How do you keep up with local happenings, national and international events, and the latest updates related to your career and areas of interest? Most people tap into social media, check their favorite blogs, and watch videos via the Internet. You can get pretty much any information you want at your fingertips using a smartphone, tablet, or computer.
Things were dramatically different when I was very young. Getting news and information took a bit of effort. Most people read the paper to keep up with what was happening in the world. Late-breaking news could be heard on the radio. And if you wanted to do research with any depth, you went to the library. But that began to change in the 1950s with the advent of television, and it blossomed in the 1960s with the establishment of the nightly network news broadcasts.
The undisputed champion of those broadcasts, the person who made them into regular staples in every home across America, was Walter Cronkite. From 1962 to 1981, Cronkite was anchor of the CBS Evening News. People called him “Uncle Walter” because he was so beloved and trusted. In fact, in 1972, two polls revealed that he was the “most trusted man in America.”1 He broke the news of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. He covered Apollo 11’s moon landing as well as the near-tragic Apollo 13 mission that had to be aborted. He covered Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the Iran hostage crisis. He delivered the news during two of the most eventful decades in modern American history. And many considered him to be the best ever. Brian Williams, the current NBC Nightly News anchor, said, “He was a founding father of our profession.”2
Cronkite started out as a newspaper reporter and spent several years working for the United Press wire service. As a war correspondent covering World War II, he was fearless. He flew into enemy territory with airborne troops, rode along in a B-17 bomber on a bombing mission over Germany, and covered the Battle of the Bulge. Andy Rooney, who became a long-time contributor to 60 Minutes, knew Cronkite in Europe during the war. In the 1990s, years after Cronkite retired, Rooney said, “Anyone who thinks of Walter Cronkite today as the authoritative father figure of television news would be surprised to know what a tough, competitive scrambler he was in the old Front Page tradition of newspaper reporting. He became the best anchorman there ever was in television because he knew news when he saw it and cared about it. He was relentlessly inquisitive. The subject of his interview always sensed that Cronkite was interested in what he had to say and knew a great deal about the issue himself.”3
Cronkite was excellent, but he didn’t start out that way. His career was successful because he was dedicated to continual improvement. He learned a key lesson early, when he was hired as a radio broadcaster for University of Oklahoma football games. Cronkite was a competent announcer, but he wasn’t a football fanatic and he didn’t know all the players. So he came up with a plan to help him identify players during the broadcast. “I devised an electric board by which spotters from the opposing teams would, by simply pressing a button, identify for me the names of those involved in each of the plays,” Cronkite recalled.
Cronkite confidently set himself up for his first broadcast with the station’s top executives and the sponsors in attendance. But from the first play, there were problems. “My spotters weren’t worth a darn and the electric board was worthless,” Cronkite remarked. He couldn’t tell which players were which. He scrambled to find information in the program, and as the game went on, his play-by-play commentary fell behind so that the reaction of the crowd preceded his descriptions. In Cronkite’s words, “The broadcast was a disaster.”4
Remarkably the station’s executives agreed to give him a second chance, but he knew that if he were to succeed, he would have to improve significantly. For that, Cronkite developed a new plan. He explains,
I recruited as my spotter to punch the buttons on my electric machine, another station employee. He and I memorized the names and jersey numbers, ages, physical characteristics, and hometowns of every one of the thirty or forty members of every squad of every university we played—and, of course, the same for OU.
We spent three or four hours a day drilling our memories. One of us would call out a single fact about each player—name or number. The other had to fill in all the details of his football biography.
It was grueling, unglamorous work that began on Monday and went right up to game time the following Saturday. We missed a lot of the partying that accompanied most football weekends. But the practice worked, and our broadcasts were highly successful from that second game on.
This experience early in my broadcast career taught me an invaluable lesson…. For every story I expect to cover, I thoroughly research all the available material regarding the event, the background, and the major persons involved. And I don’t design plans or labor-saving machinery that might permit me to skip this essential step in doing my job to the absolute limit of my ability. My motto: There are no shortcuts to perfection.5
Most of us don’t expect to achieve perfection. But we do want to perform at a higher level. That requires improvement. It’s been said that the three most difficult words to say are, “I was wrong.” When we make a mistake or fail, as Cronkite did on the early football broadcast, we don’t want to admit it. Instead, we often do one of the following:
We react like the young Navy pilot who was engaged in maneuvers. The admiral had required absolute radio silence. However, the young pilot mistakenly turned on his radio and was heard to mutter, “Boy, am I fouled up!”
The admiral ordered all channels to be opened, and said, “Will the pilot who broke the radio silence identify himself immediately!”
A long silence ensued before the young pilot’s voice was again heard over the airways: “I’m fouled up, but not that fouled up!”
Okay, so that’s a silly joke, but people do act like that in real life. For example, John H. Holliday, who was the founder and editor of the Indianapolis News, stormed into the composing room one day, determined to find the culprit who had spelled height as hight. A check of the original copy indicated that he himself had been the one responsible for the misspelling. When he was told that he said, “Well, if that’s the way I spelled it, that has to be right.” For the next thirty years, the Indianapolis News misspelled the word height. That is the antithesis of Cronkite’s reaction.
The Stone Age didn’t end because people ran out of stones. It ended because people kept learning and improving. The desire to improve themselves is in the DNA of all successful people. Getting better has been a personal passion with me for many years. Part of that involves striving to perform better day by day, but the desire for improvement has also prompted me to study others who share this passion. That has helped me to learn some important things when it comes to improvement, which I want to pass along to you.
A few years ago I was leading a roundtable of twenty highly successful people. One man expressed his frustration at having plateaued in his business and personal life. He asked, “How can I keep from plateauing?” As we asked questions and he opened up, we made a discovery. He was more concerned about his personal success than he was his personal growth. That was getting in his way.
Success does not always bring growth, but personal growth will always add to our success. The highest reward for our toil is not what we get for it but what we become by it. The most important question is not, “What am I getting?” but “What am I becoming?”
Authors Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus asserted, “It is the capacity to develop and improve themselves that distinguishes leaders from followers.” That same capacity is also what separates successful people from unsuccessful ones. And that ability is becoming more important every day.
The world is moving along at an incredible pace. I joked earlier about the end of the Stone Age. Some archaeologists believe that period lasted millions of years. The Bronze Age, which followed it, lasted roughly two thousand years. The Iron Age, which came next, was less than a thousand years. Each period in technological history has come faster and faster.
In the modern era knowledge, technology, and improvements continue to accelerate. Now that we live in the information age, the world is moving even faster. Economists at UC Berkeley recently calculated that in the year 2000, the total amount of information produced worldwide was the equivalent of 37,000 times as much information as the entire holdings in the Library of Congress. In 2003, the amount of new information created was more than double that.6 And those numbers came from the time before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other information-generating options were available.
The bottom line is clear. If you are not moving forward, the world is passing you by. If you want to improve your life, your family, your work, your economic situation, your influence, or anything else, you need to first improve yourself.
Novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky observed, “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” Instead people should most fear the opposite—not taking the step. Why? Because if we don’t step forward out of our comfort zone and into the unknown, we will not improve and grow. Security does not take us forward. It does not help us to overcome obstacles. It does not lead to progress. You’ll never get anywhere interesting if you always do the safe thing. You must surrender security to improve.
What does it take to get us to move out of our comfort zone? In my observation, it requires two things:
Jack V. Matson, professor emeritus of environmental engineering at Pennsylvania State University and founding director of the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education, develops courses in innovative design based on “intelligent fast failure.” His philosophy is to stimulate creativity by encouraging students to risk failure and realize failure is essential to success.
When he was teaching at the University of Houston, he created a course called Failure 101 and organized an international conference, "Celebration of Failure."7 In his Failure 101 course, Matson had his class build ice-cream-stick mock-ups of products no one would buy—from hamster hot tubs to kites to be flown in hurricanes. Matson says his students learned to equate failure with innovation instead of defeat, and it freed them up to get out of their comfort zone and try new things.
We can learn a lot from Matson. We need to fail quickly so that we can get it out of the way. If we’re not failing or making mistakes, it means we’re playing it too safe. Management expert Peter Drucker explained, “I would never promote a person into a high-level job who was not making mistakes…. Otherwise he is sure to be mediocre.”
Mistakes are not failures. They are proof that we are making an effort. When we understand that, we can more easily move out of our comfort zone, try something new, and improve.
Legendary Baltimore Oriole shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. played in more consecutive baseball games than any other player: 2,632 games. That means he didn’t miss a single game in more than sixteen seasons! When asked if he ever went to the ballpark with aches and pains, Ripken replied, “Yeah, just about every day.”
Ripken didn’t allow his feelings—even feelings of physical pain—to overwhelm him or keep him from performing. He pushed through them. If we want to succeed in getting out of our comfort zone so that we can improve, we need to follow his example.
Improvement demands a commitment to grow long after the mood in which it was made has passed. Speaker Peter Lowe once told me, “The most common trait I have found in successful people is that they conquered the temptation to give up.” Not being controlled by our feelings means that we can face our fears, get out of our comfort zone, and try new things. That is an important part of innovation.
We live in a society with destination disease. Too many people want to do enough to “arrive,” and then they want to retire. My friend Kevin Myers says it this way: “Everyone is looking for a quick fix, but what they really need is fitness. People who look for fixes stop doing what’s right when pressure is relieved. People who pursue fitness do what they should no matter what.” That’s true. Losers don’t lose because they focus on losing. They lose because they focus on just getting by.
Improvement doesn’t come to people who fixate on quick fixes. It comes to the slow but steady people who keep working at getting better. If you have a quick fix mindset, then you need to shift it to continuous improvement. That means doing two things:
I believe all of us can identify with the poet Carl Sandberg, who said, “There is an eagle in me that wants to soar and a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.” The key to success is following the impulse to soar more than the desire to wallow. And that is a never-ending struggle—at least it has been for me. I believe any successful person would be honest in saying, “I got to the top the hard way—fighting my own laziness and ignorance every step of the way.”
Author and leadership expert Fred Smith, who mentored me for many years, said that something in human nature tends to make us want to find a plateau and stay there where it’s comfortable. What he was describing was the temptation to disengage from the battle for improvement. Fred said, “Of course, all of us need to plateau for a time. We climb and then plateau for assimilation. But once we’ve assimilated what we’ve learned, we climb again. It’s unfortunate when we’ve done our last climb. When we have made our last climb, we are old, whether forty or eighty.”
If you are just beginning your improvement journey, don’t be discouraged. Your starting point doesn’t matter. Everyone who has gotten to where he is, started where he was. What matters is where you end up. And you get there by continuing to fight the improvement battle. As you do, make this your motto:
I’m not where I’m supposed to be,
I’m not what I want to be,
But I’m not what I used to be.
I haven’t learned how to arrive;
I’ve just learned how to keep on going.
If you can live those words, you will eventually be successful.
People today are looking for a secret to success. They want a magic bullet, an easy answer, a single thing that will catapult them to fortune or fame. Success generally doesn’t work that way. As Andrew Wood observed, “Success in most things comes not from some gigantic stroke of fate, but from simple, incremental progress.” That’s pretty boring, isn’t it? It may not be exciting, but it is true. Small differences over time create a big difference! Improvement is achieved in inches, not giant leaps.
In my early years, I would see and hear a successful person and say to myself, “I will never be able to achieve that.” And I would become discouraged. Why? Because I saw the giant gap between that person and me. The difference between where I was and where that person was appeared to be insurmountable. But what I didn’t realize back then was that the progress these people had made and the gains they had won had come through small steps—small victories of will, little denials of self, faithfulness in very little things. Most people were unaware of their hidden steps. Like me, they saw only their accumulation in the results.
Writer and artist Elbert Hubbard observed, “The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it—so fine that we are often on the line and we do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success?” That’s why we need to dedicate ourselves to small steps of improvement. Who knows if the next small step will provide the breakthrough we’ve been seeking?
David D. Glass, the president and chief executive officer of Walmart, was once asked why he admired Sam Walton, the founder of the organization. His answer was, “There’s never been a day in his life, since I’ve known him, that he didn’t improve in some way.” What an accomplishment! That shows a great commitment to continuous improvement.
Fairly early in my development on the personal growth journey, I heard something from Earl Nightingale that changed my life. He said, “If you study a subject every day for one hour a day, five days a week, in five years you will become an expert in that area.” That was when I made the commitment to improve in the area of leadership a daily one.
Some things simply have to be done every day. You know the old saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”? Well, eating seven apples all at once isn’t going to give you the same benefit. If you want to improve, intentional growth needs to be a habit. A habit is something I do continually, not once in a while. Motivation may get you going, but the positive habits you develop and practice consistently are what keep you improving.
As I have worked to improve on a day-by-day basis, two words have helped me to stay on track. The first is intention. Every morning as I start my day, I intend to learn something that day. This develops a mind-set in me to look for things that will help me improve.
The other word is contemplation. Time alone is an essential for self-improvement. When I spend time thinking about my challenges, experiences, and observations, it allows me to gain perspective. I can evaluate any losses and I can learn from them. Contemplation time by myself also gives me time to do positive self-talk. Motivational humorist Al Walker stated, “The most important words we will ever utter are those words we say to ourselves, about ourselves, when we are by ourselves.” During these “conversations” we can beat ourselves up and make ourselves feel really small, or we can learn and build ourselves up so that we become better.
If you want to spend some time each day to try to improve yourself, you might want to begin by asking yourself three questions at the end of the day, as I do. They are:
One of the things I don’t do is compare myself to others during that time. There’s a reason for that. My desire is to not become superior to anybody else. I only want to be superior to my former self. Intention and contemplation assist me in doing that.
Improvement is within the reach of anyone, no matter how experienced or green, educated or ignorant, rich or poor. To start improving today, do these three things:
To improve yourself, you must believe you can improve. Author Denis Whitley has a wonderful definition for personal development. He says that it is the conviction that there is value in your dreams. “Personal development,” he says, “is the belief that you are worth the effort, time, and energy needed to develop yourself. It gives you permission to invest in yourself so you can develop your own potential.”
You can invest in yourself. You don’t need anyone’s dreams but your own. And you don’t need to become anyone other than yourself at your best. The great philosopher Thomas Carlyle once wrote, “Let each become all that he was created capable of being.” I can’t think of a better definition of success. Life challenges us every day to develop our capabilities to the fullest. We’re successful when we reach for the highest that’s within us—when we give the best we have. Life doesn’t require us to always come out on top. It asks only that we do our best to improve at whatever level of experience we are currently on.
There is a funny story about a wealthy Texan who died. When his attorney asked the entire family to gather for the reading of the will, relatives came from near and far to see if they were included in the bequests.
On the day they were assembled, the lawyer somberly opened the will and began to read:
“To my cousin Ed, I leave my ranch.”
“To my brother Jim, I leave my money market accounts.”
“To my neighbor and good friend, Fred, I leave my stocks.”
“And finally, to my cousin George, who always sat around and never did anything, but wanted to be remembered in my will, I want to say, ‘Hi, George.’ ”
Most of us either want to improve nothing, like George, or we are so impatient to become all that we can that we try to improve all that we are at the same time. Those are both mistakes. We need to focus. Noted psychologist William Jones advised, “If you would be rich, you will be rich; if you would be good, you will be good; if you would be learned, you will be learned. But wish for one thing exclusively, and don’t at the same time wish for a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.”
You will have plenty of time to improve other areas of your life. Focus on the one now that makes the most of your strengths and is closest to your sense of purpose. Take the advice of Earl Nightingale who suggested spending an hour a day improving in that area. Then take it slow but steady. We always overestimate what we can get done in a day or a week. But we underestimate what we can get done in a year. Just imagine what you will be able to get done in five years.
Focused, strategic improvement is important to success. But so is learning from our losses as they come. I will address that more specifically in the chapters on adversity, problems, and bad experiences. However, let me say this. Some lessons in life cannot wait. You must make the most of them when they occur. If you don’t examine what went wrong while the details are fresh, you may lose the ability to learn the lesson. Besides, if you neglect to learn the lesson immediately, you may experience the loss again!
Business professor George Knox said, “When you cease to be better, you cease to be good. When you stop growing, you cease to be useful—a weed in the garden of prosperity…. We are what we are today because we were what we were yesterday. And our thoughts today determine our actions tomorrow.” Those who learn from their losses give themselves that permission. As your friend, I give it to you also. Knowledge may come from study, but wisdom comes from learning and improving in the wake of your mistakes.
I always try to remember that I am a work in progress. When I maintain that perspective, I realize that I don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to have it all together. I don’t need to try to have all the answers. And I don’t need to learn everything in a day. When I make a mistake, it’s not because I’m a failure or worthless. I just didn’t do something right because I still haven’t improved enough in some part of the process. And that motivates me to keep growing and improving. If I don’t know something, it’s an opportunity to try to improve in a new area.
I’m in it for the long haul. I try to be like industrialist Ian MacGregor, who said, “I work on the same principle as people who train horses. You start with low fences, easily achieved goals, and work up.” When I got started, my fences were embarrassingly low. But in time I was able to raise them. Today, I’m still raising them little by little. That’s the only way I know how to keep improving, and I always want to keep doing that, because improvement is the focus of learning.