Laura Wolfe Coaching LLC

Supporting the Evolution of Careers, Leaders,

& Climate Consciousness

Somebody Else Will

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800px-Dr._John_2

Grammy award winning blues* artist Dr. John closed his 2014 French Quarter Fest show last Friday with the hit, Such A Night.

The chorus is:

If I don’t do it, you know somebody else will
If I don’t do it, you know somebody else will
If I don’t do it, you know somebody else will

Of course, the words and that tune stayed with me for days. The song is about going for the girl, but those lyrics apply to going for any opportunity – whether it’s romance, a creative endeavor, or an entrepreneurial venture.

Got me thinking about what Baton Rouge native Dr. Paul Judge, a serial entrepreneur and creator of 30 patent and patent-pending computer security technologies, said during BREW 2013. He told the audience that he regularly gets pitched by entrepreneurs who think their idea is unique. In reality, a lot of people out there have the same or similar ideas and Judge said that what really matters is the execution.

Then, just last night, I came across this story about a pitch event where Ashton Kutcher, now a venture capitalist, basically says the same thing about ideas. He goes on to say that those who succeed have grit, a trait developed through “hardship, humiliation, and failure early on.” Grit is elsewhere described as “passion and commitment for a particular long term goal” and as being related to resilience, hardiness, and persistence.

Do you have an idea for a startup, a project, a book, a creative offering, or a new business? If you don’t do it, you know somebody else will. 

Get gritty and execute. (and for a little extra motivation, listen to Dr. John because you won’t be able to get that chorus out of your head!)

*I call him a blues artist here but his music really defies categorization.

 

Would love to hear how you’ve gone for it, executed, and kept it gritty.

 

Let Them Go

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In January, I listened to this Amy Porterfield podcast about planning for the new year where Amy challenged business owners to consider what was working and what wasn’t working with regard to growing their business. Her advice was to stop the activities that weren’t contributing to success.

On the surface, that’s the obvious action to take but how often do people continue down a less than productive path?

Soon after, I came across an article about toxic people that included the wisdom, “the more time you spend with people who are unhelpful, unsupportive, disrespectful, envious, resentful, dysfunctional or outright damaging to you, the less value all your time has.”

Wow.

Time is a precious and limited resource and when minutes are gone, there is no getting them back. Too often we are overly attached to some initiative that once seemed like a good idea or to familiar relationships without ever evaluating whether they are right for what we hope to accomplish.

Consider both your personal and professional goals. Do the people and activities that consume your time support and align with the future you are working towards?

If not, let them go.

Would love to hear how you make the most of your time.

Development Pearls

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What I try to do through my coaching and my writing is to help individuals find work that they are on fiyah about and to help managers and leaders grow in ways that improve both their performance and the lives of people in their organizations.

This week I published my second e-book for Kindle on Amazon. Development Pearls: Information for Professional Development is a collection of blog posts I’ve written around professional development and it is available for FREE through midnight March 23.

Feel free to share and thanks again for your support.

Laura

Would love to hear about your development journey.

Coincidentally…

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128px-The_FabsDid you catch The Night that Changed America: A Grammy Salute to The Beatles commemorating the 50 year anniversary of the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show? It contained much great music including performances by Alicia Keys, John Mayer, Keith Urban, and many, many more. While My Guitar Gently Weeps performed by Joe Walsh, Gary Clark, Jr., and Dave Grohl was amazing and intense.

The conversation between Ringo, Paul, and David Letterman was very interesting. Paul said so casually that “all sorts of lucky things, amazing little coincidences came together, with amazing skills added to those coincidences; it was a lot of stuff that came together to make the Beatles.”

Could it have been more than amazing little coincidences that brought the Beatles together and ultimately changed the world?

I recently read Chapter 3 in The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. In that chapter Cameron talks about answered prayers and how they can be so scary that often people dismiss them as coincidence.

Cameron believes there is a greater power and she writes:

“If we do, in fact, have to deal with a force beyond ourselves that involves itself in our lives, then we may have to move into action on those previously impossible dreams.”

and also:

“Is it any wonder we discount answered prayers? We call it coincidence. We call it luck. We call it anything but what it is – the hand of God, or good, activated by our own hand when we act in behalf of our truest dreams, when we commit to our soul.”

Is there something you’ve been wanting to do? Something in your soul that could possibly change the world – even just a tiny bit? Put it out there and be open to what might happen next.

Is it a coincidence that you’re reading this post? Maybe, but maybe not…

 

Have you ever experienced the kind of coincidence that helped you realize a dream?