Success Comes to Those Who are Prepared

 Transcript: Success Comes to Those Who are Prepared

Hello everyone, I’m glad you’re with me today.   I’m going to be talking about this topic: Success comes to those who are prepared.

Now you might be thinking that “Gee, that seems kind of obvious. Of course success comes to those who are prepared.” But I think it’s an important topic for us to talk about and to examine together.

I want to start with a story to get you thinking. Have you ever scheduled a very important meeting with someone, and before you go to that meeting you’ve sent the other party information they had requested and you had expected them to review.  You were going to have the meeting so that you could review the material.

This has happened to me quite a few times.   I sent information to people that they had requested.  They had also requested the meeting.   I go into the meeting and the very first thing out of that person’s mouth is an apology for not being prepared.  They’ll say something like, “Well gee, I’m so sorry.  I meant to review all that material but things came up.   I’ve been busy.  I didn’t have a chance to review it but I’m hoping that today we can review it together.”

I’ll bet that very thing has happened to you either inside your company or outside your company, and I just want to ask you a question – if that happens to you, how do you feel?  Do you feel a little irritated?  I know I did.  I also wondered why we were even meeting.  What was the point?  If you’re not prepared than why are we even discussing anything today?  It seemed obvious it wasn’t a high enough priority.

Social convention prevents us from telling people what we really feel and we do our best to move through the meeting and try to make the best out of a bad situation.  But over a period of time with that type of behavior something happens, even if we save that particular meeting.  If this is a person we deal with regularly, I promise you, we begin to lose respect for that person because they aren’t prepared.

They showed they didn’t care enough about us to be prepared.

And yet so many leaders and managers are doing this very thing to their employees.  They request one-on-ones, don’t keep the one-on-one, and then tell the employee they’re not happy with their performance when they finally meet with them.  I’ve seen this personally, and it is so frustrating when I see people who are not prepared for interactions with their team.  Their credibility is blown right out of the water.

That’s one example of being prepared — when you go to a meeting that someone requested and they aren’t ready.

Here is another situation I often see.  Have you ever gotten a call from your boss while you were on vacation?  Let’s say you’re on vacation and your boss calls and asks you to do something that is your normal responsibility.   You have been asked to do it because the boss didn’t plan for anybody else to cover that responsibility while you were out of the office.

You being the great employee that you are stop whatever you are doing on your vacation and you take care of that issue.  Does that make you feel like your boss really cares about you?  Well, most of us wouldn’t think that is a lack of preparation, but of course it’s a lack of preparation by the manager because they didn’t look far enough ahead and say, “Hey, I gave Steve vacation for two weeks. He planned this four months ago. It’s been on the schedule for months. I’ve got to make sure I’ve got everything covered so that we don’t bother Steve on his vacation.”

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a boss or manager that would do something like that instead of making an emergency call when you’re supposed to be on vacation?   Of course, you don’t mind doing your job when you’re there, but it totally destroys the momentum of your vacation.  Unfortunately, many managers are doing that very thing – they’re interrupting the weekends of their employees, and they’re interrupting their nights because they are not prepared. They haven’t followed a plan for the day, the week, or to cover special events such as a vacation.

Bad things begin to happen.   I don’t understand why this seems to be so difficult for people, yet manager after manager – even senior leaders who should have known better – still don’t have a plan.  This isn’t happening only to entry level managers who have only been managing for six months and don’t know any better.

They’re not planning for success.  And believe me, you have a plan whether you know it or not, and that is a plan to fail.

Successful people are prepared.  They get ready to do things.  The reality is that I couldn’t speak to you today unless I prepared myself to speak about this topic.  It would come across as completely disjointed, and I don’t want that. I want to prepare for it.  I want you to get the point.  I want you to understand that success means preparation.  It means getting ready.  It means anticipating what needs to be done.
Now here’s another scenario I see happening all the time, and I’ll bet you’ve seen it too.  The press will do a story about a person saying, “They were an overnight success.”   When you start digging into that so-called overnight success you realize that person had been preparing for years for the success they had.  Yet the world just seemed to find out about them overnight. In other words they were discovered overnight but the real preparation for that success started many months and years ahead of the world discovering how great they are.

The reality is we all know this. We know that success means we have to prepare.  So the real question today is if we know it, why don’t we do it?  Here’s the answer that I usually get: “I’m too busy. I’m just too busy.”

When people tell me they’re too busy I tell them, “You know, the real problem is you don’t know what your priorities are. You haven’t established priorities. You’ve let business replace priorities.”

So that’s the first reason people will say: “I’m not prepared because I’m just too busy. I can’t get it all done.”  Well guess what?  Nobody can get it all done. So that’s not a valid excuse.

The second reason that people will give me is that they are too disorganized. They don’t have the organization skills that other people do.  If you’re a manager and you’re in charge of people, let me just suggest that you cannot use disorganization as an excuse.  It’s not the company’s fault that you are disorganized.  It’s your fault if it’s affecting your team.

You can’t shift blame to somebody else if you’re disorganized. Organization is your responsibility.  So the second reason I get, “too disorganized,” is not really a reason either.

The third excuse that I get for not being prepared is that people will say, “That’s not really my responsibility and I don’t care what that person thinks.”  Well, I it goes without saying that’s not an excuse.  That is just a manager that is well on their way to failure.  They won’t be a manager or a leader for very long.  They’ll be out the door.

None of those excuses are really what’s happening.

What I want to suggest to you is that the lack of preparation really is much simpler than what people believe.  I believe it’s because being prepared is easy to do, and it’s easy not to do.  In other words, it doesn’t take long to be prepared.  It doesn’t even take much effort to be prepared.  So we can’t say it takes a lot of time.

But here is what’s happening – nobody is forcing you to be prepared.  Preparation is a desire that comes from within. It’s something you have to do because you are personally motivated to do it.   It is your own action that requires you to be prepared.

Preparation is usually very easy.  It’s simple. It takes a little bit of time.  When you’re not under the pressure to do it now, it’s actually so easy that it flows.  It’s simple, and it feels good to be prepared.

But because there’s no pressure, it’s also easy not to do. And so it’s easy to let other things take the place of preparation and we simply don’t do it.  I’ll bet that you’re shaking your head right now saying, “Yeah, I get it.  Preparation is easy to do but it’s easy not to do, too.”

We develop bad habits over our lifetime and we don’t understand where those habits reside or that they’re even becoming a habit.  The purpose of this podcast is that I want to make sure you improve each and every day.  I want you to be successful so I want to recommend a book to you.  If you haven’t read this book you absolutely have to make it a must-read and you have to get started as soon as possible.

The name of the book is The Slight Edge and it’s written by Jeff Olson, easily available on Amazon.  And the whole premise of the book is that most everything in life is easy to do, but it’s easy not to do, too.  Not just management, not just work, not just our home life, not just our finances, but everything – everything we do in life is easy to do and it’s easy not to do.

Those people that are the most successful have made the ‘easy to do’ a priority and they do it.  That’s where success originated.  It’s doing good things, doing them well and doing them quickly.  If it’s easy to do, why delay it? Why not just do it?

That’s always been my philosophy, whether or not it’s doing my chores at home or doing my work.  If something’s easy to do, I simply do it.   I don’t think about it.   I don’t make a big deal out of it.   I make it a priority to do those easy things.   It’s amazing how many things you can get done in a day if everything you do, you feel like, “Well, that’s easy, that’s easy…..”  You begin to feel that most everything is easy.  It’s not hard, it just takes effort.

Easy to do, easy not to do can become an important part of what you should be doing to be successful.   I promise you it’s one of the great characteristics of great leaders.  The great Zig Ziglar said, “Good habits are difficult to acquire but they’re easy to live with.” He also said, “Bad habits are easy to acquire but difficult to live with.”

So many of us are struggling in management simply because we have acquired a lot of bad habits and now we find them really difficult to live with.  So my advice today if you want to be a success in management, a success in your career, make all of the money that you want and get those extra promotions is that you need to take Zig’s advice.

Begin to understand that good habits are difficult to acquire but they’re easy to live with.   Start developing those good habits.  It may be difficult to acquire them but they are nice to live with.  Good habits allow you to accomplish your goals.  You become a person that people begin to look up to.

Ultimately, if you’re in management, your goal should to want to be the leader that others want to follow.

Thank you for joining me today.  Here’s to your Success and Preparation!