eight keynotes called “Four Steps to Success.” After my seventh presentation, one of my mentors saw it and I asked him what he thought.
“It was okay,” he said. “All of the stories you talked about were from other people’s lives. All of the quotes were from other people’s lives. Anybody could have done that presentation.”
Then he said something that changed everything: “Tell your own story. Live your own life. Earn the lessons. You can’t just quote from a book.”
The lessons are in the doing. It’s the person that’s actually in the arena, on the field of play, taking those hits that has the right to tell those stories.
That’s the difference between being earned and learned. Anybody can quote from a book. Tell your own stories.
GET ON THE ICE
Ready to discover your earned stories? Here’s a four-step exercise:
Step 1: Take out index cards or cut paper into four pieces. For every decade of your life, write down one or two stories that had an impact on you.
Step 2: Put those cards on the floor or your desk and look at them. Really look at them. Start to relive some of those memories and what you’ve learned from those stories.
Step 3: If you were going to tell your life story in five stories, which five stories from the cards would you pick?
Step 4: What is the one lesson from each story?
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”
― Theodore Roosevelt