Dan Waldschmidt's Blog, page 46

Where You End Up.

Now is the time to take that risk.

Now is the time to move — to step out of your comfort zone.

Now is the time to do that thing you’ve always wanted to do. Now is the time to make your dream a reality.

Now is the time for you to break free of the emotions that hold you back from greatness.

Now is the time for you to repair the relationships with loved ones that are invaluable to your soul.

Now is the time to stand up for something — to step out and change the world.

Today. Right now. This moment.

While you still have time and energy, dreams, ambition, and drive.

Stop making excuses. Stop wishing your life would be any easier.

Stop telling people what you think would be “nice to have”.

Stop letting fear stop you from a relentless pursuit of greatness.

You’re already behind.

That’s not your excuse to quit.

It’s your reason to get up earlier, stay up later, work harder, take more risks, and start living life the way you’ve always wanted to.

Now is your time. Right now. Right here. This moment is all you have. It’s all you are guaranteed.

Will you make the choice to become the person of your dreams or will you be in the exact same place when the sun rises tomorrow?

The post Where You End Up. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

One Small Idea For Getting Bigger Results.

Make a list. Write it down. Type it. Dictate it.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to remember it.

Innovation can come from the most unlikely of observations. Breakthrough often comes when you’re least prepared to consider it.

Which means you need to get in the practice of writing down your thoughts.

Write down what needs to be done.

The busier you are, the better you need to be with using smart tools to get the ideas out of your head into a platform that can remind you what is important and when to do it.

If you’ve ever found yourself forgetting a great idea, forgetting to follow up on a relationship, or forgetting what else needs to be done, then you already know the guilty feeling of not performing at an elite level.

You’re know you’re not as productive and powerful as you could be.

If you want to make the most out of each day and create a life of success and satisfaction then you need to take steps right now to improve how you remember.

You have to write it down.

Here are a few of our favorite tools to help you do just that. Find one that works for you. Stick with it even feels though it is uncomfortable at first.

Todoist [link] — has 19 different platforms to accommodate whatever technology you are currently using
Evernote [link] — is the best combination of note taking, presentations, and writing down tasks anywhere
Wunderlist [link] — has the best looking, smoothest platform for storing and sharing  what needs to be done
Pocket Calendar [link] — be inspired every time you pull it out of your pocket to write down something awesome

Here are a few rules you should follow, even if you choose a different tool or process:

Must have a great, easy-to-use mobile app to use on your smart phone.
Must have a application that works on the web or on a desktop computer and syncs to the mobile app in real time.
Must be able to record ideas and store content even when you don’t have internet access.
Must be able to share selectively with others when an opportunity demands collaboration.

Don’t lose your best ideas because you’re stuck in a meeting or jammed up with nonstop conference calls.

Write it down. Anywhere you are.

Remember better. Win more.

The post One Small Idea For Getting Bigger Results.  appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

What Really Scares You And Why You Should Do It.

“You need to do what scares you.” You have heard that before.

It’s an easy-to-throw-around motivational phrase — if it’s scary, it must be good. If it’s scary, it must be something you need in your life.

It’s that missing thing. That radical idea that will propel you past the obstacles in your way towards success.

If you just do what scares you, you’ll fix your money problems and your business problems, be more happy, healthy, and inspired.

It often seems like the scary thing is a quick fix.

A last ditch, radical turn-around to whatever problem seems insurmountable at the time.

But that’s not what really scares you.

Do you know what really scares you? To believe in yourself enough to keep working towards getting to where you want to be even when it seems like your day-to-day efforts aren’t moving you forward.
Do you know what really scares you? To avoid running after quick fixes and easy alternatives to solving your problem and just do the hard work each day that getting out of trouble demands.
Do you know what really scares you? To master the details. To agonize over ways to be more effective. To use tools and friends to keep you accountable. To trade the pleasure of entertainment for reading and learning.

It’s scary to do what is necessary.

What is truly frightening is to choose to do what appears to be mundane and necessary over trendy, fast, or easy get-rich-quick schemes.

That should really scare you.  That you end up a failure.

It’s scary to try hard and see not enough results. It’s scary run out of money before you’re ready. It’s scary to believe in something bigger than yourself.

But what if the really scary thing is the easiest thing? To keep trying. 

Do that.

The post What Really Scares You And Why You Should Do It.  appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

9 Surprising Lessons You Can Learn From Winners.

Winners refuse to go through the motions on anything they’re doing right now that isn’t helping them get to where they want to be. When you realize something is a waste of time cut it off completely, immediately.
Winners expect a lot from themselves and are careful to put only the best fuel into their bodies. Go home and throw in your trash can all the unhealthy, sugary food that makes you think slow and act sluggishly.
Winners are determined to protect their focus and motivation at any cost. Tell the negative people and judgmental friends in your life that you just can’t spend any more time with them. They’re literally killing you.
Winners live financially fit even when it doesn’t seem like they need to. Cut all extra expenses out of your budget. No more eating out, “treating” yourself, or spending money on anything other than getting to where you want to be.
Winners are careful where they invest their emotions, their time, and their talents. Quit being involved in any committees, groups, or gatherings where you don’t feel like what you are doing is big enough to change the world.
Winners go out of their way to give generously of their wealth and experience to those who need a helping hand. Give away your “rainy day” fund to a cause that deeply moves your soul. Keep giving even when it feels like a foolish decision.
Winners refuse to hold grudges or to live with regrets. Take dramatic and consistent effort to rebuild the relationships you’ve allowed to fall apart.  Start with an apology. Continue with sincerity.
Winners do meaningful work of their own choosing. Get belligerent about developing a successful career. Quit a lousy job. Fire a lousy boss. Move to a place where there’s more opportunity.
Winners are consistent about feeding their creativity, even when there isn’t enough time for it.  Deliberately lose sleep each day and switch your priorities to gain extra time to devote to reading, learning, and practicing what makes you awesome.

The post 9 Surprising Lessons You Can Learn From Winners. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

If It’s Easy, You’re Losing.

Avoid the easy path.

It’s already crowded with everyone else hoping to achieve success by doing what comes without an extraordinary investment of effort, emotion, and personal investment.

By the way, the quick idea or sure thing isn’t new to you.

You’re not the only one who’s looking for a break in the battle.

You’re not the only one needing a change of pace from the buffeting storms surrounding your quest for greatness.

You gain nothing by choosing the easy option. No new experience. No new skills. No new opportunity to surprise yourself with the greatness already inside you.

The only thing the easy path offers is completion. An end.

Whatever you have to do can be done more quickly if you do it the easy way. It’s done. Over. Completed.

Yet you are the one who’s lost out.

It is you who has failed.

You won’t build a better company pursuing the easy path. You might lose top talent along the way.
You won’t get rich pursuing the easy path. You might go to jail though.
You won’t build stronger relationships, lead better, or uncover the genius of your creativity pursuing the easy path. It’s impossible.

Whenever you’re facing what seems like a complex decisions in the middle of chaos and stress, ask yourself: “Do I want to be better or do I just want what comes next to be easy?” 

The post If It’s Easy, You’re Losing. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

Why It’s Stupid To Rank Employees.

You don’t rank employees. You rank winners.

Every podium stand only has three levels, third place, second place, and the overall winner.

Unless you’re building a company with just three employees it’s a waste of your time and horribly counterproductive to review your employees by ranking them.

Review them. And do it regularly. Rate them. And teach them how to improve.

But ranking employees is a clear sign of poor leadership.

To systematically pit employees against each other in order to place higher than the rest of the team they work with just shows that you don’t understand the concept of high-performance.

The best teams are made of specialists with complimenting talents — not redundant competitive abilities.

Ranking the members of a great team is as stupid as deciding which body part you don’t need anymore.

Maybe having two arms does take up a little more space. Or maybe you’ll just find that you’re not as efficient and effective without all the right pieces in place.

Might look smart on paper. But flat out stupid when you actually do it.

Like most business challenges, the idea of performance and raking your employees is a complex one — usually born out of good intentions to grow and build a more valuable company.

Here are the non-negotiable basics of long term business success:

Bad employees need to go — quickly.
Good employees need to be challenged to exceed expectations.

Momentum gets broken when you stop rewarding good teams and only punish lower ranked individuals.

Great teams always beat great individual effort. Every time.

By the way, your ranking doesn’t make you better forever anyways. Just the first few times you do it.

Whether it’s Amazon or GE or myriad Wall Street banks, the result is a short-lived boost of effort with a long term downward spiral towards all the worst parts of human nature you find deplorable.

It’s your behavior right now as a leader that will create that sickening situation.

Change it now while you can. Hire better. Inspire better. Fire faster.

Not because of rank, but because you’re committed to a cause and focused on greatness.

Anything else is just stupid.

The post Why It’s Stupid To Rank Employees.  appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

You Should Take It Personally.

“It’s just business – not personal.”  

“We had to make a decision. Don’t take it personally.”

Ever heard that before? Ever been told that you shouldn’t get upset over a disappointing decision because it wasn’t “personal”?

Somehow you’re overreacting. Overly emotional. Broken. Flawed. Wasting your time on hurt feelings and righteous outrage.

You’re supposed to get over it.

Maybe that’s where you went wrong in the past.

You got over it a little too quickly. You dried your tears too quickly. You moved on to the next thing too quickly.

And wasted the rage burning inside you.

Passion and longevity are invaluable commodities you need in the battle ahead.

You’re going to get beat down and bullied.

You’re going to face some of the darkest moments of your life as you progress from where you are right now to where you eventually want to be.

You’re going to face rejection and bigotry.

Failure, deceit, and people who break the rules just to keep you down.

In the fog of the battle it’s easy to go through the day with a stunned expression on your face – a fatalistic sense that no matter what you do it’s never going to get any better.

Your legs drive you forward but your heart is mired in depression. You’ve already quit. Given up long ago.

Stop pretending like your battle wounds don’t hurt. Stop pretending that things will get better if you just endure the assault. Stop going through the motions and start fighting for your future.

Success is personal. Leadership is personal. Rejection is personal. Winning and losing are personal.

Your life is personal. Every part of it.

It’s time you channel your rage into disruption:

Do something different today than you’ve never done in the past.  Deliberately take risks and do things that scare you.
Challenge your fears with boldness – even if it costs you something you think you need (like a job or relationship).
Take quiet time to meditate on where you are at. Be brutally honest about your attitude, aptitude, and abilities.
Smile at your critics. Laugh at the cynics, skeptics, and creeps. Do it instead of crying when no one can see you.

Take back control – at work, school, church, and home.

Anywhere you are. Anything you do. Take it personally.

The post You Should Take It Personally. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

A Better Idea Is A Waste Of Your Time.

It doesn’t matter what ideas you have. Everyone has ideas. Everyone.

That guy you think is really brilliant, he has ideas. That guy you can’t stand, he has ideas too.

The crazy thing about ideas is that they don’t really matter.

You think they do.

In fact, you’ll spend a lot of time agonizing about a better idea when you think you need one.

You’ll do things you don’t normally do just to try to figure out what you haven’t been able to figure out so far.

All too late you realize that your idea doesn’t really matter.

A better idea isn’t really any better than any other idea.

What matters is your ability to execute an idea.

Horrible ideas yield tremendous success when executed with determination and finesse. Great ideas flounder and fail when not given the attention and focus necessary to drive results.

It’s not the idea that matters. It’s your willingness to do whatever it takes to consistently develop and execute that idea.

Stop agonizing over a smarter way to work. Stop wasting business cycles trying to find that one grand idea that will propel you into everlasting infamy.

Dedicate yourself to something.

Do the hard things that success demands. Keep doing those things. Day after day after day until you get to where you want to be.

While everyone else is prognosticating about what they’re going to do, you’ll have already done something awesome.

That’s actually what you wanted to do in the first place anyways, isn’t it?

The post A Better Idea Is A Waste Of Your Time.  appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

Your Leadership Strategy Sucks.

Most businesses that fail do so because the leaders running them don’t create a culture of awesomeness.

In other words, their leadership strategy sucks. And it cripples everything that they do.

Business culture is a curious thing. You have one whether you realize what it is or not.

And if you’re not focused and clear about the culture you are working to cultivate in your business, you’re going to end up fostering an environment that talented high performers want nothing to do with.

Awesome people will stay away. Good people will leave. Selfish, passive aggressive people will take over.

Eventually, you’ll destroy yourself from the inside out.

The sad truth about culture is that many leaders only change when money is involved.

You’re losing money, not making enough money, or looking to grow sales radically — those are the times where business leaders most often stop and think about the environment they’re creating.

And it’s usually too late to drive the immediate change leaders what.

Culture is a massive ecosystem full of seasons, storms, and heroes.

Just because you need to make more money right now doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to bend the laws of nature to your will. That’s not how culture works.

That’s not how inspired employees work.

Frankly, you’ll never drive massive amounts of new revenue if you’re not focused on creating a high impact, inspired workplace.

Before you create revenue, you have to create motivation and a reason to fight.

Making money or earning another bonus isn’t a big enough reason for employees to stay inspired and captivated by your company mission.

Stop trying to “create a culture” and instead build an environment where hard-working people who exceed expectations feel loved and appreciated.

It’s really comes down to doing a few things.

Spend time not just on doing better but on being better.
Fire negative people and destroy passive aggressive activity wherever you find it in your organization.
Apologize when you do something wrong and be clear with everyone around you about your expectations for them.

Don’t just do these things one time on one day in one month where you suddenly realize that your revenue goals are tremendously off the mark.

Do these things every day.

Preach them. Teach them. Reward them. Protect them.

Don’t expect anything to change overnight. But stay at it.

Looking back though you realize your growth was a result of creating an awesome place to work at it — not because you bought a new sales enablement platform or raised the quota on your account executives.

The post Your Leadership Strategy Sucks.  appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...

Yes You Can.

Don’t say you “can’t do it”.  Say that you don’t “want to do it”.

Say that “you don’t feel like it”.

Say that in order to do it your life is going to be so painful that you can’t imagine the prospect of going through something so terrible.

Of course you can do it.

It’s not that you can’t — it’s that you won’t.

You aren’t gripped by a big enough sense of urgency.

You hope things will change, but aren’t willing to go out of your way to change them.

And so, instead of being brutally honest with yourself about what really drives you — what inspires you to do the hard things that success demands — you remain content to make excuses and blame your problems on the fact that you’re human with limits.

Of course you’re a human with limits.

But those limits don’t seem to matter when your life is in danger.

No one needs to tell you to get out of bed early in the morning and get things done when your house is in flames.

You care so much about getting to where you need to be that every fiber of your being is alert and focused on a singular purpose — staying alive.

You’re urgent. You’re efficient.

You’re inspired.

Don’t say any other day of the year that you can’t get out of bed because “you’re not a morning person”.

No. You’re just not a motivated person.

The time of day doesn’t really matter. The brutally honest answer is that you don’t care enough about changing your life to do what needs to be done to achieve success.

Maybe it’s time to set your life on fire in order to drive yourself to get serious about success.

Maybe you need to quit your job and do that thing you’ve been telling everyone you really want to do.

Maybe it’s time to leave a broken relationship.

Maybe it’s time to radically scale back on materialistic things and invest in your own success.

Maybe it’s time to get started doing that thing that truly scares you.

You can do it. Yes you can. Don’t say the words: “I can’t”.

Don’t think the thought. It’s a lie. An excuse.

A reason to stay broken and unfulfilled.

Whatever it is — no matter how big your dream is — you can get there.

What’s holding you back is your fear of getting burned.

You’re running the wrong direction.

Focus. Dream. Fight. Sweat. Do work.

Yes. You can.

The post Yes You Can. appeared first on Dan Waldschmidt: Author of EDGY Conversations.

Copyright by Waldschmidt Partners Intl... Not sure that all that legal stuff really matters. If you want to share this material, do so. Just don't charge for it and don't tell people you wrote it. Both of those are uncool.

Other than that, all rights are reserved to you to change your life. If you are ready to be amazing, now is the time to get started. Onward...