Lesson 14 Networking I

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 14 - Networking

In our lessons so far, we have looked at attitude, goals (especial Big Hairy Audacious Goals), being remarkable, working towards Great, and avoiding pitfalls.

Today we will start looking at networking.

When I was young and naïve, this author thought it was “What I know not who I know” that made the difference.  After 38 years as a professor, I understand that knowledge is important, that thinking and being able to adapt is very important, but having a network is also very important.  So, who I know – and who I network with is important.

Overview:  What is networking?

According to San Jose State University; “Networking is simply an information exchange between you and another person. It involves establishing relationships with people who can help you advance your career in many ways” (taken from: http://ischool.sjsu.edu/career-development/networking/what-networking)

\You can network with anyone.   You can ‘network’ with your roommate, your classmates, your professors.  Let’s look more at the purpose of networking

Purpose of professional networking:  The SJSU definition says “establishing relationships with people who can help you advance your career in many ways”.

Who to network with for a career?

As you have been thinking about who you are and where you are going, this is a good time to meet with people in that field.  Let’s say you are thinking about going into computing – you should be finding people to talk to in that field.  Within computing, there are several areas – programming, vendor liaison, networking (computer networking, not people networking), architecture, ERP, CRM, security and much more.  Most students who are thinking of computing may not be thinking of all the options and talking to some computing professionals can help you understand the field. 

There are many sources for networking – your neighbors, your parent’s friends and people they know, even your high school career counselors will know people to talk to.

How to get a network appointment

Call or email the person to see if you can ask them questions about their field.  Make an appointment of approximately 15 minutes.  If you are going to the person’s work site, be very understanding of their time.  A CEO or high level professional making $200,000 a year on an hourly basis is about $100 an hour.  Not that you will need to pay for the time spent with the person, but be careful of their time.  Time they spent with you is time that they could be making million dollar decisions for their companies.

Have an agenda – ask specific questions – do your homework before you met.  Questions you might want to ask in a networking session:

• How did you choose this field?
• What is your average day like?
• What professional organizations are you part of and why?
• What advice might you have for me?
• If you could start over, how might you do it differently?
• Why do you like what you do?
• Did you always want to be in a position like this?
• Who has made the biggest impression on you and why?

Take notes in the interview.  Follow up questions with related questions if appropriate.    

Assignment:

• Find an interview and write your notes for two interview situations.
• How did you determine who to interview?
• Did the interviews help you towards – or away – from a particular field / job?
• Who else should you interview?  Why? 
• Could one of the people you interviewed become a mentor?  Why or why not?

Lesson 13 - Cheating

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 13 - Cheating (and Solutions)

In the last lesson (Lesson 13) we looked at the Big Pictures.  The concept was to “THINK”.  Be a problem solver, be able to take the technology and other innovations of the future and adopt them into new and meaningful actions.

We are going to look at another way to be stupid today - Cheating – and solutions to this type of stupidity

For some reason – ‘too busy’; ‘too much partying’; ‘totally forgot’ – you didn’t get an assignment done.  You have three hours until it is due.  The stupid thing to do is cheat.

Scenario: You are majoring in business.  You have to take a general education class in a science and you are taking a biology course.  The assignment is to write a two page paper on some biological concept.  This course is not all that important to you – you might not even like having to take courses outside of your major.  So, you go to the internet and search and you find a paper that meets your criteria.  You might even have to pay for it and you download the paper.  You add your name to the paper, check the paper for spelling and grammar errors, maybe (or maybe not) make a few changes (maybe even spelling something wrong so it looks like your paper) and you submit the paper.  Yeah – you did it!!!  You turned the paper in on time and didn’t even have to work very hard.  Good for you – right?  WRONG!!! 

To be a person that employers will want to hire, you want to have ethical values.  And … cheating is not one of those values.  

You will cheapen yourself.  You will know “down deep” that you took the easy way out.

You also are hoping that your professor isn’t using one of the scanning programs like “Turnitin” – that can check your paper against others to check for plagiarism.  If your professor does find that you plagiarized it, you may end up with a zero on the assignment and you may also get a “F” in the class and taken before an academic integrity committee with the potential of expulsion from college.

Even if that biology class assignment doesn’t relate to your major and to your life as you know it now, it still has the underlying concept of having you THINK.  By downloading and putting your name on a paper really short-cut the learning and thinking process.

Solutions:

One solution is to go to the professor tell him/her that you forgot about it, didn’t get it done – no real excuse – and ask for either an extension or accept a zero on the assignment.  Professors are very human as well – and we (as a professor for over 38 years) have missed deadlines in our life as well.  Being honest and not cheating is a better way out than plagiarism.  This author would most likely give the student some extra time to complete the assignment for fewer points.  Thinking and learning still will occur.

A second solution is to put this assignment into the big picture of the course.  Will failing this assignment cause me to fail the course?  Probably not.  In my courses, homework assignments are a small percentage of the overall course activities.  The major grading opportunities are tests and major team projects in my classes.  Missing an assignment might be less than 1% of the overall course.  Still talk to the professor, but put the assignment into perspective.  But, even with this solution, do communicate to your professor that you blew it on this assignment and promise to work harder in the future.

Depending on the assignment and the professor, you may be able to do some assignments as group assignments – or just study together.  Maybe for an academic paper a small study group can work together on ideas for the paper, review each other’s papers and help each of you learn and think.

The best solution is to plan ahead.  Keep an assignment planner.  Keep a schedule.  Work backward from a due date.  For example, this paper is due a week from Friday.  It will take me two hours to research a topic; four hours to research materials; four hours to write and edit the document to get it into a final version. 

Of related value:  All (or almost all) campuses have great academic support groups.  There are ‘writing labs’ where a student can take a paper for others to read and make suggestions.  When this author went to college, he was not a great writer.  He worked on it, had others review his papers and took constructive criticism to improve his writing.  You can learn how to effectively cite other papers and incorporate them into your paper.    Like the new chicken recipes, they are built on other previous recipes but incorporating some new ingredients or techniques.  In learning and thinking, finding good reliable sources as a foundation is important and then building upon those concepts (and … appropriate cite and use those sources correct).

There are math labs, science tutors and more.   Some classes have teaching assistants – utilize the resources available to you.  A quote we have used before is “Failing to plan is planning to fail” – plan your papers and your homework – and your learning and thinking.  Map out and plan your work for maximum learning for you.  (By-the-way, assignments are NOT for the professors – they are for YOU!!)

Assignment:

• Unfortunately, cheating is epidemic.  Research college (and high school) cheating and write two or more paragraphs on why it happens and why it is a stupid thing to do.
• Research modern cheating detection methods – like Turnitin mentioned before.  There are others.  How can a professor detect cheating and plagiarism?  Write two paragraphs on how you might get caught cheating.
• Many colleges have an academic ethics policy.  Research such policies for some of the colleges you are considering (or already enrolled in).

Today’s quote –  Cheaters never win.

Lesson 12 - Thinking

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 12 – Big Picture #1

So, what is the purpose of college? 

This author with his many years of being a professor thinks the purpose of college has changed fairly significantly over the years.

The early American colleges (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) were founded as seminaries.  In the late 1860’s the United States Government allocated funds for ‘land grant colleges” (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university). These land grant colleges were to teach agriculture, science and engineering. 

Other colleges started as bookkeeping / accounting and business; still others as medical related (frequently nursing). 

In recent years as suggested by the author, the purpose and focus of colleges is to enable students to think in a particular disciple.  If colleges were only to obtain knowledge, we’d all be graduates of the “Google Search Engine College”.  With the internet we can find almost any fact and generally a lot of information quickly.  But, learning how to THINK is of more significance.

Consider a typical college student:  ages 18 to 22 as a student; 22 to 66 as a graduate.  For many fields, what was learned in college 40 years old has been replaced by up-to-date information and material.  

This author learned computer programming with COBOL and with large mainframe computers.  

For many of my mathematics courses, we used tables in the back of the book to find confidence intervals or do interpolations.  Those mathematical concepts are done automatically on calculators and computers. 

Many experts say ‘the jobs of the future have not been created yet’.   

Thinking and analytical skills are essential – over facts and figures.  Knowing that Lincoln was the 16^th President of the United States is nice, but understanding and analyzing the philosophies of the day and the political divisions that resulted in the Civil War and end of slavery in the United States implies thinking skills.

Benjamin Bloom published a framework for categorizing education efforts – called Bloom’s Taxonomy.  From the lowest to the highest these are: Remember; Understand; Apply; Analyze; Evaluate and Create.   Creating ‘new’ knowledge is the highest level of educational efforts.

Taking an analogy.  Chicken for eating has been around for centuries.  So, chicken dishes are not new.  But, every year there are new recipes for chicken; there are cook books with new chicken dishes.  These new recipes can take old concepts and blend them in new and innovative ways – new ways of cooking (oven, microwave, grill and other methods); cooking with new combinations of spices; fast cooking; slow cooking, and more.  The author’s son-in-law took second place in a chicken cooking contest for stuffed chicken breasts – stuffed with green chilies. 

Another analogy:  Over the years there have been many programming languages.  Picture a programming language forty years in the future (towards the end of a current graduate’s working career), I would guess it would be very different from today’s programming.  Using a keyboard and typing in commands?  Probably not!  Speaking to the computer “Do an analysis of <something>” with artificial intelligence and natural language processing would (at least today) seem like a viable solution. 

Being able to think becomes even more crucial in an information driven world.  Bloom’s Taxonomy of Remember, Understand will be pretty low level.  Being able to apply concepts (level 3); analyze principles (level 4); evaluate alternatives (level 5) and create new knowledge (level 6) would seem to be the effort of education.

Translating that to courses.   This author strongly believes that assignments should challenge students to think.  If you are in a math class, knowing that the square root of two is approximately 1.414 is nice, but being able to apply the square root of two to an engineering or business concept involves thinking and evaluation.

Proper college assignments should challenge us to think, to work on the higher levels of thinking as part of Bloom’s Taxonomy.  In twenty years, the college graduate will be asked to make a decision based on data, on trends, with multiple facets – which is ‘thinking’.

Assignment:

• Do you agree or disagree with the purpose of college is to learn how to think?  Write an essay justifying your answer.
• How is creating a higher level of educational classification than apply? 
• Are we not going to need to know facts and data?  Why or why not?

Quote for today from Albert Einstein: ““The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

Lesson 11 - Stupidity

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 11 - Stupidity

These lessons have been coaching and mentoring for college success.  Even lesson 10 on failure is learning how to ‘fail forward’.  Today’s lesson is about stupidity.

Scenario 1:  Lexi (or any student really) is off to college.  She is away from home and away from her parents.  She can set her own hours; she has a lot of freedom to explore life that she didn’t have at home.  Early in her first semester, some friends invited her to a party.  There was an abundance of alcohol and Lexi got drunk.  She also found friendship.  Since then two or three times a week Lexi binge drinks – she is drunk at least two nights a week.  She is studying less and is drinking more.   Lexi is being stupid and her actions can lead to less studying, poor grades and not reaching her goals.

Scenario 2:  Charles (modelled after a previous student of mine named Charles) was an average student in high school.  In college he is enjoying his computer classes and math classes, but hates his English class and those other general education classes.  He finds a part time job for a computer company – it pays well.  Charles is also concerned about money.  His parents divorced when he was eleven and money for college is an issue.  He doesn’t want to borrow for college.  The part time job pays well.  His boss likes his computer work and offers him half-time work or 20 hours a week.  It pays fairly good for half-time.  He will have enjoy having money saved for second semester if he keeps this up.  But, with twenty hours a week, something has to go, so he drops his English class.  Weekends are spent catching up on his computer courses and his calculus class.   After mid semester he finds that his calculus grade is a B minus.  He knows he could do better, but he has to keep working.  He drops the calculus class on the last day to withdraw from a class.  For spring semester, he registers for calculus and English and again drops them.  After his first year in college, he has completed eighteen credits.  He decides it is not worth it and takes a full time computing position. He is abandoning his goals.

Scenario 3:  Daniel also finds he likes to party in college.  At one party, a friend gives him some marijuana.  Soon Daniel is smoking pot frequently and lately has started using cocaine.  He enjoys getting high.  His classes also are suffering and his bank account is going down quickly.  He finds he can sell some marijuana and cocaine to raise the money he wants and needs for more partying.  He is abandoning his goals.

Scenario 4: Kasey has joined a sorority and is doing well.  Her grades are very good as the sorority requires study hours and there are older girls who mentor her in her classes.  She likes the social events that the sorority sponsors and soon has a boyfriend and soon she finds out she is pregnant.  She is on the verge of abandoning her goals.

No one comes to college with a goal of living under a bridge by the time they are 30 with a paper bag holding a bottle of wine – but it happens.

No one comes to college with the goal of getting married and divorced three times before he/she reaches 40 – but it happens.

No one comes to college with the goal of becoming an alcoholic, or drug addict, or a sex slave or a college dropout – but it happens.

It is stupidity.  DON’T GET TRAPPED!!!

Assignment:

• Research and write a two paragraph paper in your journal on why students drop out of college.  While poor grades might be the ultimate factor, dig deeper and find the underlying factors.
• What temptations might you expect in college?  How might you avoid them?
• What are your thoughts on college life – and the very real ease of getting alcohol?  Is social drinking okay with you? 
• How do you learn to say “NO”?

Today’s quote – from the Christian prayer Lord’s Prayer also known as the Our Father – “And lead us not into temptation.

Lesson 10 - Failure

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 10 - Failure

Hold it – the author wants me to FAIL?  No, I want to be a success.  One of the reasons I’m taking this course is to avoid failure and be a high flying success.

Okay, I’ll do the lesson.

Opening quote:  If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.

Failure can be good, it can be very good, maybe even a ‘great’ experience!!

There are many stories of very successful people failing – Lincoln, Edison, and many others.  Let’s look at failure as a learning tool:

1.       That didn’t work – cross it off the list and try again.

2.       Maybe you didn’t plan deep enough

3.       You had a plan, and didn’t execute it well enough

4.       Factors beyond my control led to the failure.

Cross it off the list and try again:

Supposedly Edison tried many combinations before finding a solution to the electric light bulb.  It might be that a certain metal or alloy just wasn’t a good filament for a light bulb, or that the partial vacuum in the bulb wasn’t the right combination of oxygen, nitrogen, and other gasses.

Think of going through a corn maze.  As you reach a dead end, you can (should) mark that end off as a dead end and not enter it again.  Trial and error can be a successful tool if there aren’t all that many options. 

So, if you failed, get up, dust off your pants (figuratively) and start again.  If there is a real solution, keep going until you find it.

You didn’t plan deep enough or well enough:

Did you consider all the variables?  What did you overlook?  Is it possible that with a little more research into the situation, you might have a better plan.

You had a plan and didn’t execute it well enough:

If you are working as a team, maybe not all the team members have ‘bought in’.  Maybe you assumed it was going to be a snap and didn’t take the situation seriously enough.  Many sports example work here – where a team or individual didn’t take the competition seriously enough and got beaten.

Factors beyond your control:

Let’s face it, there are times when there are things you cannot control.  

Obviously, you can’t control the weather.  You picked a date six months ago for the company picnic and it rains.  You created a brand new product only to learn that Google took a very similar product to market two days ago.  (and you didn’t know about it and couldn’t control it)

As you and your team approach a problem one of the vital team members gets sick, or is in an automobile accident and that puts you behind and you end up failing. 

Assignment:

1. Think about a situation where you either failed – or didn’t achieve what you expected.  What was the reason?  What did you learn from that?  What might you do to avoid it in the future?
2. Can companies like individuals become remarkable and can being remarkable help avoid failure?
3. When you have failed or done poorly, what was your attitude?  Did you whine?  Or did you approach it with a positive attitude?

Quote for today – Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war. Donald Trump

Lesson 9 Becoming Remarkable

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 9 - Remarkable

Becoming Remarkable.

Seth Godin talked about becoming ‘remarkable’ in his book Purple Cow.  As Godin presented the concept, he and his family were in France and as they drove they noticed all the cows in the fields.  So colorful, idyllic so they thought.  But as their drive continued, they didn’t even notice the cows – the cows were now ‘commonplace’.  He makes the point that the only cows that would have appeared on their radar at that point would have to be really different – like Purple Cows. 

The idea of a purple cow is really to be REMARKABLE – to stand out among the others. 

Do you need to be a purple cow?  How are you going to stand out with the over 100 million other college students from around the world?

So, how do you become remarkable?

It isn’t really from the appearance – a purple cow would still out; a college graduate in a job interview in a purple suit (maybe with a bright orange tie) would stand out, and would probably not be hired (“too weird”). 

So, some thoughts on being remarkable:

1. ·         Be great in your field (see previous discussions on ‘good to great’
2. ·         Have a great attitude
3. ·         Have experiences that make you remarkable
4. ·         Have a great personality

Be great in your field:  

Okay, when you graduate, it is going to be really hard to be recognized for being great in your field.  For discussions sake, let’s say you are an accounting major.  How can you be recognized for being great in your field?  Good Grades?  Maybe.  Great faculty recommendations?  Maybe.  Great internship experiences?  Maybe.  Service in the community to non-profits or to third world countries?  Maybe. 

How about some out-of-the-ordinary ways to be remarkable?  Could you publish an academic paper with a professor that gets into an academic journal?  How many undergraduates are published in academic journals?  (Not many). 

Could you develop and implement an accounting system for non-profit organizations that wins recognition in a competition?

Could you work with a computing student to develop a new and innovative way for secure payment processing, maybe for secure payment on an smart phone using your finger logon component?

Could you work with a government agency (like the Internal Revenue Service or FBI) to f ully analyze fraudulent accounting reports.  Or work with the Small Business Administration to set up accounting systems for new businesses – especially for those who have no accounting background.

Have a Great Attitude:

Having a great attitude is almost always remarkable.  We go through life with the ‘average’ folks, so seeing somebody smile, somebody say “have a nice day” and really, really mean it, to stop and listen to the person you are talking with. 

Have remarkable experiences: 

Some of the remarkable experiences can go with your major field; but you can have others.   Work in a soup kitchen, climb Mount Everest, do marathons and triathlons, take a Boy Scout troop (or others) wilderness camping for three weeks, organize a community wide event.  There are many ways to be remarkable and to demonstrate it.

Have a Great Personality:

Having a great attitude is part of having a great personality.  Think of people who are very personable.  People you’d like to just sit and talk to.  How can you be that ‘instant’ friend and person that people will recognize quickly and say “Definitely a team player and definitely one that we’d love to have on our team”.

Assignment:

• Think about what you can do to be remarkable – to be a ‘purple cow’ in a black-and-white cow world.  Write an essay about how you are going to make yourself remarkable this year.
• Develop goals to become remarkable

Quote for today – being remarkable sometimes can get you in trouble: ““If you are too afraid to offend anyone, then I'm afraid you may not be able to do anything remarkable” ― Bernard Kelvin Clive

Lesson 2 - Attitude

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 2 - Attitude
A quote from Henry Ford, American industrialist and car maker ““Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”

You get to choose your attitude.  Yes – when doing a home repair job and you hit your thumb with a hammer, even then you get to choose your attitude.  You can scream (probably acceptable), you can swear (may not be acceptable), you can pick up your hammer and throw it through a window in your anger (not acceptable). 

Let’s look at “I think I can”.  Now there are times when “I think I can” are impossible.  “I think I can climb Mount Everest blindfolded with my legs tied together” – not a good idea.  But, the various climbers of Mount Everest BELIEVED that they could climb Mount Everest.  They planned carefully, had thought through various scenarios and achieved that goal. 

As a child, I read the Little Golden book about the “Engine who could”.  This little engine when asked to pull a train over the mountain kept saying to himself “I think I can; I think I can”.  The engine’s attitude was about doing it – not how heavy the train was, not how steep the mountain was, but that he could do it.
“I think I can” is chronicled in history.  Edison supposedly tried over 1,000 times to find a workable lightbulb.  His belief in himself “I think I can” made all of the many failures acceptable.  He later just viewed them as steps on the journey to the lightbulb. 

Abraham Lincoln failed in many endeavors – as a businessman, as a soldier as a lawyer and as a politician until he was elected president.  He exhibited the “I think I can” attitude.

What do you want to do?  Think about it; get your attitude right.

You are driving and a car cuts you off and speeds down the road.  What is your attitude?  “That Jerk.  I hope he has an accident” – or maybe a more gentle attitude “I bet he just got a call that his mother is dying and he is rushing to her deathbed to say ‘goodbye’”.  While it might not be true, it keeps your emotions and negative attitude in check. 

When you took calculus, before the class started did you say to yourself “I can never learn calculus, it is too hard” – or did you say “I think I can I think I can”.  You can also say “Look at student X, he passed calculus and I’m smarter than he is.  If he can do it, so can I”.

A good attitude does not whine.  “It is too hot today” (and can you do anything about that – other than stay indoors?); “I hate doing this” (sounds like a bad attitude to me)

“I just got fired from my job” might actually be a great opportunity to move on to try something new.  Or, do you want to whine “I shouldn’t have gotten fired”, “Those idiots, I’m better than half the staff that wasn’t fired”.   There is a concept that when a door closes a window opens. 
You can get out of bed, stretch and start sing “Oh what a beautiful morning”.  What is your attitude towards the new day and especially towards Monday?  “Wow – this is a brand new week, I am SO EXCITED to find new adventures, new things to learn this week”.

There is a story of two children, one with positive attitudes and one with negative attitudes.  The negative ve child is given the key to a room and finds a pony and starts to cry.  “Someday this pony will die and I’ll feel bad”.  The positive attitude child is given a key to a room filled with horse manure and is so excited “With all this manure, there MUST be a pony for me inside this room!” 

What is your self-talk?  We do all talk to ourselves (if only mentally).  Do you say frequently “This is a great day!” “I really enjoy doing this”; “This is going to be a success”?  If so, you are reinforcing a positive attitude.
In my first year of high school teaching, on my preparation period, I went to the teacher’s lounge.  There was free coffee (and in those days, a haze of smoke) and a lot of whining.  “I hate my students”, “I have my classes”, “I don’t like the principal”.  I learned quickly to get in, get my cup of coffee and go back to my classroom to do my preparation.  I learned that negative people can bring you down.  Like Winnie-the-Pooh character Eeyore, nothing is right, it is always raining, it is always miserable. 
Don’t say “I think I can” just once, embedded it in your brain.  Say it again and again. 
 

Assignment:

1. Check your attitude - do you sometimes whine?
2. Count how many times you complain and how many times you are positive today - what did you find out?
3. Think about how you can make your attitude better

Lesson 8 Good to Great

Coaching for College Students

Lesson 8 - - Good to Great

Today’s lesson overlaps attitude and goals. 

Jim Collins is the author of one of my favorite business books “Good to Great”.  The concept is really seen even in the title.  Good is okay (maybe), but we should strive for GREAT.  There is a world of difference between:  it was a good dinner and it was a GREAT dinner.  Likewise: that was a good paper and that was a GREAT paper.  And again:  I got good service at the restaurant and I got GREAT service at the restaurant. 

Great is ‘nailing it’.  Great is going the extra mile, doing the extra things that really make the activity memorable. 

If you want to get to your BHAG, you need to be GREAT. 

So, how do you get to be great?

1.       Set your attitude to ‘great’

2.       Don’t waste time

3.       Keep the end in mind

4.       Dig deeper, analyze more

5.       Don’t settle for good when you can be great

Let’s look at these concepts:

1.       Set your attitude to ‘great’.

Yes, attitude is the main part of GREAT.  You have to believe you can be great, you have to put that deep in your brain to be great.  In most jobs and activities, there will be barriers to break through.  If you get stopped too easily, you won’t get to great.  Push through and keep your brain focused on GREAT.

2.       Don’t waste time.

I’m not a big TV watcher.  While recreation and fun have to be part of life, to get to great you have to put the time and effort into it.  For me TV is a waste of time.  While it can be fun and even educational to watch some television, in many cases, that hour (or two hours or four hours) in front of the television keeps you from achieving some other tasks towards your goal.  When I taught high school, I only went into the faculty lounge to get coffee and then back to my classroom to work on lessons.  I know farmers who in the off season are fixing fences, doing analyses of crops and new techniques.  Yes, there should be a vacation in that off season, but even then – the off season is a time to gear up for the new season.  My high school teaching was in a rural area.  Some farmers spent their time at the café or the tavern during the off season, while others (and generally the more successful ones) spent their off season time being productive.

3.       Keep the end in mind

If you haven’t done it, read Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  One of Covey’s habits is keep the end in mind.  There is an adage “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there”.  Be focused.  Read your goals daily.  Know what you want and work towards it.

4.       Dig deeper, analyze  more

Sometimes on the surface, we can comprehend things fairly well, but to really understand you have to really dig deeper.  For example, the stock market  has swings, and analysts go deeper to understand trends and the reasons behind them.  Asking “why” is a good tool to find the root cause of events.

5.       Don’t settle for good when you can get to great.

There are times to settle for okay.  For example, you like music and you have played in a band or orchestra.  But, music is not going to be your career.  Being a good trumpet player in the band may put you on the second or third trumpet part.  You can enjoy being part of the ensemble without all the practice of being the first trumpet player.  But, when you are passionate about something, you need to press to great.  Are you happy being an ‘average’ jogger, or are you aiming for track records?  Are you happy with being a good accountant, but you are passionate about accounting and want to be great?  Settling for ‘good’ when you can get to great is like getting a “B” or a “C” grade when you know you could have an “A” – and not just an “A”, but the top grade in the class if you really worked at it.

Assignment:

1. Review your goals from lesson 6 and 7:  Take your primary BHAG and do an in-depth analysis of what you will have to do to reach that goal. What would it take to be GREAT – one of the tops in the field you choose?
2. Reflective – are you committed to being great? 
3. What is your passion towards your goals – just ‘good’ or ‘exceptional’ (that is ‘great’)?

And a quote from Mark Twain: ““Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”