As I think about the seven capacities I’m challenging you to develop in this section of the book—energy, emotional, thinking, people, creative, production, and leadership capacities—I recognize that talent and natural ability come into play with all of them. But of the seven, production capacity can be increased the most regardless of the level of giftedness a person possesses. Production capacity can be increased dramatically and immediately if you are highly intentional about it. If you’re willing to work at it, you can be successful.
No one has ever had to work at limiting their capacity. That happens naturally. The world tries to talk us out of working hard. We convince ourselves that we can’t get ahead. We feel down, and we watch our lives go downhill. There are even people who will tell you that others have put you there, that the system is rigged, that successful people have pushed you down and have gotten to the top by stepping on you.
Well, I have good news for you. I’m successful, and I don’t intend to push you down. Instead, I want to help you get up and get going and live a productive life. Your production capacity is within your own control, and I believe that what you are about to read can change your life—if you let it.
I want to begin by telling you the truth: everything worthwhile in life—everything you want, everything you desire to achieve, everything you want to receive—is uphill. The problem is that most of us have uphill dreams but downhill habits. And that’s why we have a cap on our production capacity.
Take a look at the difference between a life of downhill sliding and uphill climbing:
DOWNHILL SLIDING: Nothing Worthwhile
UPHILL CLIMBING: Everything Worthwhile
DOWNHILL SLIDING: Low Self-Esteem
UPHILL CLIMBING: High Self-Respect
DOWNHILL SLIDING: Negative Momentum
UPHILL CLIMBING: Positive Momentum
DOWNHILL SLIDING: Losses
UPHILL CLIMBING: Wins
DOWNHILL SLIDING: Low Morale
UPHILL CLIMBING: High Morale
DOWNHILL SLIDING: Not Making a Difference
UPHILL CLIMBING: Making a Difference
DOWNHILL SLIDING: No Improvement
UPHILL CLIMBING: Self-Improvement
DOWNHILL SLIDING: Aimless
UPHILL CLIMBING: Purposeful
DOWNHILL SLIDING: Empty
UPHILL CLIMBING: Fulfilling
If we compare those two lists, we know we don’t want a downhill life. But are we willing to work for an uphill life? That’s the question. So I’ll say it again: Everything worthwhile is uphill. I want you to let that really sink in. I want you to feel the implications of that statement. To help with that, let’s look at the components individually:
Everything is inclusive. It means total, all-encompassing. Nothing is excluded.
Worthwhile is a good word. It means desirable, advisable, appropriate, good for you.
Uphill is demanding. It means the experience is going to be grueling, exhausting, rugged, punishing, strenuous.
The word everything holds promise. We like that. The word worthwhile is attractive. We want what’s worthwhile. But uphill? That’s challenging. Many of us do not want to deal with that.
Downhill is easy. It has no requirements. It doesn’t take any effort. It’s like feeling the effects of gravity, which continually pull us down. You can slide downhill—in your sleep. A downhill lifestyle is characterized by unintentionality, complacency, inconsistency, and excuses. There is no big-picture vision for the future, only instant gratification.
Uphill is hard. Moving uphill requires intentionality, energy, determination, hard work, and consistency. It requires you to keep an eye on the big picture, be determined, demonstrate character, and put in the time. The right thing to do and the hard thing to do are usually the same thing. More and more people resist doing the right thing because it’s hard, so they choose the easy thing. They go downhill instead of uphill.
Civil rights activist Benjamin E. Mays observed, “The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.”
The challenge every person faces in the area of capacity is changing from what you have done to what you are capable of doing. That’s what I want to encourage you to do. I want to challenge you to become an uphill climber. Perhaps you find that intimidating. Maybe you’ve not done as well in the past as you’d like to. And you find it difficult to move forward in this area. If so, let me ask you this: If you won’t do it for yourself, will you do it for your family and friends? The life you choose for you doesn’t begin and end with you. What you do influences others.
If you feel like your life is going downhill instead of upward toward the accomplishment and rewards you desire, you need to change the way you approach productivity. First, you need to own your current level of productivity, whatever it is. You need to see your past productivity as your responsibility alone. Next, you need to learn to embrace uphill practices and habits that will help you to increase your capacity.
I want to help you with productivity. And I’m going to try to do that by acquainting you with a friend of mine named Paul Martinelli. He is the president of the John Maxwell Team. Every day he climbs uphill and leads thousands of certified coaches to climb with him. I’ve met few people in my life with his ability to produce. In 2011, he started with nothing but an idea. He approached me along with mutual friend Scott Fay and said, “John, let’s start a world-class coaching company.” It was something I’d never considered before. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. I didn’t know if I wanted to lend my name to people I didn’t know personally, and I wasn’t sure if we could deliver a certification of high value. But Paul was very persuasive, and we decided to partner together. I would give the program my name and teach the coaches my values, and Paul would do all the other work.
Let me tell you, in just six years, Paul has done wonders. He has taken the John Maxwell Team from zero coaches to more that fifteen thousand coaches. He’s grown it from his headquarters in South Florida and spread it to 145 countries around the world. Before he started, he taught a few masterminds (discussion groups) himself to business people he knew personally. Now the coaches are leading masterminds all over the world, and nearly a million people have gone through a mastermind led by a certified coach. And starting from zero dollars, Paul estimates that the coaches have generated nearly a billion dollars in revenue in their businesses. If you’re a businessperson, I bet I’ve got your attention now! But you don’t have to be in business to learn from Paul or appreciate his story.
Paul grew up in Mount Lebanon, an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with an older sister and two older brothers. Theirs was a single-parent home, because Paul’s dad left when his mom was pregnant with him. The community they lived in was nice, but they were very poor. You know how some people say, “We grew up poor, but we never knew it”? Paul says, “We grew up poor, and we knew we were poor. We felt it every day.”
Nobody gave Paul much of a chance, because he had a speech impediment. Back in those days, the school system treated him like he was disabled. His friends made fun of him and called him stupid. Paul dealt with that by working. He spent his childhood delivering the morning paper, delivering the evening paper, collecting bottles, selling lightbulbs door-to-door, raking leaves in the fall, and shoveling driveways in the winter. He did whatever he could to make an honest buck.
Paul used his money to help his family. He told me about two of his proudest memories. The first came at Christmas. When Paul was little, he, his mom, and his siblings would wait every year for his father to bring them a Christmas tree. They never knew when he would bring it, and when he did (often not until Christmas Eve), he just left it on the porch. One year Paul thought, Why do we need to wait until Christmas Eve to get our tree? So Paul went out and bought the family’s tree. He was nine.
A few years later, Paul’s brother David was running track in high school, and he was a bit of a track star. But he didn’t have any money to buy real track shoes. That was right when Nikes were coming in. Paul went out and bought his older brother a pair of Nikes for thirty-eight dollars. He was always doing things like that.
By the time he was fifteen, Paul was pretty discouraged with school and decided he’d rather just work. So he dropped out and started work on a roofing crew. But he also joined the Guardian Angels, a group of citizen-volunteers who patrolled the streets to discourage crime. The New York City–based nonprofit organization had been founded in 1979 by Curtis Sliwa. When Guardian Angels started a Pittsburgh chapter, they recruited tough kids who wanted to help people. Paul was one of them.
It took no time at all for Paul to rise up. He quickly recruited a hundred young people into his chapter. He was so good at recruiting and fund-raising that he soon became the number two man in the organization and traveled the country with Sliwa.
When the Guardian Angels wanted to start a new chapter in a city, they sent Paul to lead it. He opened chapters in Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa, and Miami. The last chapter he opened was in Palm Beach, where he eventually relocated. That was during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, and the Palm Beach area was where a lot of the drugs came into the country.
Paul enjoyed his role with the Guardian Angels, but after seven years, the entrepreneurial bug bit him again, and he decided he wanted to start his own business. At Thanksgiving dinner with the entire extended family, over the turkey and lasagna (it was an Italian-American Thanksgiving) he decided to announce his decision.
Back when he had quit high school, his mother had been so angry with him that she had kicked him out of the house. But she and the rest of his family had been proud of the work he was doing with the Guardian Angels. When he made the announcement that he was going to quit the organization to start his own business, time stopped. Paul says it was like everyone at the table dropped their fork at the same time and just stared at him.
“What, are you crazy?”
“What kind of business are you going to do?”
“I’m going to start a cleaning business,” Paul answered.
“A cleaning business! Do you remember what your room looked like when you lived at home? What do you know about cleaning?”
Paul says it was like he suddenly became invisible, and they started to plan his life for him.
“Mamma mia,” said his grandmother, “let’s call Ro.” She meant Paul’s cousin Rose, who worked at the post office. They thought they would save him by finding him a government job.
Undaunted, Paul started his own business at age twenty-two. During the day, he went door-to-door at office buildings, cold-calling to try to get clients to hire this company to clean their offices. At night, he went out and did the cleaning himself. He started with two partners, but in less than a year, they had dropped out. Paul was on his own.
For sixteen years, through many ups and downs, Paul led his company, At Your Service, and grew it into a highly profitable business. He learned a lot of lessons during that time and developed principles of productivity, which I’ll share with you in a moment. But by the time he sold the business, he had one hundred full-time employees cleaning 150 locations every night, including offices, restaurants, country clubs, movie theaters, imaging centers, hospitals, and even a zoo. Paul’s motto was “If it stood still, we cleaned it.”
While he was learning and growing, Paul decided that he wanted to help others become more successful in their careers. So he started to teach them from a book that had changed his life: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. He found it so rewarding that he found an organization that trained and certified him as a speaker. And he started speaking and training people while still running his cleaning business. Within months, he became the most successful entrepreneur in that network of speakers. The organization’s founder discovered this and wanted to hire Paul to run his conference business, so Paul sold At Your Service and changed careers. Five years later, he approached me about starting the John Maxwell Team.
I find Paul’s story remarkable. It illustrates the power of perseverance and productivity. Of his early years, Paul says, “Even though all my programming said you’ve got to play the cards you were dealt, there was a part of me that knew that I could take those cards and throw them back in the center of the table of life. I just didn’t know how to do that. But I just knew all my life that there was something more for me, that I could change my life. I did not know how to articulate that. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know how to do it, but in my heart there was a part of me that knew it was possible.”
Paul found a way, and I want to share that way with you. Paul’s principles can be applied to anything you want to accomplish, whether it’s a business, a nonprofit organization, a home remodel, a sports team—you name it. If you want to increase your production capacity, take these ideas to heart:
Stephen R. Covey advised in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that we should always begin with the end in mind. Paul takes this idea one step further. He calls this “creating a mental model of perfection.” He doesn’t just want to know where he’s going. He wants to visualize the perfect outcome with as much detail as he possibly can. Before we launched the John Maxwell Team, Paul had the end product mapped out in his mind: the teaching team, the number of trained and certified coaches, the number of cities with licensed partners—all of it. He wants to know what perfection looks like, so he can strive to achieve it.
Paul likens this to what a master gardener does. In his mind, he has an image of what a perfect tree looks like. When he goes to prune a tree, he keeps that picture in mind and goes to work. You can see the results of this in bonsai trees that have been carefully cultivated into ideal forms, or in topiaries where a shrub has been sculpted to represent a geometric form or the shape of a familiar character.
Do you have a vision for what you want to accomplish? Have you created a mental model of perfection for what you desire to achieve? If not, you need to work on that. It’s your starting point. Put as much detail to it as you can. Will it actually be perfect? No. But that idea is where you need to start.
Paul’s productivity process starts with the idea of perfection. However, the next step would appear to be in exact opposition to that. Paul calls this suspending the requirement of knowing how. Paul says, “I think for me what makes me productive is that I’m willing to do what I know to do, and not get hung up on what I don’t know to do.” In other words, begin. Do something, anything.
“There are so many people who are not productive because they’ve already made an inventory of everything that they cannot do,” Paul explains, “and that becomes a ‘because.’ ‘I can’t because I don’t know this.’ ‘I can’t because I don’t have the resources.’ ‘I can’t because I don’t have the time.’ ‘I can’t because I don’t have the money.’ ‘I can’t because I don’t have the contacts.’ What I’ve learned to do is just take whatever I do know and allow that to be causative.”
When you want to accomplish something, you have to have a vision for what you’re trying to do, but you also have to be willing to take action in the face of uncertainty. You need to tap into your thinking capacity to know what you’re shooting for, but you also need to have a bias for action to be productive. You have to be willing to take a step, probably a small step.
Most people want to start with one bold certain leap. They want a big head start, a quantum leap. But Paul points out that there are very few quantum leaps. If we’re willing to take one small step, ten small steps, one hundred small steps, then we may have a chance to make a leap later. It may look like an overnight success to others, but we know it’s the result of many small successes. And you don’t achieve those unless you’re willing to take that first uncertain step.
Paul gave me a humorous example of this from his childhood. When he decided to shovel snow to make money, he went to his garage and found a shovel, and off he went, knocking on doors. If you grew up where it snows, like I did in Ohio, you know what a snow shovel looks like. It’s big and wide and has a curved blade to make it easy to pick up lots of snow. What did Paul have? A shovel made for digging holes in the garden.
“I laugh now,” says Paul. “I didn’t have a snow shovel. Everybody else had these very nice snow shovels. I didn’t have that. I found an old spade in our garage. I didn’t know that there were seven different types of shovels. I just knew that I had a shovel, and that I was going to go out there and get to work. That’s what I did.”
That’s the mind-set you must have to become more productive. Whatever you have—or don’t have—you’re willing to start, regardless of how little you know about how you’re going to get where you want to go.
This next step also seems to fly in the face of the idea of striving for perfection. To be productive, you have to be willing to fail. A lot.
One of the things I admire about Paul is that he tries new things and just keeps moving. He doesn’t let something that doesn’t work bother him. A key to Paul’s thinking is that he doesn’t think of his efforts as right or wrong, as successes or failures. He asks himself whether what he did got him closer to his vision of perfection. If it did, it’s a win. If it didn’t, he focuses on the feedback he’s getting from what didn’t work. Then he makes adjustments and tries again, immediately.
Are you willing to fail? Are you willing to fail repeatedly? Are you willing to learn from what didn’t work? That’s what will be required for you to blow the cap off your production capacity.
Paul learned a lot of lessons as a budding entrepreneur during his childhood. One of the most important was how to stay focused. “As I look back,” says Paul, “I realize that I stayed focused longer than most people. When all the other kids would go out to shovel snow, most kids would do it for thirty minutes and maybe earn three or four dollars. Then they would quit. I had the ability to stay focused, regardless of the distractions, to the exclusion of outside conditions or circumstances. That was what was giving me the results.”
That still gives Paul results. It will give you results, too. Paul started out working hard because people told him he wasn’t smart. Now he recognizes how smart he is, but his work ethic is still intact. So I have to ask: How long do you stick with something to make it work? And how hard do you work at it while you’re doing it? Do you stay focused? Here’s the thing you need to learn from Paul’s example. He initiates many tries at one thing, not one try at many things. That’s an approach anyone can adopt, regardless of talent, intelligence, resources, or opportunity.
About two years into his cleaning business, Paul hit a wall. “I was doing what I’d been told my whole life,” says Paul. “I was told that if I worked hard and did honest work that things would be okay. I was working hard. I was doing honest work, but things weren’t okay. I would get a new account, then I would lose two others. I would get an employee well trained, and then he would leave to earn twenty-five or fifty cents an hour more somewhere else. It was the proverbial ‘one step forward, two steps back,’ and I didn’t know how to change it. I was stuck. And let me tell you: stuck stinks.”
Back then Paul didn’t know how to navigate himself out of his problem. So he started to think about himself and his skills. He realized that he needed to grow. “If you are not growing,” Paul says, “you are not living at your full capacity. If you are not fully expressing your full capacity, it registers in your spirit as stuck and it stinks. The reason why it stinks is because it’s so contrary to who we are as human beings.”
One of the books Paul read was Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. It made him realize he had created his own lid on his capacity. He had created a negative expectation for himself without realizing it. “I thought, If you are a high school dropout, you should never be able to go that far,” says Paul. “But after reading Maltz I thought, Huh, I’m the one that really controls the ability to expand what I produce. It had never occurred to me that I had created all those limits on my own capacity. I expected only a limited level of success, for a certain level of happiness, and I in fact was looking for the rest of the world to try to change that for me, and that was never going to happen.”
One of the illustrations in Maltz’s book pointed out the difference between a thermometer and a thermostat. Paul had been a thermometer that simply reported on his condition. But he turned himself into a thermostat, which changes the conditions. If you want to be more productive, you need to take charge of your own productivity. You need to become a thermostat.
Coming out of one of his sessions of inventory taking, Paul made a decision. He would not try to become a keynote speaker. That was his original goal when he sold his cleaning business. Paul’s a good speaker, but he realized he wasn’t a great speaker, the kind who could fill an arena. Nor was he willing to do what it took to try to get there.
Paul recognized that he’s at his best as a second in command. It’s true that he ran a very successful business himself, but he performed at the highest level in the second chair. He got a first glimpse of that when he worked with Curtis Sliwa in the Guardian Angels. And he’s found it to be true working with me at the John Maxwell Team.
You will drastically increase your production capacity if you stop doing what you’re not great at and instead focus on what you do best. Find ways to focus your time and attention and work toward eliminating from your schedule anything that doesn’t have a high return.
Paul credits his high production capacity to building a team. “When I look at all my successes,” says Paul, “I see teams. Guardian Angels: team of people. At Your Service commercial cleaning company: team of people. The John Maxwell Team: teaching team, sales and marketing team, and the team of certified coaches. Some of these people have worked with me ten, twelve years. Cheryl Fisher has been with us for twenty-two years. I didn’t want employees. I wanted a team. I needed teams because I realized my capacity is limited. But when I bring together a team and unify us to achieve a goal, it automatically, exponentially, increases my capacity in ways that I could never do alone. It’s productivity squared.”
Because Paul recognizes the importance of the team, he is highly intentional in staying connected to his people. Every day he calls somebody to check in with them or drops into their office just to chat. He pays attention to his team’s social media. He wants to know how they’re doing. “You’ve got to know the vibe of the tribe,” says Paul.
I do this as well. I try to have dinner with key members of my staff, and I take them with me to events so that we can spend time together. I know that those closest to me determine my level of success, so I want to maintain and develop those relationships and add value to my team members whenever I can. If you want to be productive, you need to develop a team, connect with team members, and keep adding value to them.
When Paul starts any endeavor, his first goal is to just get started and make things functional. For example, when he started the John Maxwell Team, he didn’t even have a website. But he didn’t let that stop him. He did the things he knew how to do, and then worked to make improvements. And that’s where he focuses a lot of his production energy. That process requires the ability to make decisions every day.
One of the things I find most interesting about Paul is that he doesn’t see decisions as right or wrong, good or bad. He judges only whether or not they move him and the team forward or backward in the journey toward his vision. “There are lots of things that we do wrong, but the decision was still right, because it moved momentum in the right way. Again, I am not attached to failure, so I don’t care. The question I ask is ‘Does it move us closer in the direction of perfection?’ All I am worried about is trajectory. I’m not worried about hitting the mark. I am a futurist. I don’t care about the now; the now is going to change. I want to make sure that I am getting the trajectory right. I want to get us moving the right way. If you ask John Maxwell Team members, they’ll tell you that one of the quotes I share all the time is ‘Jump and build your wings on the way.’”
You will only reach your production capacity if you are willing to make decisions. And Paul’s approach to decision making can free you up. When it comes to character and ethical decisions, yes, there is a right and wrong. But when it comes to productivity and achievement, there isn’t. Either something works or it doesn’t. Either it takes you forward, or it doesn’t. If you develop the habit of making quick decisions, trying new things, and judging whether or not they take you forward, you will be more productive.
Productive people are always working to become better and to find better ways of doing things. That’s certainly Paul’s goal. He’s constantly reevaluating everything. Every time he has hosted the semiannual training event to certify coaches, it has gotten better. Every time he has changed the marketing and sales plan, the results have gotten stronger. Right now, he’s redesigning the pretraining process that’s included in the certification program. He’s also reevaluating the teaching faculty. These aren’t things that are broken. They have been highly successful. But he wants to make them better. He’s still driving toward that model of perfection he has in his mind.
Paul is motivated by continual improvement. “I phrase it this way,” Paul explains. “We have three options in life. We can be historians, reporters, or futurists. The historian wants to remind us of everything in the past and wants to filter everything in the future through that. The reporter is really attached to conditions and circumstances today, and that’s just the way it is. The futurist focuses on what hasn’t yet been done. He says, ‘There is more for us to do. We can do more. We can broaden our capacity. There is more of our potential we can take advantage of.’”
Paul calls this living in the emerging future. I would also describe it as acting today with the intent of making a better tomorrow. The place where today and tomorrow meet is where you can create positive change. The only time you really control is now. You can’t change yesterday. You can’t control tomorrow. But you can choose what you do today with the goal of those choices making things better tomorrow. Professor Edward Banfield of Harvard University confirmed the importance of a future focus in his book The Unheavenly City. He called it a “long-term perspective,” and said that according to studies, it is the most accurate single predictor of upward social and economic mobility in America, more important than family background, education, race, intelligence, connections, or virtually any other single factor. If you want to be productive and successful, think of the future, but act today.
I’ve now known Paul for six years, and I’m amazed not only at his level of productivity, but by the way he continues to increase that productivity. Paul says, “What’s the point of potential if there isn’t capacity for you to express it?” Believe me, he is expressing it.
Few things will positively impact your potential or your success more quickly and more thoroughly than increasing your production capacity. If you take a cue from Paul, you can do that immediately. Adopt his practices. Repeat them daily until they become habits. And watch what happens.
1. Is your natural inclination to be a historian, who examines the past; a reporter, who observes and comments on the present; or a futurist, who acts today with the intention of improving tomorrow? What could you do to focus more on the emerging future?
2. Using Paul’s story as inspiration, how would you describe your vision of a perfect future? What would you be doing? Describe it in as much detail as possible.
3. What downhill habits do you currently possess that are taking you away from that ideal future? What uphill habits must you cultivate to replace the unproductive ones?