BOOK EXCERPT

Success is Not an Accident

By Tommy Newberry
Looking Glass Books

Choose Who You Want to Become

WHAT’S YOUR DREAM?

You might initially recognize one particular thing as your ultimate vision or dream. For some, this dream will shake the entire world. For others, it will soothe just one tiny home. In either case, the world will be left a better place.

Sooner or later, we are all confronted with the question of whether we are living on purpose — whether or not we are heeding our call and following our ultimate vision. No matter how far you may have strayed from your true place, you can always find it again.

Your true place is always waiting for you because no one but you can fill it. That’s a great thought! So take comfort in knowing that every experience you have ever had, no matter how seemingly unrelated, can be used to your advantage in your true place when you finally find it. And you will find it . . . if you will wholeheartedly look for it.

Are you now serving God by becoming each day a little more like the person he wants you to become? Your purpose is not something to achieve; rather, it is something to be satisfied and quenched. So who are you becoming here on earth? Throughout your life, you will be changing constantly and becoming someone new, either slightly or extensively different from the previous version of yourself. With each change, you will either move closer to your true place or move further away.

For most people, change just happens. Change is considered an external event that occurs randomly and haphazardly. Most people allow themselves to be molded and thrown off course by their circumstances. But as James Allen writes in his book As a Man Thinketh, “Circumstance does not make a man, it reveals him.”1 This is a critical principle of human nature.

EXCELLENCE IS INEVITABLE!

Now let’s move a little deeper into the concept of Genius, and in particular, how it applies to your work.

This is where you are capable of making the greatest contribution in the world. Excellence is inevitable once you find this Genius. How do you find your Genius? First, determine what you naturally enjoy. Ask yourself what you’d do all day long if money were not a factor. Only when you really love what you do as much as a cherished hobby will you have what it takes to generate tremendous results. A Genius is someone who believes in the ideas that God sends and then takes action.

What is God whispering in your ear? What do you secretly want to do with your life? Exercise the courage to honestly identify where you have been uniquely blessed — where you have special talents and abilities. If you don’t know, pray about it. Ask your spouse. Ask your friends. But seek it out. I believe you have the ability to become outstanding in at least one thing if you are selective and if you throw your whole heart into becoming the best. You must give up all hope of becoming excellent — and enjoying the abundant opportunities that come with it — if you can’t lose yourself with enthusiasm for what you do. As the old saying goes, “Do what you love — love what you do.” Start thanking God it’s Monday!

GENIUS IS AS GENIUS DOES

I have been emphasizing the concept of Genius, which is the ability to focus on your unique strength to the exclusion of all else. This is accomplished by identifying your Genius and then over a period of years eliminating all those activities that interfere with it or oppose it.

The concept of Genius is closely aligned with two major principles of peak personal performance:

The Strength Principle, which is that by focusing on your strengths, you ultimately render your weaknesses irrelevant
The 80/20 Principle, which is that 80 percent of your results come from only 20 percent of your inputs

Let’s examine this by more closely defining your Genius. We’re not talking about Einstein genius; we’re talking about entrepreneurial or performance genius. Sometimes I call it Forrest Gump genius, meaning it’s a way of acting. To paraphrase Forrest’s mother, “Genius is as Genius does.” Your Genius is a set of related activities that collectively produce superior rewards in the marketplace. Whether you’re a star athlete, a pastor, a business leader, an FBI agent, an entrepreneur, a stay-at-home parent, or a teacher, you have a marketplace — a group of people you are charged with serving. When you operate in your Genius, you produce outstanding results. Best of all, these outcomes are generated with a disproportionately small but extremely calculated investment of time and effort.

Your Genius is where you are most fully leveraged. You can achieve far more with less time, effort, and energy. In many fields, this means you will be able to work less and earn even more by significantly increasing the dollar value of each hour of your time. For others, you will simply be much more productive. By operating within your Genius, you can do less but become much more. Your Genius is where you’re capable of making the greatest difference in the world.

Almost everyone has experienced brief glimpses of Genius, yet only a small minority have capitalized on their latent potential and transformed it into their daily operating system.

Seven Clues to Help You Identify Your Genius

Passion. Your area of Genius will always be characterized by enthusiasm, intense interest, and pure fun. This passion will be difficult to turn off, even when you’re away from work. You’ll have boundless energy; working in your area of Genius will energize you physically,
mentally, and emotionally. When you do experience fatigue, it will be accompanied by a powerful sense of satisfaction.

Rapid and Continuous Learning. In your area of Genius, you’ll notice that learning new information takes little time. New concepts are easily visualized and quickly integrated into your existing knowledge base. Just as important, the learning process is fun, and neverending improvement comes naturally.

Strong Memory. Your area of Genius is characterized by a vivid, clear, almost perfect memory. Facts, figures, dates, names, conversations, and key points related to your Genius activities are effortlessly recalled when needed.

Flow. When you’re operating in your Genius, you’ll tend to get totally immersed in what you’re doing. World-class athletes sometimes refer to being “in the zone” when they’re totally absorbed in the present moment and able to shut out everything else.

Using Intuition. In your Genius, you’ll naturally tap into and be inclined to follow your intuitive hunches, and most importantly, you will be right. Expect to experience a strong, instinctual knowing that helps you make quick, positive decisions to move you toward your goal.

Absence of Burnout. By operating in your Genius, you will insulate yourself from burnout. Since you’ll be doing what you do best and most love to do, you will get more done in less time and be happier, healthier, and much more balanced. Burnout is the mental, emotional,
and physical consequence of overwork in an area of weakness or non-Genius. Burnout is the breaking-point result of accumulated resistance to non-Genius activity.

Yearning. When you experience a deep desire that just won’t go away, it’s a strong sign that you may be approaching your Genius. Several summers ago, one of my sons kept holding a ball underneath the water in the hot tub. When he released it, it would shoot like a rocket to the surface and up into the air. He seemed to get a kick out of this process, especially when the ball smacked his dad in the face. No matter how deep he held the ball or how often he repeated this exercise, the ball still shot up to the surface. And this is exactly how a yearning works. No matter how often or how deeply you try to bury it, it will keep emerging until you do something about it. Your Genius is longing to be released once and for all.

The “Wing-It” Factor. Have you ever attempted something, completed it with very little effort or preparation, and then received tremendous feedback and praise? This means you “winged it” and got away with it. This can be a great clue to your Genius. If you have the talent to wing it and get great results, how well could you do with a little more preparation? How well could you do with a lot more practice? One of the biggest performance mistakes people make is continuing to wing it because they can, rather than investing the effort and time to make it to the top one percent. Where do you still wing it? It’s worth thinking about.

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