STEP 5
Find your purpose and passion.
This step will help you understand the power of living your life with a clear purpose and passion. It helps you create the vision, goals, and plans you need to turn attitude into action.
In my first seven years at IBM, I was eager to please but I didn’t have any direction for my career within the company. I was just hoping to find a comfortable and secure place, probably as a salesman, someday. At first, I was excited just to be at Big Blue. Basketball hadn’t worked out. I obviously wasn’t cut out to be an apprentice painter in Alaska. Given my lack of other options, I felt fortunate to be granted a job by one of America’s most admired and powerful companies.
It didn’t take long for my attitude to change. It deteriorated into feelings of frustration and resentment. Why didn’t I get a better territory? Their sales numbers weren’t any better than mine. I’ll never get promoted.
Some people join a company and begin swiftly climbing up the corporate ladder. My ladder ran out of rungs, and I joined the IBMalcontent club. I had a long list of excuses for my lack of success. IBM had risen to the top of the Fortune 500 because of its world-famous sales force. For thirty years, electric typewriters had been Big Blue’s primary product, but that was twenty years before I came on the scene. High-tech mainframe computers were the company’s bread and butter when I was hired. Yet I was posted to a low-tech office equipment division where I rarely made a sale, so I couldn’t make my quota, which made me a noncandidate for promotion, according to IBM’s policies.
All Dressed Up with No Passion
or Purpose to Go
I had done my best to fit into the company culture. I wore the right suits, shirts, and ties. I had the sales patter down pat. But my inner dialogue was self-defeating. Maybe I’m in the wrong business. Maybe I’m just not cut out for sales. In my mind, the source of my problems was always external. The negative inner dialogue was the result of a poor attitude, which itself was a symptom of a deeper problem.
It wasn’t IBM. It wasn’t my bosses. It wasn’t my job or my coworkers. It was me. As I’ve noted in previous chapters, often a bad attitude is due to the emotional baggage we carry with us from one stage of life to the next. Sometimes, though, our negative attitudes aren’t products of our past. They can also be an expression of our fear of the future.
When we feel trapped, bogged down, stuck in the mud, and going no place fast, we develop bad attitudes. Then we fall into the blame game. We find fault with everyone and everything around us. Once again, the enemy usually lies within.
Many times we get stuck because we don’t know where we want to go in the first place. Think about the happiest people you know, the people with the most positive, energized attitudes in your school, on the team, in your office, in your family, and in your community. They may be from different walks of life, in different stages of their careers, but it’s highly likely that they have two things in common. Those positively charged people are working on goals (purpose) while doing what they love (passion).
When I set my sights on getting a job with Big Blue, I did it with a very limited vision. I wanted security. I wanted the prestige of working for an internationally recognized corporation. I hadn’t given up after not making the NBA. I had looked for new opportunities and worked hard to pursue them. But my vision was shortsighted. I’d set a goal with no passion or purpose behind it. I wanted to have a job at IBM—period. No wonder I became frustrated once I got inside the company door.
Living for a Purpose
What happened to me at IBM is a case study of how a change in attitude can change your life.
I’d been a marketing representative in the IBM Product Center Store in Seattle for nearly three years when my regional manager told me that it was time I moved into another position. He was right. I was burned out. It was just a job to me. A safe, secure job, but hardly one I could get excited about. I was doing just well enough to hold on to the job and not badly enough to be fired, which isn’t saying much, since at that point IBM still prided itself on retaining its people.
I was in a rut and had no idea of what else I was qualified to do within the company. My self-confidence was at an all-time low. Fortunately, there were a few people within the company who saw more in me than I saw in myself. Since I’d won a marketing excellence award for my sales presentation skills, my regional manager thought I might make a good training instructor for the company.
Training instructors conduct classes for new IBM employees, teaching them sales and marketing techniques as well as the basics of IBM products. I’d been through most of the training programs. I’d had some great instructors who could make the most mundane class interesting, and I’d had others whose classes were like watching paint dry. So I had a fair idea of what worked and didn’t work for a trainer. A friend of mine, Ervin Smith, an instructor, thought I would be a good instructor too. He had recommended me to his boss, who talked with my regional manager and invited me to fill in for two weeks as a guest instructor in Atlanta.
My negative inner dialogue kicked in as soon as they told me about it. Will I be able to master the technical material in such a short time? I won’t be able to answer questions from all of those smart trainees. Comfort zones can be treacherous. I wasn’t even that comfortable as a marketing rep. I just didn’t want to leave the familiar for the unfamiliar, no matter how frustrated I was. It was not where I wanted to be, but I didn’t see any particularly enticing options anywhere else.
I wasn’t happy where I was, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was angry about standing still but afraid to move. A great many people are in the same situation. They hang onto dissatisfying, dead-end jobs because they are afraid to make a move. Here’s a news flash for them: If you don’t make a move, sooner or later, life makes a move on you.
That’s exactly what happened to me. My regional manager took me to lunch one day to break it to me gently. “You aren’t going anywhere as a marketing rep,” he said. “You’ve got to go see if you can make it as a trainer in Atlanta. That’s an order.”
Once the boss kicked me out of the comfort zone and made it clear that I was going to Atlanta whether I liked it or not, I woke up and changed my approach. I became Mr. Positive Attitude. “If I go down there, I won’t let you down,” I told him. “I will be the best. I will do the job better than anyone has ever done it.”
By the time I got to the Atlanta training school, I was pumped up. I was determined that no one was going to nod off, complete a crossword puzzle, or write a doctoral thesis during my classes. I wanted their full attention, and I was going to earn it. It was show time, and I was the headliner. Strange things happen when you leave a comfort zone and turn your attitude into action.
Once I got up in front of those raw IBM recruits, I knew that I’d found my passion.
There was one problem. IBM didn’t need a trainer in Atlanta at that particular moment. When I told my bosses I’d found my purpose and passion, I ran right into a wall of bureaucratic brick. “There aren’t any openings in that position right now, and besides, you know that IBM promotes people based on performance. Your sales numbers aren’t that great. You aren’t even the top salesperson in your store!”
I’d been ready to pack my bags for Georgia. Instead, the old bad attitude baggage was handed back to me. Even worse, a new manager was sent to our store. He suggested I might be put on probation if my sales numbers didn’t get better. This new manager hadn’t read my personnel file so he didn’t know about my stint as a trainer. He didn’t know that I was dejected because I had found my purpose and passion only to run into a roadblock.
Before I could convince the boss that I wasn’t a deadbeat, another bomb dropped. IBM sold its stores. It was getting out of the retail business. If I wanted to stay with the company, I had to go back for forty weeks of intense training in mainframe sales. Basically, they were asking me to start from scratch. If I didn’t do well in my classes, I’d probably be tossed out the door.
I was discouraged as I began the training classes, but there was something about the training environment that stirred up the fire in me again. I was fascinated by the techniques of the instructors. Some were not all that good, but I learned a bit from each of them. Working in the retail stores was challenging, but being in the classroom lifted my spirits. It gave me a new focus and purpose—to become an IBM training instructor.
Have you heard the saying “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”? My new boss was a young guy, Craig Kairis, who had trained under me as a new IBM hire. We’d established a rapport and remained friends. His first words to me when he came to work as my boss were “This company doesn’t recognize your talent. I’m going to help you show them!”
Throughout my career at IBM, I had a support team. Craig had been part of that team since his first years with the company. From the minute Craig became my manager, we sat down and mapped out a strategic plan to realize my goal of becoming a training instructor. He was in charge of a major IBM product announcement that all of the employees in the region were to attend. Craig arranged for me to be a presenter, to showcase my speaking skills. During my brief twenty-minute presentation, I raised the level of enthusiasm in the room. If you’d been standing outside the meeting room, you would have sworn there was a spiritual revival going on. I had those salespeople on their feet, shouting Hallelujah!
The one person who didn’t make the meeting was the branch manager who’d been blocking my attempts to become an IBM sales school instructor. When he returned from vacation, there was an e-mail message from his boss wanting to know who Keith Harrell was and why he wasn’t conducting every product introduction meeting and teaching others how to do it.
In the weeks that followed, I got call after call from managers around the region wanting me to do program events for them. Meanwhile, back in my sales territory, my numbers were up because Craig was giving me support like I’d never had before.
I had purpose. I had passion. I was on a roll. At the end of the year, my name came up for promotion, but the branch manager again stepped in my path. He insisted that I complete one year on a large account team in mainframe computer sales because he thought that would enhance my career. But Craig had been working behind the scenes, promoting my talents to the other members of the management team. When the branch manager balked at letting me go, the other managers outvoted him. The rest of the management team stood up for me. They saw that I had a purpose and a passion, and they bought into my vision.
Lack of Vision Will Get You Lost
Have you shared your vision with those who might help you? Write down what you want to do, for whom, and for what purpose. Make a chart of how you intend to pursue your vision. The “how” will help you put your attitude into action. People who don’t understand the importance of goals are always running into walls. They have a poor attitude because of their shortsightedness. They are out of synch with life. They don’t know what they want, so they aren’t prepared when opportunities arise.
Write this on your hands, on your bedroom ceiling, on your forehead (backward if you tend to look in the mirror): You have to know what you want before you can go after it! When you go shopping, do you walk around the mall, identify every item that you don’t want, and then buy what’s left? Or do you go there knowing what you want, find it, and buy it? Why would you lead your life any differently? Why would you go to work for a corporation, play on a sports team, be in a relationship, or live your life without some sense of purpose, direction, or goal? As that great wise man, philosopher, and catcher Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”
Going goalless is like trying to drive to an unfamiliar address in a new town without a road map or directions. You might eventually get where you’re going, but chances are you’ll pull over in frustration or settle for a “suitable” substitute. To avoid being bounced around, you need to set priorities. Goals are the means for doing that.
We all share certain goals. Once we have the basic goals of food, shelter, clothing, and cable television covered, we begin to set other goals that are more specific to our unique nature and our priorities. When you have well-defined goals, you are far less likely to develop a bad attitude. If you suspect that you are carrying around a negative attitude because you’ve arrived someplace other than where you really want to be, then it’s time to sit down with paper and pen and do a little soul-and goal-searching. Here is a quick attitude assessment designed to determine if you’re suffering from a lack of purpose and passion.
ATTITUDE ASSESSMENT
NEGATIVE INNER DIALOGUE CAUSED BY BEING—
GOALLESS AT WORK
GOALLESS AT SCHOOL
GOALLESS IN YOUR PERSONAL LIFE
If any of that self-talk sounds familiar, you may be lacking purpose, and most definitely passion, in one or more of these areas. You’ll notice that there’s a lot of blaming going on in those bits of dialogue. When you hear that in your inner dialogue, the bad attitude alarms should go off. Those are the early warning signs that you’ve abdicated your primary responsibility to take charge of your life.
Goals are tools for focusing your life, taking responsibility, and getting you to take action. Achieving goals is just part of what is really important—the quality of life you experience, the person you become, and the difference you make in the lives of others as you pursue and achieve your goals.
It’s Not the Destination,
It’s the Journey
I discovered the principle behind that philosophy while playing basketball in high school. When we won the state championship, it dawned on me that getting the title and the trophy wasn’t the real reward. It was the season-long experience of being with guys who played well together, improved together, and then celebrated each other’s contributions to the winning effort. Realizing that did wonders for my attitude. I always felt that I was working on something. The sense of being in control gave me energy and focus.
When I went to work for IBM, I hadn’t taken the time to identify my purpose or my passion. Instead of taking responsibility for my life, I was looking for shelter. I’d just lost my passion for basketball and my purpose, playing in the NBA. I was still recovering from that disappointment.
Some people are fortunate enough to identify a passion early on and then build their goals and their lives around pursuing that passion. Often they are people with the most obvious talents: writers, musicians, athletes, singers, mechanics, chefs, and others whose natural gifts are easily channeled into a life’s purpose.
When I lost the opportunity to play basketball professionally, I thought I’d lost my purpose and passion. I spent several years wandering around with an attitude of disappointment at IBM before I realized that I hadn’t lost them, I’d only misplaced them.
Looking back, I can see now that I came close to discovering my real passion once or twice. About a year before I was sent to be a guest trainer, I got a call at work late on a Friday afternoon from an IBM manager. She was frantic. There was a Career Day for five hundred high-achieving minority high school seniors—all of them standouts in math and science—that weekend. IBM’s representative, a systems engineer, had been scheduled to speak but she’d had to cancel because of a family emergency. They needed someone to replace her. Would I go?
My initial response was You want me? I didn’t major in science or math in college. Then it dawned on me. There were two obvious reasons I’d been called:
No. 1: It’s Friday. Everybody else has probably already gone home or made plans for the weekend.
No. 2: It’s a minority Career Day.
Based on those two criteria, I was the perfect man for the job. I also didn’t have a good excuse for turning them down, and I figured it might help raise my profile at IBM and in the community. The Career Day was to be held the next day from 9 A.M. until noon on the University of Washington campus. The next morning I woke up at 7 A.M. in a panic. I called my best buddy at IBM, Ralph Bianco, and asked him what I should talk about. He told me to tell the story of how I went from hoping to play pro basketball to not getting drafted and then to preparing myself for an IBM job. “It’s a good story about winning and losing and setting yourself up for opportunities. Why don’t you talk about attitude? You’re always talking about the difference it makes,” Ralph said.
When I arrived at the Career Day, I ran into Robert Lee, my high school math teacher, who was in charge of the event. He was happy to see me. The other speakers were an imposing bunch: local celebrities, public officials, and businesspeople from a wide range of professions. Each person was allotted twenty minutes to talk and five minutes to answer questions. I was way down on the schedule, so I took a seat in the back of the auditorium. The first few people were so inspiring I began to take notes. I was getting more out of it than most of the kids. I didn’t see any of them taking notes, and most of them looked bored. As I listened, I got excited because nobody was really talking about the things I wanted to cover.
The adrenaline was really starting to flow as my turn drew near. Just before I was supposed to speak, Robert Lee made an announcement: “I’m sorry, but because our speakers have been so enthusiastic, we’ve run out of time,” he said. “We won’t be able to get to the remaining speakers, but we appreciate their coming this morning.”
Before I realized what I was doing, I was on my feet. “We can’t stop now,” I yelled from the back of the room. “You can’t wrap it up, Mr. Lee. I’ve got some things I want to share.”
My old teacher realized that I was on a mission. “It looks like perhaps we’ve saved our best speaker for last,” he told the group.
I talked for thirty minutes nonstop. I told the students what I had learned about self-esteem, motivation, and the power of attitude. I was in a zone.
When I finished, they gave me a standing ovation. One woman came up and said, “You remind me of some of the motivational speakers at the Amway conventions!”
Dreams with Deadlines
I was fired up about public speaking after that Career Day appearance, but I didn’t go anywhere with the passion that it stirred. I didn’t have the vision to see what I could do with my natural-born ability for public speaking. I simply didn’t connect that passion to any purpose or goal. It took me more than a year to see how I could channel my passion for public speaking into a purpose as a trainer at IBM.
It’s up to you to set goals and direct your passion at a purpose. Start making changes today that will get you to where you want to be tomorrow. Dare to dream, and then set deadlines for realizing those dreams.
Take some quiet time today and write down your dreams for your life. What do you enjoy doing? What can you do for hours and hours and enjoy so much that you lose track of time? What are you better at than anyone you know? It doesn’t have to be a great and unique talent like playing the harp or building skyscrapers. The level of your talent isn’t nearly as important as the intensity of your passion.
I will never be the orator that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., was, but I can do my best to be what God has blessed me to be. I encourage you to do the same. Maybe you have musical talent and want to share that gift with others. There are many paths to pursue, including performing, teaching, composing, recording, publishing, selling, or booking musical talent.
When you’ve identified your purpose and passion, put a deadline on it. Don’t make it a vague wish. You don’t want to say, “I want to make a lot of money soon.” That won’t get you anywhere. Instead, set a goal of making an exact amount by an exact date. The more specific, the better.
Once you have defined your goal or goals, make a list of smaller goals that can be achieved in the short term. These are the mini-goals that will take you step-by-step toward your greater goals. Date the smaller goals. If your goal is to go back to school and get your MBA, set mini-goals for raising the tuition or applying for a scholarship. Other mini-goals for that major goal might be selecting a school, getting an application form, filling it out and submitting it, and selecting a course of study. Or maybe your goal is to get a promotion at work. Your mini-goals could include selecting the position you want to be promoted to, talking with your supervisors about what you need to do to get that job, and then setting those tasks as mini-goals along the way.
CREATE A WORK-LIFE GAME PLAN
Here is a blueprint to assist you in designing your own Work-Life Game Plan.
David’s goal is to become a regional director of sales in ten years. As a recent college graduate, he’s starting at an entry-level position within the corporation.
Primary Long-Term Goal: I will be promoted to regional director of sales.
CREATE A PRIVATE-LIFE GAME PLAN
Below is a blueprint to assist you in designing your own Private-Life Game Plan.
Shortly after graduating from high school Pat began working full-time in the corporate offices of a major retailer in California. One of her life-long goals is to earn an advanced degree in order to work as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution. She has designed a ten-year life plan that incorporates her four primary goals.
Primary Long-Term Goals:
Earn a bachelor’s degree in Art History
Spend quality time with family and friends
Relocate to the Washington, D.C., area
Work as a curator at the Smithsonian
I suggest that you reread your game plans at least twice a week as a positive reinforcement. Every time you do that, you implant the goals more deeply into your subconscious mind. Your conscious mind acts upon what your subconscious mind believes.
When you’re presented with change, setting goals will make the unfamiliar easier to deal with. But it’s important to stay flexible within your plans. Keep in mind that there will be changes within the changes. A friend of mine who works in the infomercial industry says that every decision in her business is “written on sand at low tide.” Whatever is decided today will be changed tomorrow, when the tide comes in and wipes the sand clean. Your goals will change as your circumstances change. Flexibility is vital.
In his book The Wisdom of Your Subconscious Mind, John K. Williams says there are four powers of the subconscious mind that we must all remember.
Develop a Complete Game Plan
When I first started playing basketball as a boy, I put together a game plan to improve my basketball skills. My first step was to figure out where I was in comparison with other players, where I needed to be, and how to get there. Obviously I needed the benefit of someone else’s expertise, a coach who could provide direction and assess my abilities. My dad stepped up and helped me considerably. He preached the virtue of “practice makes for improvement” and found ways to build my confidence and self-esteem as I was learning the fundamentals. He also encouraged me to build the body strength necessary for competitive play so that I was strong enough to be an offensive threat and a tough defender.
One of the interesting things my father did to motivate me was to lower the basketball goal in our driveway from the standard ten feet to eight feet. He noticed that because it was a strain for me to get the ball up to the hoop at the standard height, I was throwing the ball like a shot-putter instead of shooting it. He lowered the hoop to help me develop a better shooting style, and as I grew taller and stronger, he raised it so that I made the adjustment gradually.
My father did the same thing in helping me create a plan to become a better player. He helped me to set small, reachable goals as a defensive move to fend off an attitude of frustration and impatience. As I reached those goals or skill levels, we set new goals. In addition, I began to watch college and pro games to increase my understanding of the sport. It was there that I found my first basketball heroes, who became my goal models. Everyone needs goal models—those who have been down a path similar to the one you hope to take and achieved goals similar to those you’ve set for yourself. Goal models help you by directing you, by taking you through the steps necessary to realize your dreams.
I followed a growth policy in selecting my basketball goal models. I changed them as I grew, always moving to those players who were my height. When I was six-feet-two-inches tall in the sixth grade, Jerry West was my hero. When I hit six-four, I switched to Pistol Pete Maravich. I studied their moves at the positions they played. It really did help me improve my game.
My goal-modeling wasn’t limited to watching the pros play. I also read about them. I wanted to know more than how good they were. I wanted to know how they got that way. Many people study and admire successful people, wanting similar results without understanding their challenges, obstacles, preparation, and the price they had to pay to achieve their success. Once I learned what my goal models did to achieve their level of mastery, I knew what I had to do and the price I had to pay to be successful.
I studied my goal models. I read that when Pistol Pete was developing his game, he treated the basketball like his girlfriend. He gave it a name and took it with him everywhere he went, including to the movies. I called my basketball Diane.
Pistol Pete also practiced dribbling and shooting in the gym with the lights out so that he could learn to play by feel and instinct rather than by watching the ball or the hoop. I did the same thing. My mom refers to it as my “Helen Keller” training regimen. Pistol could dribble and shoot equally well with either hand, so I worked on my left-hand coordination. I’d eat, brush my teeth, and comb my hair with my left hand. This will explain to my old classmates why I always had all those food stains on my clothing.
I put a lot into basketball in my teenage years because it was a passion for me, and I had a purpose. I wanted to be a high school All-American, a college All-American, and an NBA All-Star. I had a great attitude while I was working on those goals. In high school, people told me I was too skinny to be any good, but I became an All-American. I think the key to my success was that with my father’s help, I had developed an overall game plan with both an offense and a defense geared to keeping my attitude positive and my self-confidence high.
Attitude Tune-Up
There are two great moments in a person’s life. The first is when you are born. The second is when you discover why you were born.
—UNKNOWN