Whatever your field, it has dimensions that you can control, leverage, and improve. And it has elements that you can't.
Identifying and maximizing those dimensions is entirely our decision. After that "binary option" (inside or outside my boat), we determine the allocation of our time and effort.
- How sturdy is my boat (TEAM)?
- How do I select the oarsmen/women?
- Along what parameters do I train them athletically, physically (skill), emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually?
- How do I assess their progress and needs?
- How is the internal communication and the leadership (coxswain)?
- What is their motivation, their "why"?
- What race strategies will work?
- What type of training schedule is optimal?
- What are the 'reserve' requirements and training?
- What lessons am I teaching and learning?
The individual chapters offer insight into managing your boat. One describes a divorcee' who takes over her husband's unsuccessful gas station and turns it into a multi-million dollar operation. Another describes Willie Davis' move from Cleveland to the Green Bay Packers and later the business world. A former POW describes the lessons he learned from over six years in captivity. Jack Kemp describes how an injury provided him an unexpected better opportunity leaving San Diego for Buffalo and later Congress.
Every experience offers us lessons, opportunities that we can use to 'harden' our boat and 'strengthen' our crew.
Here's are two examples: "If you focus on what you have control over, all of a sudden you can make that better, because you do have control. It's so empowering. Too many people sit around whining and moaning. When you do that, you're really giving your power away to somebody else."
"There's a wonderful quote by the great French novelist Marcel Proust: Perhaps the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
Here is the Table of Contents.
