Today’s Dadly Daily Declaration comes from Chapter 11 (titled #1. When You’re a Cleaner…You don’t have to love the work, but you’re addicted to the results.) of Tim Grover’s book, Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable. In this chapter, Grover discusses what it takes to be a professional, what it takes to be a Cleaner within your business or profession, and gives advice on how to be a professional.
There are a few gems from this chapter, including the following:
- “There are no shortcuts, and there is no luck. People always say “good luck” in a pressure situation. No. It’s not about luck…There are facts and opportunities and realities, and how you respond to them determines whether you succeed or fail…When the game is on the line, you don’t want to hear “good luck”; it suggests you’re not prepared. When you’re headed to a job interview, you don’t need luck. You need to know you’re prepared and in control, and you’re not relying on some random events or mystical intervention. Luck becomes a convenient excuse when things don’t go your way, and a rationale for staying comfortable while you wait for luck to determine your fate. You can’t be relentless if you’re willing to gamble everything on the unknown.”
- Ask yourself honestly, what would you have to sacrifice to have what you really want? Your social life? Relationships? Credit cards? Free time? Sleep? Now answer this question: What are you willing to sacrifice? If those two lists don’t match up, you don’t want it badly enough.
- Anyone can start something. Few can finish. Priorities change if you don’t constantly protect and defend them. You stop caring about keeping up with the competition, unless you mean the competition to have more stuff than the next guy, and instead of being addicted to building your career and your legacy, you become addicted to building bigger houses and more garages and adding more names to the party list. And pretty soon, you’re just part of a long list of nobodies with declining talent who bumbled themselves out of a job.
- Take care of business. Show up ready to work every day. Be professional. Do the work. That’s being a professional.
So, here is what I discovered today from this chapter:
If you want to be elite, you have to earn it. Every day, everything you do. Earn it. Prove it. Sacrifice.
No shortcuts. You can’t fight the elephants until you’ve wrestled the pigs, messed around in the mud, handled the scrappy, dirty issues that clutter everyday life, so you can be ready for the heavy stuff later. There’s no way you can be prepared to compete and survive at anything if you start with the elephants; no matter how good your instincts are, you’ll always lack the basic knowledge needed to build your arsenal of attack weapons. And when you’re surrounded by those elephants, they’ll know they’re looking at a desperate newcomer.
