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The Monday Morning Memo

The Ones Who Don’t Go Away

June 20, 2011

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https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/d7f9b977-12a6-45a4-adb7-c5e621d0a95e/MMM110620-WhoDontGoAway.mp3

How to Become Self-Selected, Part Two

Monday Morning, One Week Ago – “Honey, I liked this week’s memo but you never really told us how to become self-selected. You just gave us examples of other people who have done it.”

I took another look at that memo and said, “You’re right, Princess. I intended the reader to read the line that says, ‘The self-selected are those who take action, the ones who participate, the ones who don’t go away,’ and understand that you select yourself for leadership when you take action, participate, and don’t go away. But now that I look at it again, I can see that I didn’t connect those attributes to the reader nearly so clearly as I thought.”

Self-selection is an important life skill, so I’ve decided to make another run at explaining it:

Leaders aren’t appointed or selected so much as they’re simply acknowledged.

Let’s look at the example of Peter, James and John. People assume Jesus chose these three above the other nine. But I’m convinced Jesus was merely reacting to the fact that they chose him more strongly than the other nine. Anytime Jesus stood up, they stood up. When he walked to a different spot, they followed him to that spot, even if it meant getting out of the boat. They were the ones who were always with him.  Every time Jesus looked up from what he was doing, Peter, James and John were there. This is what it means to be self-selected.

To be self-selected is to volunteer. No, that’s not it. To volunteer is to say that you’d be willing to take action if it were asked of you. But self-selection doesn’t wait to be asked. E.W. Howe (1853-1937) understood self-selection perfectly, I think. “When a friend is in trouble, don’t annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.”

The world is full of educated people waiting for an opportunity to demonstrate their competence. Most of these people will go to their graves having never gotten “their big break.”

Education is one thing. Recognition is another. Education is what you receive when you choose to become informed. Recognition is what you receive when other people see the value of your expertise. Education without recognition has very little value in the marketplace.


Wizard Academy is a business school. Is this beginning to make sense to you?

Do you want to be a published author? Take the advice of Mark Twain, “Write without pay until someone offers to pay.” Write intelligent, clearly worded letters to the editor. Submit feature stories and op-ed pieces to magazines and websites. Write a blog on whatever subject you’d like to become known as an expert. If you have something to say worth hearing, people will tell other people and soon your readership will begin to grow. It may take a few years but if you self-select and don’t go away, you’ll someday have a book in print.


Wizard Academy is a business school. Is this beginning to make sense to you?

Do you want to be a public speaker? Talk constantly about your subject. Talk to the crowd that gathers at the water cooler. Talk to Ms. Johnson’s seventh grade class on career day. Talk to a breakfast club. Talk to the Rotary Club. Find 100 different opportunities to talk about your subject for free, no matter how small and insignificant your audience. Prepare for each of these audiences as if you were being highly paid. You’ll be a highly paid public speaker before you reach venue 150.

 

The myth of a “big break” is what keeps the average person from becoming successful. They keep waiting on someone else to do something instead of simply selecting themselves and taking action.

 

The self-selected person is not the average person. When Willie Nelson was asked what it felt like to be an overnight success, he answered, “Overnight success feels great after playing 10 years in honky-tonks behind chicken wire.”

 

What do you want to see happen in your life? Are you willing to select yourself for it?

 

Wizard Academy is a business school.

Select yourself.

Pick a class and come.


Roy H. Williams
 

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Random Quote:

“…the only really nice furnishing we own is an Oriental rug that we bought, with the help of a decorator, in a failed attempt to become tasteful. This rug is way too nice for an onion-dip-intensive household like ours, and we seriously thought about keeping it in a large safe-deposit box, but we finally decided, in a moment of abandon, to put it on the floor. We then conducted a comprehensive rug-behavior training seminar for our main dog, Earnest, and our small auxiliary dog, Zippy. “NO!!” we told them approximately 75 times while looking very stern and pointing at the rug. This proven training technique caused them to slink around the way dogs do when they feel tremendously guilty but have no idea why. Satisfied, we went out to dinner. I later figured out, using an electronic calculator, that this rug covers approximately 2 percent of the total square footage of our house, which means that if you (not you PERSONALLY) were to have a random diarrhea attack in our home, the odds are approximately 49 to 1 against your having it on our Oriental rug. The odds against your having FOUR random attacks on this rug are more than FIVE MILLION TO ONE. So we had to conclude that it was done on purpose. The rug appeared to have been visited by a group of specially bred, highly trained Doberman Poopers, but we determined, by interrogating both dogs, that the entire massive output was the work of Zippy…”

- Dave Barry, Pet Zoo, Nov 12, 1989

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