Transcript

A proven method to accelerate your success | Owen Brady | TEDxUVM

If you want to lead a fulfilling life, just follow your true passion. Who here has ever heard some advice like that? And it looks like the entire Yeah, pretty much most of us right now. Who here is currently following a passion? A lot of the same people. That's great. Now, here's the tricky question. Who among you is sure beyond any shadow of a doubt that you are currently pursuing your one true lifelong passion? Still a few hands, but not nearly as many. I know how you feel. I've spent my entire life searching for my one true passion, and consequently, I've had several of them along the way. For instance, when I came to UVM, I started ballroom dancing. I had never danced before, but I found myself enjoying it immensely. And and I thought to myself, maybe this is my one true passion. Maybe this is why none of the other passions I've ever had, such as being an actor or an auto mechanic, ever provided that limitless happiness that I was searching for. Because I was meant to be a ballroom dancer all along. I trained aggressively for 5 years, convinced that I had found my life's purpose. When I needed more knowledgeable mentors, I asked the UVM coaches where to go and they sent me all the way up to Montreal to train with the former world champions who live there. I learned the steps, pun intended, to succeed, and I took them, eventually being crowned the Quebec champion at the pre- championship level in 2012. I met a lot of great people, learned a valuable skill, and gained a ton of confidence. success made it fulfilling, but I still didn't feel like I had found that one passion that was going to be the center point for the rest of my life. So, my search continued. Millennials in general share a common fear of investing their life in anything other than their one true passion. And this is a fear that's fueled by the neverending barrage of social media posts from people claiming to have found their one true passion. # blessed I know this because I'm only one. I still haven't found my one true passion. And despite the Instagram evidence to the contrary, I have come to believe that most humans don't have one. Now, this might sound disheartening, but it is in fact the most liberating piece of advice I could possibly give to you. Recognizing that you do not have one ultimate unchanging passion means that you are able to leverage the energy of changing passions to build your skills and success. If you are successful within your passions, regardless of whether they are short-term or lifelong, you will find exploring them to be much more enjoyable. Let's face it, no one is passionate about being terrible at something. Success ultimately provides fulfillment and continual opportunities to add value. Brian Tracy, famed personal development author, once said, "The future belongs to the competent. The future does not belong to the well-meaning, the sincere, or the merely ambitious." As I looked back on my quest to find that magical true passion that would fill every day of my life with sunshine and rainbows, I realized that I'd been successful in every passion that I ever had. Whether that was being an auto mechanic where in less than two years I went from knowing nothing about cars to graduating at the top of my Wii class or whether it was ballroom dancing or singing and acting where I went from thinking that I couldn't match pitch to starring in shows and becoming the president of a coral society, maybe even ballet. And lest you think that I spend all of my time in either a tail suit or tights working in the professional world where I went from unemployed for 9 months after graduation to earning an award as one of Vermont's top 40 under 40. As I reviewed all of these successes, I realized that they had provided me with a very fulfilling life despite the fact that they were not unified by one true passion. As I explored how I had accomplished the success, a formula started to emerge. And the more I read about personal development, the more these same principles kept showing up, which means that this is time-tested wisdom. Now, I'm not an entrepreneurial unicorn who can tell you how to go from idea to IPO in 18 months. But I'm here today to share with you a formula for success which will accelerate your progress in any focus area in your life. Does that sound good? Yeah. Yeah. So, what's the [Music] formula? Simple. Do it. In an effort to make it memorable and to motivate action, I came up with an acronym that, thanks to Nike's marketing team, should be indelibly etched into all of our long-term memories. Desire, outline, investment, and team. These are the four pieces to the puzzle. Apply this formula with persistence and you will accelerate your success. Napoleon Hill summed it up perfectly when he said, "A burning desire to be and to do is the starting point from which the dreamer must take off. Dreams are not born of indifference, laziness, or lack of ambition." If you remember nothing else from this presentation, I hope you remember this quote. A burning desire, not a weak want, not a casual concept, is the key to success. But we don't talk a lot about desire. We mostly talk about goals, usually smart goals, which are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Using smart guidelines to set our goals means that they are clear and actionable. Sounds great. How is desire different? Desire adds in emotion, which is what will keep us motivated until we cross the finish line. Let's think about why we set goals for a second. If you set a goal to lose weight, do you really care about the number that's on the scale? Or do you care about how good it will feel to be that way? Emotion is the critical component to setting goals. And that is why I propose that we amend the smart guidelines for goals and instead develop smarty goals aka desires where the E stands for emotional. The I is going to stand for internalized and an internalized desire is a desire where we have set it up in such a way that we are in complete control of the outcome. For instance, rather than saying, "I want to be a billionaire, so freaking bad." Which relies on a lot of external factors, it would be better instead to say, "I will become a skilled enough person and will generate enough value to earn a billion dollars." Now, I admit it doesn't sound as catchy. I don't think Bruno Mars is going to be changing the title of the song anytime soon, but being able to maintain motivation and accountability to for our progress by recognizing that we are in complete control of that progress is incredibly important. Now, setting an ambitious desire, even if it's internalized, is simultaneously inspiring and quite daunting. the path is going to be long and we are going to need an outline to help us get there and to help us get back on track when we stumble. Outlines are incredibly important because as I said, they will help you know when you are on course and they will help you know when you're stumbling. If you have an ambitious desire, you can break it down into actionable steps that will allow you to start making progress right now towards that desire. And since it's internalized, as we just discussed, you are in complete control of the outcome, which means there is literally nothing stopping you. To ensure that your outline is effective, you want to keep it realistic and flexible. Now, a realistic outline helps to keep us from getting discouraged. By giving yourself time at the beginning to build momentum through small victories, your success becomes much more likely. A flexible outline allows us to adjust to life changes. Let's say your desire is to read 52 books per year. Right? If your outline stipulates that you read one book per week and then in the second week of January you miss a week, you might be inclined to give up on your entire desire because you've already failed. So you want to set up a flexible outline that will allow you to adjust to those changes and keep working towards your desire. It's important to realize that outlines are valuable even if you don't have all the information that you think you will need. Don't let a lack of information keep you from taking action. Start writing with what you have and continue to review and add detail as you go. Now, a road trip is the best analogy I have ever found for developing and pursuing a desire. And a GPS is the perfect way to explain just how powerful an outline is. A GPS knows where you are at any given moment and it knows the available paths to take you to your destination. More importantly, it can adjust your course if you make a wrong turn or if you encounter any sort of a roadblock on your way. Can you see how that's similar to pursuing a desire? Now, the GPS has is as close an outline if it's written and regularly reviewed is as close as we can possibly come to having an LPS or a life positioning system. But by having that outline, we are able to see whether or not we are still on course towards our desire. The satellite, the GPS has a little bit of an advantage though because it has satellites orbiting the planet at all times that provide a fixed frame of reference. We need to identify sources of objective feedback that we can use to determine whether or not we are still making progress and if we are still on course towards our desire and they need to be feed sources of feedback that will allow us to be honest with ourselves. If we do this, we can adjust our outlines accordingly. One of the biggest challenges about setting an ambitious desire is changing your mindset. Your mind has an image of yourself and your life in it right now. And it goes to work every single day to bring that into reality. Therefore, changing our reality requires changing our minds. Let's go back to our road trip for a second. Once you've decided to go on a road trip, you will often imagine yourself in the destination. You might think about how good the sun will feel or how tasty the food will be. And if you can't imagine yourself in that destination, you're going to find it a lot more mo hard a lot more difficult to get motivated to make the trip. Luckily, that same imagination that allows you to get excited about a road trip will help you to get excited about pursuing your desires. Make it a part of your outline to regularly visualize yourself and your life as if you have already achieved your desire. And your brain will go to work to bring it to fruition. So what happens? You get excited by your desire. You start to build your outline and you begin to take action. And then you encounter a cost. To use the road trip analogy again, you come to a toll booth and you realize you didn't bring enough money. Let's imagine that your outline involves going to the gym every single day after work or class, but then some co-workers or classmates come up and they say, "Hey, let's let's go out and and get drinks afterwards instead. Would you go?" For many of us, these sorts of choices are enough to derail our entire journeys and to send us back home. Every desire, every success will require investment and sacrifice. And the bigger your desire, the higher the cost. If you decide ahead of time what you are willing to invest and sacrifice to achieve your desire, then you will find it much easier to make these tough choices when they arise. Think of it like getting an easy pass for your car. You've already prepaid the tolls, so you don't even have to slow down and decide whether or not it's worth it. You just keep on making progress towards your destination. Sorry. Your investment is likely to evolve along with your outlines and desires. So, it's important that it is written and reviewed also along with the rest of this formula. And before you start getting daunted thinking about the investment that you're going to have to make to pursue your desires, specifically in terms of time, I want you to remember that time is a lot like money. We can either invest it in the future or spend it in the moment. Choosing not to invest in your pursuing your desires is choosing to spend your time in the moment. So if you're not investing it, where are you spending it? Social media, binge watching Netflix. Now, I'm not trying to say you have to give up all of your indulgences and everything that you enjoy in life. All I'm saying is that every hour that you invest in pursuing your desire is an hour that you are investing in your future success. Few big things are accomplished by a sole individual. Even if the task is accomplished solo, the team is still critical to prepare that individual. And there are four different types of people that you will find on your team. The first are supporters. Now, these are the people that will pick you up when you stumble and will help you to celebrate your successes. Then we have teammates. These are the people that are struggling alongside you in the trenches. They are facing similar if not identical challenges and you will all grow by helping each other to overcome them. Then you have your competitors and these are the people that keep us motivated. They are often striving for similar goals and they are the ones that will help you to keep digging deeper. Finally, we have our mentors and mentors are people that provide insight, information and perspective. Mentors are the most important part of your team when it comes to accelerating success. Top level mentors are expensive, but they are worth it. You will learn more in 30 minutes working with someone who has spent their entire life doing what you are trying to do than you will in 30 weeks working with someone who is only a few steps ahead. Mentors can offer you can help you recognize pitfalls and opportunities which will save you lots of time and money on your journey. Think of them like the friendly local that knows a shortcut to help you bypass traffic on the road trip. The greatest road trip that you can possibly imagine will never happen if you don't take action. The car can be ready to go. The route is all picked out. Your teammates are out there waiting. But nothing will happen if you don't leave the house. The same is true for our desires. Don't choose to be paralyzed by fear or by questions of what if. When you stumble, you will have an outline and a team to help you get back on track. So dare to be bold. I want to make it clear that just because you have a formula to accelerate your success doesn't mean that it's going to be easy. Big changes are hard and you're going to have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. When I was traveling back and forth to Montreal for ballroom dancing, I would leave here after working a full day, drive for 2 hours up to Montreal, dance for 4 hours, and then leave to drive another 2 hours back. Usually arriving about 1:00 in the morning and then getting up at 6:00 a.m. to do it all over again. I don't need to tell you that I was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted when I would leave to start that long, dark drive home. As I was driving along and replaying the hours of investment and struggle, I found myself thinking, why am I doing this? Why don't I just take it easy? I almost gave up many times because of those thoughts. When I would reach those low points, I was reminded of a quote that my grandfather gave to my family decades ago. It was handwritten on a pink index card and it sat on the side of our fridge year after year. I must have read that quote a thousand times and it came to me in those little moments reminding me of my desire and refueling my tanks. To close my talk, I'm going to share that quote with you in the hopes that at some point when you are pursuing your ambitious desire, you will find some solace in it and it will help you to keep going. The quote comes from one of Vermont's famous sons, Calvin Culage. It's most frequently attributed to him and it reads, "Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. There's nothing more common than unsuccessful men of talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. Persistently apply the framework of do it by defining your desire, your outline, your investment, and your team. and dare to take action and you will accelerate your success. Thank you.