I am sitting in the Indianapolis airport as I write this, awaiting my flight home. I just finished the second day of leadership training for a very successful U. S. Company. While the industry they operate in (Publishing and book distribution) is not my area of expertise, leadership skills are people specific, and as such, the industry doesn’t really matter.
Anyway, interacting with, and teaching, people that want to become more effective and more successful is a blast for me. And this group was awesome. But I know that while I cover a large amount of content, we have great discussion, and they take lots of notes….the true learning happens as they apply what they discovered. I say discovered, because there is a difference between knowing about something and truly knowing it.
You truly know it, when you consistently do it without thinking about it. So the key for the group, is to reduce the elephant of information to a bite they can take. Then focus on that single bite until they own it, then take the next bite. That is how we progress in any project, and its how we learn things of value.
Too often we allow ourselves to get overwhelmed with the size of an endeavor…when if we will just reduce it to today’s bite…take THAT bite and then tomorrow look at the next bite….then bite by bite, day by day, we can grow and succeed. I’ll leave you with this piece of wisdom on the subject:
“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I permit myself to contemplate.”-John Steinbeck
