Successful Blog

Genius is made, not born

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By Andy Crestodina

Laszlo Polgar started with a belief: “geniuses are made, not born.” The Hungarian chess teacher felt this notion so strongly, he wrote a book called Bring Up Genius! The book was basically a how-to guide for raising brilliant children. And through his children, Polgar had a plan to create a chess champion.

It was basically a social experiment. First Laszlo found a woman, Klara, to be the mother of his future champions. He married her, and together they had three daughters: Susan, Sofia, and Judith. From the age of three, the girls were immersed in the game of chess.

How did it work out? Today, the Polgar sisters are chess legends. Sofia is an International Master, and both Susan and Judith are Grandmasters. Judith actually became the youngest player to ever achieve that title. She was 15 years old. To this day, she is one of the strongest living chess players, male or female. She has defeated World Champions with names like Karpov, Kasparov, and Spassky.

Mr. Smith goes to Hollywood

Actor Will Smith is another example of planned success. He set out with a deliberate purpose to not just be an actor, but to be the most successful actor in the business. His manager James Lassiter said to him “Listen, if we’re going out to L.A., we probably should have a goal.” Smith replied, “I want to be the biggest movie star in the world.”

So together they looked at a list of the 10 top-grossing movies of all time. “We looked at them and said, O.K., what are the patterns? We realized that 10 out of 10 had special effects. Nine out of 10 had special effects with creatures. Eight out of 10 had special effects with creatures and a love story.”

In minutes, Smith and Lassiter had deconstructed the formula for Hollywood blockbusters. Smith’s conclusion? “Independence Day, no-brainer. Men in Black, no-brainer. I, Robot, no-brainer.” He pursued opportunities that would lead him down a specific path. It wasn’t an accident. It was a plan.

Vision + Work + Environment.

Success requires vision. In the case of Judith, that vision began before she was born, with Laszlo Polgar’s dream of raising a champion. With Will Smith, he started by analyzing the greatest successes in his field. They both understood Stephen Covey’s principle of “beginning with the end in mind.”

Success requires work. You must put in the work! You may have heard the “10,000 hour rule” made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. It takes 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to become an expert. They both started early, but both Polgar and Smith have pursued their goals with intense determination.

Success requires the right environment. All that practice has to happen somewhere, so a favorable setting is critical. Polgar himself said, “Genius equals work and fortunate circumstances.” But your environment and circumstances can be controlled. If you’re not in a good situation for reaching your goals, change it.

Make your own genius

Your goals may not be as lofty as chess Grandmaster or Hollywood movie star. Success at this level requires almost total dedication. But all accomplishments at any level require these same ingredients. Whatever your goal, set your sights, create your environment, and get to work. Great things await you.

Author’s Bio: Andy Crestodina is the Strategic Director of Orbit Media, a web design company in Chicago. He’s also the author of Content Chemistry, An Illustrated Guide to Content Marketing You can find Andy on and Twitter.

What’s the WHY of Your Business?

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Influence and Attraction

Purpose, Mission, and Vision

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Whether we’re working with a new businesses, a project, or a team that needs rebuilding, it’s typical to start with purpose, mission, and vision.

You have to choose your future before you can make it happen.

Though we might not fully agree on the exact definition of those terms, a true strategy will investigate, establish, and articulate these foundational ideas of mission, vision, and purpose before …

  • before auditing market share and position;
  • before studying current trends, cycles, and conditions;
  • before making product or customer service decisions,
  • before choosing a core community;
  • before considering processes and systems.

This list represents the “who” “how” and “what” of a business.

What’s the WHY of Your Business?

Making any key decisions without agreeing on mission, vision, and purpose is dangerous. It’s an invitation to hidden assumptions, shallow thinking, and miscommunication. Without clarity, everyone who might help you, your team, or your business — employees, vendors, partners, customers, friends — will construct their own definition of your mission, vision, and purpose.

Next time you want to influence people to support your idea, project, or business venture, next time you want to attract people to participate with you, answer these four basic question sets:

  1. Who are we? / What do we value?
  2. Where are we going / what are we building?
  3. How will we get there / how will we build it?
  4. Why is this quest important? / Why are we uniquely suited to meet this call better than any other?

These foundational questions require priority attention because they build they WHY of your business.
They underpin your best true, compelling story — the calling and commitment — that fuels your business and the people who want to help it grow. Yet, the last of these, the “WHY” fuels is of what moves us and the people we serve to action.

The WHY of your business is the bedrock of influence and attraction.
The WHY attracts people who share your values and believe in what you’re building.
The WHY calls the ideal employees, customers, vendors and partners to pitch in to help you build it.
The WHY is irresistible reason to join you in making something you can’t build alone.

What’s the WHY of Your business?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Are You Seeing the Things that Make a Difference to Your Business and Your Life?

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1200x1200--GeniusShared ReadWhere Do You Focus Your Vision?


Take a 60-second look at this lights in this photo then try not to look back again as you answer the questions that follow it.

Now look at this while space for a while as you scroll down to a few questions about what you saw.

Where do you focus your vision? What’s important in your business and your life?

Are You Seeing the Things that Make a Difference to Your Business and Your Life?

Everyday we interact with a world of information that has potential for adding something to our our business, our brand, and our life. But the ways our brains work, the way we jealously guard our time time, we as easily overlook what we’re seeing as finding the fuel and the data that might …

  • to make our work and our lives easier … It’s not that we’re not thoughtful enough to find easier ways. It’s that we’ve forgotten to take time to reflect and think while we keep up our breakneck pace, racing through time to beat a clock that would work for us if took the time to look.
  • make our work and our lives simpler … It’s not that we’re in love with the complicate and difficult. It’s that we’ve come to believe that balance is adding more and more things to juggle without stopping to sort which really deserve our time.
  • make our work and our lives more meaningful and inspired … It’s not that we’re without mission or purpose. It’s that we’ve let our heads get disconnected from our hearts, setting that inspiration at a lower priority, not letting our aspirations fuel our businesses and our lives.

And those those thoughts, those beliefs change our world by changing what we see and how we respond it.

So answer me this, when you saw photo above, did you see …

  • the three lights up front that look like stars and the fourth that did not?
  • the light in the window of the building next door?
  • the trees along the harbor?
  • the reflections in the water?
  • the way the water changes color?
  • the yellow in the sky?
  • the red light under the clouds on the horizon?

Think for a minute about what you saw and what you missed. Were looking with your heart or with your head? Or did you hardly even look?

I started taking photos of the harbor so that I would remember to look. After months of pictures what I’ve found is that the harbor never looks exactly the same twice. The light and color from the sky add mood and flavor. They communicate about the weather that is and the weather is coming. They communicate about my connection to it. And that communication has unlimited power to open my eyes, open my mind, open my heart to what inspires me to what’s important in my business and my life.

Did you believe that you didn’t have time to really look? It’s not just the beautiful harbor. It’s the clouds and colors in the sky that change one day to the next.

It’s not just the “what” of the bar graph. It’s the people behind it that tell you the “why.”
It’s in the looking that we find the nuance, the detail, and the color that inform a business, a brand, and a life. Understand those and your work and your life will become easier, simpler, and more meaningful.

Are you seeing the things that make a difference to your business and your life?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

What’s the YOU in What You Do?

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Your Strategy Is Uniquely Yours Alone

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I spend most of my days thinking about, reading about, writing about and talking about strategy for individuals, small businesses, and huge corporate brands. When you look closely at what I do, it will soon become apparent that like snowflakes that every strategy is uniquely different and in that way they’re all the same.

True strategy draws from who you are, where you’ve been, what you know, what you’ve experienced, and decisions you’ve made. So even though an individual, a small business, and a huge corporation might all have the same vision, mission, and goals. The opportunities that come to them are as different as who they are and what they know.

A solid brand is like your character. Build on who you are, not on a strategic plan.

It’s a serious risk to invent a brand that isn’t you or the values that your business is built upon. What happens when you do is that the brand becomes a bad facsimile of what you really are. And sooner or later the true you leaks out in some way — you don’t live up to what you invented.

You can’t write my blog post. You can’t give my talk. You can try to copy me, but you’ll always be a copy.
The value in what you do you is your own version of the way you do things.

I can’t be Copyblogger Chris Brogan, Oprah, or even my own mother, but I’m one heck of a Liz Strauss.

The closer we get to understanding who we are and what we value, the more people trust us to show up in ways that we say. They see, feel, and respect that we are living what we’re saying and they know they can trust that. It resonates with others when we ARE who we ARE, not just how we act.

And within us, our businesses and our corporation, the integrity and confidence of know who we are offer rich context that telegraphs itself to anyone who hears any one of us talk or anyone talk about us..

Don’t reinvent yourself. Don’t re-engineer new ways of reaching out.
Reconnect to your values and be what the best version of you is about.
That’s how you’ll attract the people who share those value with you.

It’s the YOU in what you do that makes the brand, the business, and the team work the way it does. No one can compete with that. People can join in, adding to the story and enhancing the mission.

The you in what you do is the ultimate barrier to entry. It attracts opportunity, but defies replication.

Read that sentence again. Information, products and services are all over the world and all over the Internet, but there’s only one YOU. No one can do, see, think or add the difference you make in exactly the same way you do. Anything that isn’t you … isn’t your brand – it’s discounting your true value and values.

That unique YOU is the part that people love, protect, stay loyal to, and bring their friends to experience.

You are the value. You are the difference.

Have you figured out what’s the YOU in what you do?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

7 Steps to a Vision that Grabs a Community by Its Soul

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(Updated in 2020)

10-POINT PLAN: 1.2 Articulate the Vision

CommunityPhoto by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Why Have a Vision?

Last week, I wrote Why You Absolutely Must Share Your Vision Early and Often. Now, it’s about the how-to.

Imagine three corporations that build and sell computers for small business and entrepreneurs. Each corporation defines its business in a different way.

Brand A says: Our company is in the business of making products for consumers who need them. We do the work they can’t do and offer it at a fair price.

Brand B says: We’ve are the leader in quality, creative solutions to the complex technology problems that entrepreneurs and small business owners face today. We make it our business to know their problems and to find a way to solve them. We deliver on our promises and we’re committed to staying the best in the industry.

Brand C says: We are a network of deep and strategic partnerships with employees, vendors, partners, and small businesses leaders who work together to build products and work environments that inspire and generate creativity, competence, performance, and trust and to create jobs and solutions that build the economy now and for future generations.

Brand C is the description that connects the company to every person on the planet.

How Does Vision Attract Community?

The vision is more than the mission. It’s the destination drawn clearly so that every member of the new community can see it, understand it, speak about it with passion, and believe that it will happen. The vision is not a product devised and made by a crowd or a committee. It’s a leadership decision — the original strategy expanded with thought and design to elevate it to a higher calling.

The vision is the cause that attracts and unites the people of the community. It why they invest tireless hours and best efforts — because they are building …

  • something that makes an important difference;
  • something that no other company is building;
  • something that needs every individual’s unique contribution
  • something that no one individual could build alone.

The vision isn’t a dream. It’s a work in progress … a group aspiration in the true sense of it’s definition, breathing toward. The vision gives the community a why for why they are investing the time of their lives each day into this work. The vision is more than economic, more than profession, it is a commitment to accomplish something meaningful in the world.

7 Steps to Communicating a Vision that Grabs Folks by the Soul

If you’re looking to build a thriving business, start with a long-term, loyal internal community of employees. They will build and protect a healthy innovative culture, promote the values of the business, stay with the company, develop expertise with coworkers, and live to serve customers. What better way to build a brand than to agree upon the values that you stand for and create an environment that nurtures brand ambassadors?

It takes the right vision to attract the right people to that kind of community culture. When we meet the best people, we have to tell them about that vision, or how will they see it? Here are 7 steps to articulating a clear vision.

    1. Think contribution. Think partnerships. Re-imagine your team or your business at this highest, most useful place in the world — financially, professionally, and philosophically. Talk through what you see with people you trust until you have a image, a vision, of what that business offers to employees, partners, vendors, and customers.
      We’re inviting the highest quality people who have a stake in teaching and learning technology to join together in building products, services, and opportunities that show other people how business can work better for customers.
    2. Think ideal membership. Make the vision irresistible: smart, feelingful, and life-changing on a world-scale.
      We’re only interested in the best minds, best designs, and the best problem solvers with the highest values. We’re going to align our goals and build stable, successful, ethical business models that freely give support to fledgling business in depressed areas to create an economy that helps us all grow.
    3. Think contributions and returns. Find the words to describe it simply in ways that others can see the value of what you’re going for.
      We’re building the business that listens, learns, contributes, and invests in the people who help it thrive — it will be the business that people want to work with and for — the sort where every person makes a difference.
    4. Think recruitment. Be able to speak to the benefits of being a part.
      One benefit is that under-achievers and those who will sacrifice anything to raise the bottom line won’t want to work here.
    5. Think champions and heroes. Invite the people who see the vision to be involved in highly visible ways. Talk about what they’re doing encourage them to talk too.

The communications team has started a newletter for partners and vendors working with inner city high school enterpreneurs. Let us know if you want to volunteer.

  1. Think honest communication. Talk publicly to everyone in as many ways as you can — live your message.
    I’ll be listening to the folks who have experience where I don’t. I’ll be looking to learn from you how to do this better. That includes everyone I know.
  2. Think evangelism and growth. Invite people to pass on the vision and the invitation.
    Who else belongs here? Tell us.

It’s not the how or what of work that builds community. It’s the why. The underlying vision that unites us toward building something that we can’t build alone. A community needs leadership to set and invest that vision and so that they can feel smart, safe, and powerful in investing too.

Once the community sees the vision and realizes that leadership commitment. People who share those values will pick up the message, the tools, and the passion to contribute to the cause. The culture will grow from their actions.

Humans are wired to be deeply inspired by causes greater than ourselves. To inspire a community to invest its soul, we have to show them why we’re willing to invest our own.

Have you really communicated your vision? Are there ways you might make it clearer to the people who can help it thrive?

Related
To follow the entire series: Inside-Out Thinking to Building a Solid Business, see the Successful Series Page.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to Share the Vision and the Plan with a Business-Building Community

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Goals, Dreams, Visions, and Plans

Raising a barn is a spectacular goal. Getting a community to help makes it easier and harder. It’s important not to confuse goals with dreams.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery,
author of The Little Prince, said that.

Char Polanosky explains what that means.

To raise a barn or build a business with a community is a social collaboration. It competes with all of the other wonderful and pressing things in their lives. To capture their time and attention, we have to offer something that is smart, compelling, and easily fit into their lives — irresistible.

Share the Vision and the Plan

When the time comes to build, we’re not going to find a community who magically knows what to build and where to put their skills to work. A critical stage in social leadership is being ready for the community when they’re ready to help.

We have to be able to explain — what we’re building and what roles they might play.

Share the Vision

We gotta know the vision before we can share it. The vision has to be clear from the minute they arrive. We need to be able to articulate

  • what we’re building — what the parts are
    and how the parts fit together to make a whole.
  • how that whole will be useful and who will use it.
  • how that whole with make that real people’s lives
    better, faster, and more meaningful.
  • how you’ll reach the people who will use it.
  • how you know they will.

Seeing the vision gives a community a reason to do the work.

Share the Plan

We gotta have a plan before the work can start. The value of the work also needs to be shiningly apparent. We need to be able to communicate without hesitation a clear business plan that offers:

  • easily understood standards of quality
  • simple budget rules or a stated source of materials
  • a realistic schedule with an end date for their commitment
  • a clear description of job roles for volunteers

Knowing the plan offers security that the work will be time well spent.

The vision and the plan let the community see what we will be creating. The vision and the plan give us the confidence on which a community can plant their trust, energy, thought, and emotion. On the vision and the plan, we align our ideas and ideals — we agree on the work to be done.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery also said,
Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.

Have you ever helped someone build a dream? What did you need before you invested?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to build barn? Work with Liz!!
Image: NASA Image Exchange