I made a new friend yesterday. Craig DeLarge is appropriately named. He’s a guy with deep thoughts and big ideas. I feel honored to have met him. And for purposes of this blog, he really gets it about life and career success.
I read a blog post he wrote in March called “About Strength.” You need to read it too. It has some great career adcice. You can find it here. In this post, Craig writes about the idea of Servant Leadership. He quotes the book On Beomong a Servant Leader…
The ability to: 1) see a choice of aims to pursue, 2) to select the right aim, and 3) to responsibly pursue this right aim over a long period of time (Greenleaf, On Becoming a Servant Leader). Successful development of strength is relevant to one achieving their best potential in healing the world. It requires: 1) knowledge regarding one’s choice of aims, 2) judgment and wisdom in the selection of the right aim, a highly subjective matter, 3) discipline and discretion to pursue a chosen aim in a responsible manner and 4) patient persistence to carry on pursuit of chosen aims for a long period of time. This definition acknowledges the blessing and challenge of choice we have as to how we put our gifts to use. Greenleaf goes on to talk about the development of strength as an ethical imperative and even suggests that one who does not acknowledge this imperative in his or her own life is ethically inadequate. Yikes!
Craig goes on to say…
I realize that a worthy aim is addressing some form of evil in the world. The trick then is to 1) select the right evil, 2) to pursue it responsibly (avoiding the corruption of that evil, or others) and 3) doing so for a long period of time. The difficulty and challenge of doing this is certainly an environment for building strength over a lifetime. I write this to encourage us all to commit, and daily recommit, to a stance of pursuing our lives and careers from a position and intention of developing strength.
Tweet 4 in my career advice book Success Tweets says, “The mightier your purpose, the more likely you are to succeed. It will give you a strong foundation when the winds of change shift.” When Craig talks about a “worthy aim” he is talking about a mighty purpose. I like the way he suggests that your aim (or purpose in my words) should be to eradicate an evil in this world.
To me, unfulfilled potential is an evil. In my role as a career success coach, an author and blogger I work hard to eradicate this evil. I want to help everybody create the life and career success they want and deserve. This is my worthy aim, my mighty purpose.
In addition to helping people reach their potential, Craig has a day job. He works in the pharmaceutical industry where he helps eradicate the evil of health problems – another worthy aim.
In the introduction of Success Tweets I say that you need to begin your life and career success journey by clarifying the purpose and direction for your life and career. Craig and I believe (and I am confident that I can speak for him here) that your clarity of purpose should be so big, so mighty, so important to you, that it is deeply ingrained in your psyche. It has to be part of who you are. Second, you have to live your clarity of purpose 24/7/365. This takes commitment; commitment to determining your life’s purpose, and commitment to living it.
If you were to wake me at 3:00 in the morning, shine a light in my face and ask me for my life’s purpose, I’m sure I would say, “Helping people create the life and career success they want and deserve.” It’s that much a part of me. My elevator speech begins, “Hi, I’m Bud Bilanich, the Common Sense Guy; I help people create the their life and career success byhelping them apply their common sense.”
For me, this is a mighty purpose. I’m helping other people find career success — and fulfillment in their lives. That’s important work in my book. I take immense satisfaction out of seeing others learn, grow and succeed. In another life I might have been a teacher or athletic coach. In this life, I help people create the life and career success that they want and deserve.
This is a worthy aim – and a tough goal. There is an old saying that goes something like, “The problem is not in setting your goal too high and not reaching it. The problem is setting your goal too low and achieving it.” As Craig points out, eradicating some form of evil in this world is a worthy aim and mighty purpose. And it can be a difficult goal to achieve. But as the poster I had in my room in college said, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, but what’s a heaven for?”
What is your purpose? Is it mighty? I hope so.
The career success coach point her is simple common sense. Successful people think big. They ground themselves in a mighty purpose, or a worthy aim. Tweet 4 in Success Tweets says, “The mightier your purpose, the more likely you are to succeed. It will give you a strong foundation when the winds of change shift.” Take this advice to heart. Ground yourself with a mighty purpose. Choose a worthy aim for your life and career. And don’t worry if you come up a little short occasionally. My common sense tells me that it’s better to aim too high and fall a little short than it is to aim too low and reach your goal. Or, as Mario Andretti once said, “If you’re in complete control, you’re probably not going fast enough.” Think about it.
That’s my common sense career advice for today – based on Craig Delarge’s thinking about grounding your life and career with a mighty purpose or worthy aim. What do you think? Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment. As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success. I value you and I appreciate you.
Bud
PS: I have more common sense for you. If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained. It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career success advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail. Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.
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