Monday Morning

Motivation    130/2012

THE POSITIVE PLACE. SALES MOTIVATION AND PERSONAL GROWTH

Reality, such as it is.

I’ve been spending some time cleaning out old papers today, and I ran across a quote I’d squirreled away from Winston Churchill.

“However beautiful he strategy, you should occasionally look at the results,” he said.

Too many times, we get so caught up in our view of what life or an organization should be. It’s important to dream, plan, and craft your future to what you would wish it to become, but altogether too often, we choose to live in that dreamland, never looking at the reality of the actual results.

We may think we’re the strongest man in the world, but occasionally, it’s still important to exercise a bit, and sometimes try an arm-wrestle match with our kids. We might find out that we’re not the strongman we think we are.

And in business, weak minds sometimes just look at a theoretical view of what should happen, and then they are always confused when something else happens instead.

Politicians are quite adept at this kind of thought -- a politician will decide that something “has” to be that way -- and make laws as if it were so -- and yet the reality of the situation is totally at odds with the politician’s skewed view of life.

I read once that the stupidest ideas were thought up by three classes of people: politicians, journalists, and academics. I’d probably add CEOs to the list, but there are the occasional CEO that can still tell his backside from a hole in the ground. But to a lot of people, reality doesn’t matter

If you don’t include reality, it’s much easier to plan -- you don’t have to worry about all those facts getting in the way.

As we go through our lives, we must always keep reality and results in mind. We shouldn’t allow what “is” to stop us from attaining what “may be,” but we shouldn’t fly in the face of the results we are attaining.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, a great general and a pretty good president, said that once the battle starts, the battle plan goes out the window. He knew that people had to respond to change and reality, and although the battle plan would guide their options, those decisions had to be made depending on what actually happened, not what you thought would happen.

In our lives, we must pay attention to the results and reality we confront. We should let our minds soar, but usually it pays to keep our feet on the ground while we’re building that new tomorrow.

Copyright, 2012, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.weekdaywisdom.com.