Positive Leadership: Determination

Positive Leadership: Determination

Positive Leadership: Reaching for the Top

Positive Leadership: Reaching for the Top

Positive Leadership: Why Grit Determines Success

Wisdom from psychologist Angela Duckworth on ‘Why Grit, Not IQ, Predicts Success’

“Character is at least as important as intellect.”

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/26/angela-duckworth-grit/

Positive Leadership: Why Grit Determines Success

Positive Leadership: Perseverance

Positive Leadership: Perseverance

Positive Leadership: Vince Lombardi

'The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.'

'The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.'

'Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.'

Vince Lombardi (1913-1970)

Positive Leadership: Vince Lombardi

Positive Leadership: Finding the Power Within

Excellent Nike ad on 'finding the power within' - especially the point about 'patience'. All leaders should have drive, determination, impatience with how things are ... and patience. We know - leaership's a bag of contradictions, isn't it!

Positive Leadership: Finding the Power Within

Positive Leadership: Inspired Leadership - The Historical Perspective on the London 2012 Olympics

In January 2003, a storm was gathering in Washington, Whitehall and Baghdad when the then Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell went to the cabinet with the idea that London should bid for the 2012 Olympics. 

“We started with no votes around the Cabinet Table,” she said. She went round the departments one by one, to Health, Education and Transport, and told them what the Olympics could do for everyone. Tony Blair, whose last minute lobbying later proved so crucial, dismissed the idea at first.

Tony Blair was much more preoccupied with Iraq, and rightly so. I said to him, “How are you going to answer this question. We’re the fourth largest economy in the world, London is the greatest city in the world, we would like to think. What will you say to someone who asks you ‘Why didn’t you dare bid to host the games?’ I’ve never forgotten the way he looked at me.

In his memoir, Blair recalls that Jowell lectured him to man up:

“I really didn’t think that was your attitude to leadership. I thought you were prepared to take a risk. And it is a big risk. Of course we may not win but at least we will have had the courage to try.” When Tessa says this, you feel a complete wimp and rather ashamed. You know she is manipulating you, but you also know it’s a successful manipulation.

I got a call the next morning from his Principle Private Secretary saying ‘The Prime Minister will support your recommendation.”

Two years later, the American businesswoman appointed to lead the bid Barbara Cassani resigned, because she didn’t think an American bid leader would win the games. “She deserves great credit,” said Dame Tessa Jowell.” She said the person who could win it is Seb Coe.

It was only six months later that the double Olympic gold medallist stood on stage in Singapore and said:  ”To make an Olympic champion it takes eight Olympic finalists. To make Olympic finalists, it takes 80 Olympians. To make 80 Olympians it takes 202 national champions, to make national champions it takes thousands of athletes. To make athletes it takes millions of children around the world to be inspired to choose sport.” Jacques Rogge was up not long later, opening his envelope and reading out the word “London.”

From the very start, the London 2012 Olympic bid has been characterised by the single-minded passion, persistence, vision and determination of all those involved in hosting the Games. Congratulations!

For more background into the bid process for the London 2012 Olympic Games, see: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/06/international-olympic-committee-london-summer-olympics)

Positive Leadership: Inspired Leadership - The Historical Perspective on the London 2012 Olympics

Positive Leadership: #gostanford Pre-Game Speech

Good luck to the Stanford Men's Basketball team in tonight's NIT final.

With pre-game speeches like this they should be in good shape!

Positive Leadership: #gostanford Pre-Game Speech

Positive Leadership: Dealing With Brick Walls

Randy Pausch was, by all accounts, a happy man: attractive, charismatic and blessed with a good marriage and three kids. At Carnegie Mellon, he was a popular computer science professor known for developing courses that drew students from the arts, computer science and engineering. So when in 2007 Pausch was asked to give a talk for a lecture series called "journeys," no one was surprised that it was standing-room only.

The idea behind the series was for professors to speak to their students as if it were their last lecture. Except in Pausch's case, it really was. He began by showing the audience scans of his liver tumours and explaining his grim diagnosis.

"That is what it is, we can't change it, and we just have to decide how we are going to respond to it," he said. "We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I don't seem as depressed or morose as I should be ... sorry to disappoint you!"

Pausch went on to say he wasn't going to talk about his cancer. Instead, he wanted to celebrate his life and the lessons he had learned while growing up.

"You left that lecture hall just wanting to share this with everybody in the world," says Peter Lee, head of the university's computer science department, who was in the audience that night.

Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey Zaslow was also in the audience. He wrote a piece about the lecture and posted a video of it in on the newspaper's Web site.

"That spread so fast, with people saying they were so touched," says Zaslow. "I knew he was going to move the world."

Eventually, Zaslow collaborated on the book by Randy Pausch The Last Lecture [DECKLE EDGE] 1st edition. None of the lessons in the book is startlingly new, but Pausch had a way of taking a cliché — like "running into a brick wall" — and imbuing it with new life:

"The brick walls are there for a reason. Right? The brick walls are not there to keep us out, the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough," he said in his lecture.

In the end, Zaslow says Pausch's ability to embrace life even as he faced death was a lesson in itself:

"He lived with such bravado and such love of everybody in his life ... but he also showed ... that when our time comes, we should have a little bit of Randy inside of us."

Positive Leadership: Dealing With Brick Walls

Positive Leadership: True Grit

Grit is defined as perseverance and passion toward long-term goals (Duckworth et al. 2006). Gritty people tend to persevere, self-regulate and push themselves toward success. 

Drs. Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman (2006) found that the correlation between self-discipline and achievement was twice as large as the correlation between IQ and achievement.

Additional research suggests that people with grit:

• report experiencing more happiness than those who are less gritty, even when controlling for age and education;
• earn higher GPAs than their non-gritty classmates, even with lower SATs scores;
• are more likely to outperform in spelling bee contests, regardless of verbal IQ.

The bottom line is that the research shows that self-control is more important than self-esteem in determining achievement.

For more, see: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~duckwort/images/Grit%20JPSP.pdf

Positive Leadership: True Grit

Obstacles Can Be Overcome

This is the story of Dick & Rick Hoyt, the most inspirational father and son team to race in an Ironman. 

The message is important - obstacles can be overcome with focus, determination, commitment and generosity of spirit.

Obstacles Can Be Overcome

Determination and Energy

Determination and Energy are two values of Positive Leadership.

‘If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over.’ John Wooden

‘The energy of the mind is the essence of life.’ Aristotle

Here are some reference materials which speak to these values:

Determination and Energy

The Truth About Grit

In 1869, Francis Galton published “Hereditary Genius,” his landmark investigation into the factors underlying achievement. Galton’s method was straightforward: he gathered as much information as possible on dozens of men with “very high reputations,” including poets, politicians, and scientists. That’s when Galton noticed something rather surprising: success wasn’t simply a matter of intelligence or talent. Instead, Galton concluded that eminent achievement was only possible when “ability combined with zeal and the capacity for hard labour.”

Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, came to a similar conclusion. He spent decades following a large sample of “gifted” students, searching for evidence that his measurement of intelligence was linked to real world success. While the most accomplished men did have slightly higher scores, Terman also found that other traits, such as “perseverance,” were much more pertinent. Terman concluded that one of the most fundamental tasks of modern psychology was to figure out why intelligence is not a more important part of achievement: “Why this is so, and what circumstances affect the fruition of human talent, are questions of such transcendent importance that they should be investigated by every method that promises the slightest reduction of our present ignorance.”

Unfortunately, in the decades following Terman’s declaration, little progress was made on the subject. Because intelligence was so easy to measure - the IQ test could be given to schoolchildren, and often took less than an hour - it continued to dominate research on individual achievement.

However, in recent years, psychologists have come up with a term to describe this mental trait: grit. 

Although the idea itself isn’t new - “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” Thomas Edison famously remarked - the researchers are quick to point out that grit isn’t simply about the willingness to work hard. Instead, it’s about setting a specific long-term goal and doing whatever it takes until the goal has been reached. It’s always much easier to give up, but people with grit can keep going.

While stories of grit have long been associated with self-help manuals and life coaches - Samuel Smiles, the author of the influential Victorian text “Self-Help” preached the virtue of perseverance - these new scientific studies rely on new techniques for reliably measuring grit in individuals. As a result, they’re able to compare the relative importance of grit, intelligence, and innate talent when it comes to determining lifetime achievement. Although this field of study is only a few years old, it’s already made important progress toward identifying the mental traits that allow some people to accomplish their goals, while others struggle and quit. Grit, it turns out, is an essential (and often overlooked) component of success.

For more on this fascinating subject, see - http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/02/the_truth_about_grit/?page=full 

The Truth About Grit

The Gesture of a Winner That Means Victory and Hope

For more on Seve's inspiring story and for information on how to support his foundation, which is one of Positive Leadership's charities of 2010, please go to: http://www.seveballesterosfoundation.org/

The Gesture of a Winner That Means Victory and Hope

Leading and Learning from a Crisis

When you find yourself having to navigate your way through a crisis, what can you do to come out on the other side stronger for the experience?

Every crisis involves risk. It is fraught with danger, but it is also an opportunity for tremendous learning and growth. Crisis is a time of testing, but it is also a time of renewal.

Many people, when faced with crisis, tell themselves that they have failed and convince themselves that there is no point in trying any longer. For example, if a young woman tries to become a professional writer and fails, it does not mean she is a failure as a person or that her life is a failure. It simply means that, at this particular time in her life, her attempts at writing for a living are not working out.

There are many other possible choices she can make, including trying again at some point in the future. She has not failed, and she does not have to give up her dream. But she does need to learn from the attempt and, perhaps, rethink her strategy. Is there another way she can go about it? Does she need more education? More experience? More exposure? Help promoting her work?

Failure is only failure if you let it cause you to quit. 

If you choose to let it help you, it is merely information you can learn from. It is in meeting crisis with determination that we measure up to life and its challenges. In so doing, we develop tenacity and great inner strength. 

Leading and Learning from a Crisis