Page 42 - Sorry, We're Not Hiring Any Visionaries Today

SORRY, WE’RE NOT HIRING ANY VISIONARIES TODAY
courses for businesswomen to make them more successful. Now, I could never see myself creating an entire site like this. What I do is to take what someone else has done and improve it and very carefully track every single question, and issue in a systematic way, so that when I meet with the client or my manager, I’ll be exceptionally organized.
In my last meeting with the client, when I showed her the progress so far, she was absolutely ecstatic and amazed at how much I’d accomplished. Seeing that reaction was the greatest feeling in the world. It completely destroyed my anxiety. It was such a contrast compared to when I was failing in the print in- dustry and in tech writing, when everything I touched turned to crap. Now, my goal is that everything I touch turns to gold. In fact, this is my life goal, and it should be everyone’s life goal: to leave the world a little bit better than before we arrived in it.
In business, the best thing anyone can say about me is: “This guy’s organized, he’s tracking things, he’s on the ball, and he’s not a slacker.”
MICHAEL: All right, now look at my follow-through. There are six levels of difference. It says I might create shortcuts, revise approaches, and thrive on interruptions. It says that I diversify, switch tasks frequently, am flexible, cut through bureaucracy, and do several things at once. You tighten up processes; I loosen them.
ANDREW: Yes, all the things it says that you do, I do not do, especially thriving on interruptions. But why do you find it hard to follow through on things? Is it because you always like the idea of something new?
MICHAEL: Yes, and this is my Achilles heel. The truth is that you can’t be 10 or 8 or 9 in every single category. To succeed, I need to delegate or find some- thing that I’m really good at, which is selling advertising and writing about skateboarding, or dreaming of new ideas in a room all day long.
My ideas never turn off, it’s like a convulsion of ideas. If you’re faced with that, and everything is new, all you’re doing is thinking, “Will this help the cause?
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