Destination

Imagine we're standing in a big empty room, right?

And, we're standing in one corner, and I give you a simple instruction.

I want you to go to that corner, in a straight line, right?

Off you go, no big deal, right?

Without telling you, I slip a chair in front of you.

What do you do? You go around the chair.

Now you just disobeyed what I told you to do, I told you to go to that corner straight line.

But this is the amazing things about human beings, which is when we're given a clear destination, we use our own creativity and our own sense of innovation and our own problem solving abilities to overcome obstacles to get to the destination.

In other words, the destination is more important than the route right?

We are flexible about the route. We are obsessed with the destination. Reset.

We're standing in the corner together and I give you a simple instruction, go somewhere in this room in a straight line.

And you say to me, well where do you want me to go? I'm like I don't know, you're smart, figure it out.

Go in a straight line. And so you pick a point and you start walking, and without telling you I put a chair in front of you. And what do you do?

You come to a grinding halt. I say, what'd you stop for? Well, you put a chair in front of me. Or, you'll make a sudden turn and go in another direction.

And this is the problem, it's the same obstacle. The difference is when you have a clear destination, the obstacles become easy to overcome, when you don't have a clear destination, you keep coming to a grinding halt and what we do in our companies, is we're counting the steps we're taking along the route, but we're never looking at the destination, right?

So a company says, make million dollars this year. We're only planning on making $800,000. It's like, we took ten steps, we were only planning on taking eight. Where you're going? No clue, right? We count the steps.

And so the point is, is that people want to feel that the effort they're exerting actually are moving somewhere. And so, successful measurement, successful recognition. It's not just for the steps you take.

It's not just for the effort, it's that the effort you exerted moved us closer to where we're trying to get to. And that get to should be some crazy ideal. My ideal is to live in a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning, you know, inspired to go to work and fulfilled by the work that they do. And the couple of measurements that I use are if the book is selling, and by the way. And the couple of measurements that I use are if the book is selling, and by the way people ask me how many have you sold, I have no clue, I have never asked the publisher because I don't care. I really don't care how many I've sold.

What I care about is that the Amazon rankings and that those are going steady, or up, and not plummeting, because that means other people, because I don't have a publicist, I don't have a marketing strategy on purpose. I didn't hire one of those companies to sell the book for me and the reason is, is because I'm not interested in book sales. I'm interested in the spreading of an idea. So I just use that as a metric to help me understand, am I sort of marching in the, because the more I preach, is it resonating, you know? And so you have a couple of these imperfect measurements that help you understand, are you going along the way.

So it's not just great effort, look what you achieved, because that's what we're doing now, right? Our goal is to increase top line revenues by 50 million dollars. For what reason, right? Which is, we have to know the destination, and then we say amazing, you took that much closer, and if we go to the right, it's because we were overcoming an obstacle. If we hadn't gone to the right, we would have been stuck forever. Thank you, you know, it's not always straight lines. It's not always straight lines, but it's in one direction.