photo by Net Efekt 

Imagine that all of the money, influence and power in your world is a pie (apple in this case).  Now imagine hundreds…no thousands…of people in your industry, your geographic space, your niche of business all vying for their piece of that pie!  There is no way there’s enough pie to go around – if you’re going to get the pie you need it’s clear that you need to step on people, be ruthless and constantly be looking out for yourself.  You must win at all costs!

Sound overblown?  Unfortunately it’s not – it’s called a scarcity mentality and most people default to this mentality unless they actively guard against it.  Here’s Stephen Covey’s take (from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Habit #4 Think Win-Win):

Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the Scarcity Mentality….

The Scarcity Mentality is the zero-sum paradigm of life. People with a Scarcity Mentality have a very difficult time sharing recognition and credit, power or profit – even with those who help in the production. The also have a a very hard time being genuinely happy for the success of other people.

It’s an insidious problem because it gets worse with fear, so if you start to struggle in your business, you will shift to more of a scarcity mindset, which brings on more fear, less collaboration and ultimately makes all the problems worse! 

You start looking at all transactions as a Win-Lose proposition – you have to win and the other person has to lose (‘cause there’s only so much to go around).  However Win-Lose relationships aren’t sustainable and you’ll soon find yourself alone against the world wondering why everyone has turned on you!

Overall it’s a pretty bleak picture (especially since we started with apple pie!).

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  photo by terren in virginia 

Success is all about finding your strengths (what you’re better at than almost anyone else) and figuring out how to leverage those strengths to reach your goals.  Once you know what you’re good at, what you really enjoy doing and how to translate that into something that others will pay for, then it becomes a matter of refining your model and adding in more traits.

I was reflecting on what makes people successful recently and decided to ask my clients that are in my Peer Group Advisory boards to find out what has led them to the success they’re having to this point.  I was expecting that we would end up with 2 or 3 key points, but surprising (to me at least) everyone had a different key that really reflected on their particular strengths.  They were all great points and things that almost anyone could use to be more successful, but it makes sense that you have to figure out what’s going to work for you.

We ended up with 10 different success traits – would any of these be your first choice?

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photo by Tony the Misfit

I had a couple of great meetings last week with the kind of people that I would like to hang around with (or work with).

I imagine everyone knows that person that’s always happy – you know the one that can almost be annoying except that they make you smile.

On the other side of the coin, you probably also know those people that are never happy.  They start an awful lot of sentences with “Yes…but” and proceed to tell you in great detail why something won’t work.

It can be incredibly draining to deal with the negative people (and these days there’s more of them than ever!).

The great news is that for the most part you get to choose who you hang out with.  (Family might be a little challenging, but in almost every other case, you have a lot of influence).

If you really want to experience success, enjoy what you do and transform all of those hours of work into something you look forward to, give some thought to the people around you. 

Here are the 3 things you need to do:

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Ben Franklin was an amazing man – most people are familiar with several of his more famous inventions.  As an outcome of his studies of electricity he invented the lightning rod.  He also invented the bi-focal glasses that he’s often pictured with (he was both near and far sighted and got frustrated with having to switch glasses while he was working).

Beyond that, he’s also credited with creating the first Fire Insurance Company, he came up with the idea behind Daylight Savings Time and he helped form the first Library (as their known today) in 1731.

However, in addition to all of those great accomplishments, Franklin is also arguably the father of Social Networking (at least as it pertains to business). 

One of the better definitions of Networking that I’ve seen comes from Bob Burg – author of Endless Referrals:

Networking is the cultivating of mutually beneficial, give and take, win-win relationships.

Old Ben certainly knew a thing or two about the power of relationships and networking – even back in the 1700s!  He drove a lot of the ideas that make networking what it is today.

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