Friday Quote!

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

- Leo Tolstoy

Tips on Managing Oneself!!

Peter F Drucker - Managing Oneself - a synopsis from mutex07

Invaluable career and personal development advice!  Click through the slideshow for a good overview, and this link takes you to the original article.  Focusing on my strengths has made a huge difference in my performance and attitude.  Since I've realized that looking at my natural strong points is the way to go, my enthusiasm is at an all time high!

Friday Quote:

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction

between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure;

his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He

hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision

of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves

others to determine whether he is working or playing. To

himself, he always appears to be doing both.

—Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

Big Failure, Big Success: 12 People To Keep You Going!

Short and simple inspiration from Danielle LaPorte.  This keeps things in perspective for us!

: Oprah was fired from one of her early anchor gigs, after being labelled “unfit for TV.”

: Tim Ferriss had 26 publishing rejections for The 4-Hour Workweek – which spent months on The New York Times Bestseller list.

: Twilight author Stephenie Meyer had 9 rejections from literary agents, and then…a $750,000 three-book deal.

: Lady Gaga was dropped by Island Def Jam Records after only three months.

: Project Runway winner Christian Siriano was rejected by the Fashion Institute of Technology. After winning Project Runway, his fashion line brought in $1.2 million in the first two years.

: Abraham Lincoln had less than five years of formal education.

: Marilyn Monroe was booted from 20th Century-Fox, after producers declared her “unattractive.”

: Beethoven was almost completely deaf when he composed “The Ode To Joy.” He removed the legs from his piano and placed it on the floor, letting the vibrations resonate through his body.

: Emily Dickinson had just a handful of poems published during her lifetime–out of over 1,800 completed works.

: Louisa May Alcott was encouraged by her family to find work as a household servant. She wrote Little Women, instead.

: Verdi was rejected from a prestigious music conservatory in Milan, because he “wasn’t talented enough.” He wrote 28 operas, including La Traviata, Aida, and Othello.

: Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.

11 Books Every Young Leader Must Read

A recent article from Harvard Business Review suggests eleven books for those interested in improving their leadership skills.   Enjoy the list!

Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor's Handbook. Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180 A.D., Marcus Aurelius is considered one of history's "philosopher kings," and his Meditations were perhaps his most lasting legacy. Never meant to be published, Marcus' writings on Stoicism, life, and leadership were the personal notes he used to make sense of the world. They remain a wonderful insight into the mind of a man who ruled history's most revered empire at the age of 40 and provide remarkably practical advice for everyday life. This is the translation I've found most accessible.

 

Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived life in the Nazi concentration camps. Man's Search for Meaning is really two books — one dedicated to recounting his frightening ordeal in the camps (interpreted through his eyes as a psychiatrist) and the other a treatise on his theory, logotherapy. His story alone is worth the read — a reminder of the depths and heights of human nature — and the central contention of logotherapy — that life is primarily about the search for meaning — has inspired leaders for generations.

 

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full. Tom Wolfe founded the New Journalism school and was one of America's most brilliant writers of nonfiction (books and essays like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) before he became one of her most notable novelists. Often better known for his portrait of 1980s New York, The Bonfire of the Vanities, A Man in Full is his novel about race, status, business, and a number of other topics in modern Atlanta. It was Wolfe's attempt, as Michael Lewis noted, at "stuffing of the whole of contemporary America into a single, great, sprawling comic work of art." It's sure to inspire reflection in burgeoning leaders.

 

Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker. One of the first books I read upon graduating college, Liar's Poker is acclaimed author Michael Lewis' first book — a captivating story about his short-lived postcollegiate career as a bond salesman in the 1980s. Lewis has become perhaps the most notable chronicler of modern business, and Liar's Poker is both a fascinating history of Wall Street (and the broader financial world) in the 1980s and a cautionary tale to ambitious young business leaders about the temptations, challenges, and disappointments (not to mention colorful characters) they may face in their careers.

 

Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't. What does it take to make a great company, and what traits will young businesspeople need to lead them? Jim Collins introduced new rigor to the evaluation of business leadership in his instant classic Good to Great, with a research team reviewing "6,000 articles and generating 2,000 pages of interview transcripts." The result is a systematic treatise on making a company great, with particularly interesting findings around what Collins calls "Level 5 Leadership"that have changed the face of modern business.

 

Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Persuasion is at the heart of business, where leaders must reach clients, customers, suppliers, and employees. Cialdini's classic on the core principals of persuasion is a sterling example of the cross application of psychological principles to business life. Based on his personal experiences and interviews — with everyone from expert car salesmen to real estate salespeople — Cialdini's book is riveting and, yes, persuasive. It serves as a great introduction to other works by modern writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Steven Levitt, who translate theories from the social and physical sciences into everyday life.

 

Richard Tedlow, Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built. Richard Tedlow taught one of my favorite business school classes, The Coming of Managerial Capitalism, and this book is something like a distillation of a few of the high points of that class. Giants of Enterprise chronicles the lives of some of the businesspeople — Carnegie, Ford, Eastman, Walton — who shaped the world we live in today. It's a brief introduction to the figures and companies who built modern business for the young business leader seeking to shape the future.

 

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. Financial capital is at the heart of capitalism. Any young person aspiring to business leadership should understand the financial world we live in. Ferguson is one of our era's preeminent popular historians, and The Ascent of Money traces the evolution of money and financial markets from the ancient world to the modern era. It's an essential primer on the history and current state of finance.

 

Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.Clay Christensen was recently ranked the world's greatest business thinker by Thinkers50, and his breakout book was a thoughtful tome on innovation and "disruption" called The Innovator's Dilemma. All of Christensen's books are essential reads, but this is perhaps the most foundational for any young leader wondering how to drive business innovation and fight competitors constantly threatening to disrupt his or her business model with new technology.

 

Stephen R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey's book represents the best in self-help. His advice — about prioritization, empathy, self-renewal, and other topics — is both insightful and practical.Seven Habits can be useful to the personal and professional development of anyone charting a career in business.

 

Bill George, True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership. A hallmark of next-generation business leaders is a focus on authenticity. Bill George has pioneered an approach to authentic leadership development articulated well in his second book, True North. George (who, full disclosure, I've coauthored with before) conducted more than 100 interviews with senior leaders in crafting the book, and offers advice for young leaders on knowing themselves and translating that knowledge into a personal set of principles for leadership.

Opening Day of Keeneland!

After an intense month long competition, six of our Account Managers won a day at Keeneland for the opening races!  Congratulations to all of you, and we expect to see you for the closing weekend at the end of October!

See more pictures on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/INERTIAinc.

The 5 Most Common Regrets of Young Adults

Our Assistant Manager, Kim, recently presented these common regrets to us during our morning meetings.  I'm currently working on the "physically fit" part, so that it will not be one of my regrets!  A link to the original article on WallSteetOasis.com is here.

Daniel Gulati, from The Huffington Post, apparently interviewed 100 young people between the ages of 25 and 35. Yes, that is not exactly what I would call an scientific sample size either. Nonetheless, Gulati asked these young people what they regretted the most. At the end of it all, he got some pretty deep answers. The introspection went something along the lines of these five most common regrets:

1. I wish I was doing something useful
Without a doubt, the overarching regret of the people I surveyed centered around their life's purpose. With the natural excitement of their first jobs now muted, many were staring down the barrel of a career in corporate America ("Five years down, 35 to go," one quipped) or somewhere else in business. Accordingly, many concluded that their jobs, and indeed their lives, did not serve a purpose beyond the mere superficial. When I dug deeper, "doing something useful" often meant "doing something useful for other people." This regret was so common that it seemed fundamental.

2. I wish I didn't waste so much time earlier in life
In a surprising finding, many young people desperately wanted to turn back the clock to their "even younger" years. Most referred back to their college days as time spent socializing, partying and, as one put it, "experiencing the edges of life." Looking back, many perceived this era as lost setup time. There was a feeling that, knowing what they do now, many would actually use all their college years as a platform for something other than what they were currently doing. Showered with endless free time and world-class resources around campus, this was a lost opportunity to do something, as one put it, "Zuckerberg-great."

3. I wish I had I travelled more
Having earned the disposable income to travel overseas, many recounted with delight stories of offshore adventures. Some boasted of exciting relationships forged across continents, and almost everyone wanted to rack up more mileage than they had been able to. But, with many now married or in long-term relationships, their short-term focus has turned to spending time with their spouses, with many planning for their first or second child. With those overseas adventures on the backburner for the next five to 10 years, it was obvious that some still hadn't quite shaken the travel bug.

4. I wish I was physically fit
Building solid careers and relationships takes time, and for many, physical fitness was an early casualty. Some young men and women recounted their "glory days" on the high school football field or basketball court, and those who weren't gym class heroes simply wished they had taken better care of their bodies as they rage towards the middle of their lives. Physical fitness, many argued, was all-pervasive: By maintaining it, you held the key to a better work life and a better life at home. The oft-cited enemy? "After-work drinks."

5. I wish I learned to live in the moment
Many of those in the room were taught all their lives to set goals, work hard to achieve them, only to then set a still higher bar. In the process of living a life looking forward, many felt they had lost the capacity to look down and enjoy the moments that today's life presents. Many recounted days when time seemed to move slower, "days where you could just sit in the backyard all afternoon." But those days, too many, seemed all but over, after the skill of living in the moment had long left them.

So, what do you regret the most? Which of the five above do you find relating to the easiest? It may be possible to regret nothing, but how do you cope with regretful thoughts?