On May 13, 2009, President Barrack Obama delivered the commencement address to the graduating students of Arizona State University. Obama advised the graduands not to rest on their laurels, to think long-term, the importance of building a body of work, and pursuing their passion in order to contribute to a better world.
If you live to be 80, you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks
In Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, British journalist Oliver Burkema highlights some great insights about the brevity of life. Burkema notes “If you live to be 80, you’ll have had about 4,000 weeks. But that’s no reason for despair. Confronting our radical finitude – and how little control we really have – is the key to a fulfilling and meaningfully productive life.”
American record producer, Quincy Jones shares 12 strategies and insights that have helped him navigate the roller coaster of life and creativity. Quincy’s career spans 70 years in the entertainment industry with 80 Grammy Award nominations and 28 Grammy Awards won.
Quincy’s former teacher in Paris, Nadia Boulanger used to tell him: “Quincy, there are only twelve notes. Until God gives us thirteen, I want you to know what everybody did with those twelve.” Bach, Beethoven, Bo Diddley, everybody . . . it’s the same twelve notes. Isn’t it amazing? That’s all we have, and it’s up to each of us to create our own unique sound through a combination of rhythm, harmony, and melody.”
In 12 Notes: On Life and Creativity, Quincy breaks down his principles, approach to life, and philosophies, along with standout stories from his journey in twelve chapters called “notes”.
The 12 Notes are:
Recycle your pain, if you can see it you can be it, go to know, establish your guideposts, always be prepared for a great opportunity, sharpen your left brain, avoid paralysis from analysis, understand the power of being underestimated, do what’s never been done before, value relationships, and most important, recognize the beauty and inherent value of life.
Here are some great quotable quotes from 12 Notes: On Life and Creativity by Quincy Jones
President Obama delivered the commencement address to the 2013 graduates of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He advised the graduands to be role models, be an example by their actions, and take responsibility for their lives.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. – Hebert Simon
Your priority determines what you pay attention to and give the utmost importance to. American author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins often say “Energy flows where attention goes.” The difference between successful people and non-successful is how they spend their time and what they prioritize. Priority is derived from the old french word Priorite, from the latin Prioritas. Morphologically it contains the word: Prior + ity. It means the importance placed on an activity, item, event, person, or situation. A priority is something you do first, you do it prior to doing any other thing. It is of utmost importance, it affects your bottom line, it affects your well-being, and it affects your choices and decisions.
The reason most goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first.- Robert J. McKain
In the book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, authors Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling define Wildly Important Goals (WIG) as the goals you must achieve with total excellence beyond the circling priorities of your day-to-day. To succeed, you must be willing to make the hard choices that separate what is wildly important from all the many other merely important goals on your radar. Then, you must approach that WIG with focus and diligence until it is delivered as promised, with excellence.
Human beings are genetically hardwired to do one thing at a time with excellence.
Focusing on the wildly important means narrowing the number of goals you are attempting to accomplish beyond the day-to-day demands of your whirlwind.
A wildly Important Goal is the goal that matters most. Failure to achieve it will make every other accomplishment seem secondary, or possibly even inconsequential.
The concept of wildly important goals has been very important in my quest to achieve my goals. Our time here is limited and the need to have a sense of urgency has never been these urgent. In our instant everything, shortcut driven world, setting your intentions and reviewing your goals daily is a great skill set to master. To re-order my priorities daily, I use the Thankfulness, Insight, Meditation, and Exercise (TIME) framework as taught by English author and former Hindu monk, Jay Shetty in his book, Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day.
I have been experimenting with the TIME framework since October 2021 and it has allowed me to stay centered, and focus on my wildly important goals daily.
If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. – Jim Rohn
Review your goals constantly to remind you of your most important goals
In his book, Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals, NYT Bestselling Author and Speaker Michael Hyatt describe the concept of daily threes and weekly big 3. He advocates constantly reviewing your goals as this reminds you of your most important goals. Hyatt writes:
Reviewing your goals and motivations will keep you ideating, self-checking, and analyzing. And that will up your resolve and stimulate creative problem-solving. He breaks goal reviews into three separate reviews: daily, weekly, and quarterly.
Daily Review
One of the main challenges we face with reaching our goals is losing track of them. We get distracted and sidetracked by life, and they slip out of focus. We can lose months of the year before we realize we’re not making progress. A regular goal review process can fix that problem.
Weekly Review
Next is the weekly review. It goes a bit deeper and takes a bit longer about twenty minutes. A weekly review keeps those key motivations present in our minds. When we’re in the thick of it, it can be hard to recall. But when we’re reviewing our rationale week in and week out, the reasons become so internalized, we know what’s at stake.
Quarterly Review
Quarterly goal setting naturally leads to a deeper review every three months. In the quarterly review process, at least five options are possible:
look at the four quarterly review options as a decision tree:
▶ REJOICE if you’ve reached your goal/milestone. If you’re not there yet,
▶ Then RECOMMIT to achieve it. If you can’t recommit,
▶ Then REVISE the goal so you can achieve it. If you can’t revise,
▶ Then REMOVE the goal from your list. If you remove a goal,
▶ Then REPLACE it with another you want to achieve.
If you do not set your priorities daily, you would fall into other people’s plans and expectations. If you don’t have your goals and aspirations, others would use you to get their goals achieved. By setting a widely important goal daily, you would re-order your priorities, be reminded of what really matters, and be in a better position to achieve your dreams.
Set your intentions and goals daily, review them daily, restrategize, recalibrate and most importantly “Start with Why”. Achieving any worthwhile goal is challenging and tough but with hard work, dedication and discipline, you can achieve anything you set your sight on. As author Naopleon Hill once observed: “What the mind of a man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.
Your life is your story. And the adventure ahead of you is the journey to fulfill your own purpose and potential.
George Washington University alumnae (B.A. ’98), American actress Kerry Washington delivered the commencement address at the National Mall in Washington D.C to a large crowd of graduating students and their loved ones. She spoke about Joseph Campbell’s Hero Journey, heeding the call, leaving your comfort zone, living and telling your own stories cos the world needs your voice.
She implored the graduates to go beyond their comfort zones, live and tell their own stories.
Revolutionaries aren’t born. Revolutions can’t be planned. Revolutions can’t be managed. Revolutions happen…… And sometimes, revolutionaries just get stuck with it.
In Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, the creator of Linux Kernel, Linus Torvalds chronicles his journey of creating Linux and distributing it on the internet for free. On August 25, 1991, as a Finnish computer science student, Linus announced his hobby project on an internet messaging platform:
Hello everybody out there using minix – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).
Without an understanding of profitability, every business, no matter how big, no matter how “successful,” is a house of cards
In Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine, Small Business author Mike Michalowicz describes a framework that he calls “Profit First”. It is a behavioral approach to accounting wherein the entrepreneur takes profit first and appropriates only what remains for expenses. Mike noted that by following this approach, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows.
A financially healthy company is a result of a series of small daily financial wins, not one big moment. Profitability isn’t an event; it’s a habit.
In The Company I Keep, Chairman Emeritus and former CEO of The Estée Lauder Companies Leonard A. Lauder shares the business and life lessons he learned as well as the adventures he had while helping transform the mom-and-pop business his mother founded in 1946 in the family kitchen into the beloved brand and ultimately into the iconic global prestige beauty company it is today.
In its infancy in the 1940s and 50s, the company comprised a handful of products, sold under a single brand in just a few prestigious department stores across the United States. Today, The Estée Lauder Companies constitutes one of the world’s leading manufacturers and marketers of prestige skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products. It comprises more than 25 brands, whose products are sold in over 150 countries and territories. This growth and success was led by Leonard Lauder, Estée Lauder’s oldest son, who envisioned and effected this expansion during a remarkable 60-year tenure, including leading the company as CEO and Chairman.
A routine is a habitual or mechanical performance of an established procedure. In computer parlance, a routine is a sequence of computer instructions for performing a particular task. 1 The word routine is etymologically derived from two words route + one from the french routine “usual course of action, beaten path”, from route “way, path, course” + noun suffix -ine. 2 It is the customary course of action, more or less mechanical performance of certain acts or duties.
Show me your routine and I would show you who you are. How you do anything is how you do everything. As ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle once said “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Your routine grounds and routes you. One of the major hallmarks of highly successful people is their daily routine. They show up daily, do first things first, they work in accordance with their priorities, value, and mission.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle
So throughout this journey, I have learned to block everything out and focus on my truth. I had to answer some basic questions for myself: Who am I? No, really, who am I? What do I care about?
The former first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address at the 2015 Tuskegee University graduating ceremony in Alabama. She delivered a powerful speech about racial discrimination and the pressure of being the first black first lady of the United States of America.
I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values — and follow my own moral compass — then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.
In The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, marketing strategist Chet Holmes describes 12 competencies & strategies for doubling sales and business growth. Chet shared tools for marketing, management, and sales mastery.
Key Insights: Pigheaded Discipline and Determination, Dream 100, Education-based marketing, Best neighborhoods sales strategy, Stacked Marketing.
Chet Holmes got his break by working for Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger. Chet doubled the sales of nine divisions under Charlie’s management purview. He shares 12 principles for doubling sales in the Ultimate Sales Machine.
Shoemaker: The Untold Story of the British Family Firm that Became a Global Brand, Co-Founder of Reebok Joe Foster describes the remarkable story of how he founded Reebok in 1958 with his late brother Jeff, following their family heritage back to 1895. From humble beginnings , they started from a small factory in Bolton and built a global brand with grit, persistence and focus. Joe’s Grandfather, Joseph W Foster founded J. W. Foster & Sons which pioneered the spiked running shoe and famously made shoes for the Worlds best athletes of the early 20th century, with World records and Olympics Gold Medals.
My story, the Reebok story, is not a standard business tale about how I worked hard, hunched over a shoe last for thirty-five years. Nor is it a linear journey along a well-thought-out path, or a tale of how I risked millions and came out smelling of shiny leather. It is a book about motivation and the importance of gripping onto an opportunity when Lady Luck presents it.
Get busy. Decide what it means to do great work, and then try to make it happen. Success is never assured, and the effort might not be easy, but if you love what you’re doing, it won’t seem so hard.
Ken Kocienda worked as a software engineer and designer at Apple for over fifteen years. In Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, Kocienda takes the reader on a journey of how some Apple Inc. products such as the Safari Web browser, iPhone and iPad were built, the design thinking, the key players, Apple’s innovative DNA, working with Steve Jobs, dealing with corporate politics and what it feels like working in an innovation baised company like Apple.
Apple is a top-down leadership, bottom up Contribution organization.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO of medical technology company, CrowdOptic Jon Fisher delivered the 2018 commencement address to the graduating students of the University of San Francisco.
John Fisher’s 2018 University of San Francisco Commencement Speech Transcript: