The common denominator of success -- the secret of success of every person who has ever been successful -- lies in the fact that they formed the habit of doing things that failures don't like to do.
That is the one thing successful people do differently: they do what they need to do to get the results they want -- whether they feel like it or not. And because they consistently do what others don't do, they get results other people don't.
Success almost always requires you to ignore something easy in favor of doing something hard.
Choose to perceive discomfort not as an obstacle but as an opportunity for growth.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable.
There are four foundational habits that everyone needs to feel great and perform at their very best:
Sleep.
Nutrition.
Movement.
Mindfulness.
Go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning, including weekends.
Research has shown that people who spend a lot of time sitting are significantly more likely to die prematurely -- regardless if they exercise or not.
Two months of exercise can be enough to significantly increase the ability to resist temptation and persevere in challenging situations.
Whenever you feel the impulse to be self-critical, remember that stacking shame and guilt on top of what you consider a poor performance only makes it harder to bounce back.
For those who hold a leadership position, creating an environment in which the people in your charge feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves is your responsibility as a leader. For those who work for an organization that does not leave you feeling inspired at the beginning and end of every day, you must become the leader you wish you had.
If we want to feel an undying passion for our work, if we want to feel we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves, we all need to know our WHY.
Money isn't the thing that drives people. WHY goes much deeper to understanding what motivates and inspires us. It is the purpose, cause, or belief that drives every organization and every person's individual career. Why does your company exist? Why did you get out of bed this morning? And why should anyone care?
For better or for worse, hiring for cultural fit is usually less about facts and more about how it feels. Irresponsible executives will ignore that feeling (a.k.a. their gut) whereas good executives will listen to it.
Each of us has only one WHY. It's not a statement about who we aspire to be; it expresses who we are when we are at our natural best.
Here's how Simon Sinek expresses his WHY: To inspire people to do the things that inspire them so that, together, we can change our world.
Contribution and impact. These are the building blocks of the final WHY Statement -- the contribution the person makes to the lives of others and the impact of that contribution over time.
Our struggles are the short-term steps we must take on way to long-term success.
An organization has a WHY. And within an organization are teams -- subcultures that exist within the larger group. Each of these parts within the whole will have its own WHY. We call that a Nested WHY -- the purpose, cause or belief that defines a subgroup within the larger organization. Then within each of those teams are people who also have their own unique WHY -- their individual WHY. The goal is for each individual to work for a company in which they fit the culture, share the values, believe in the vision and work on a team in which they feel like they are valued and valuable.
Simply hiring a good fit for the company is only part of the work. Knowing where in the company that person will work at their natural best and feel like they are contributing in a way that inspires them is also important. In fact, it can actually be more important.
When a unit, division or middle manager within an organization wants to find the WHY of their subgroup because those at the top of the hierarchy are not interested in articulating the company's overall WHY. If the larger organization really has lost its way, is operating without a clear sense of WHY and the senior leadership has no intention of going through a WHY Discovery, any leader of a team or member of a team can become the leader they wish they had.
A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.
People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
The greatest contribution of a leader is to make other leaders.
Do the things you say you believe.
Our actions either add to or take away from the trust and loyalty others feel toward us.
You don't want to spend a bunch of time small talking with someone who doesn't believe what you believe. It's just a sign that there is someone else with whom you could be having a deep and meaningful conversation. Go find them!
Each of us has one WHY and one WHY only. The WHY is the one common thread that brings out the best in us and makes us feel the most fulfilled.
Moving toward something (e.g., a situation in which you can thrive and live your WHY) is always better than moving away from something (e.g., a situation that isn't working for you).
Customer centricity is defined as "a strategy that aligns the development and delivery of a company's products and services with the current and future needs of its highest valued customers in order to maximize these customers' long-term financial value to the firm."
Not all customers are created equal, which means that they don't all deserve and equal share of your organization's valuable time and resources. To be clear, this doesn't mean you should "fire" your worst customers or ignore them wholesale, but it does mean that you should know at what point you're throwing away valuable resources on customers who aren't valuable enough to deserve the level of attention you're giving them.
A product-centric approach ignores customer heterogeneity and wastes valuable resources on chasing down product sales to anyone and everyone, at any cost.
By focusing on its highest-value customers, Best Buy was able to differentiate itself from online retailers and reinvent itself in an otherwise cut-throat business.
You often have more control over the kinds of customers you bring in as opposed to trying to change them after they've been acquired.
Bezos founded Amazon in the dawn of the internet after becoming intrigued with the exponential growth of online usage and sales. A year after founding Amazon, he was in Chicago at a national publishing conference, where he hung a sign at Amazon's booth boldly proclaiming that the company was "Earth's Biggest Bookstore." This daring statement caught the attention of Roger Doeren, chief operating officer of Rainy Day Books, a Kansas-based independent bookstore. As reported by the New Yorker, Doeren was puzzled by this claim and questioned Bezos on where, specifically, his bookstore was located. Bezos replied, "Cyberspace!" and then went on to say that he intended to sell books as a way of gathering data on affluent, educated shoppers. The books would be priced close to cost, in order to increase sales volume. After collecting data on millions of customers, Amazon could figure out how to sell everything else dirt cheap on the internet.
The "streetlight effect" is a form of observational bias that causes people to look for things wherever it is easiest to see them. This idea is applicable to many demographic-based marketing practices.
If you want to actually gain insights into what your customer's spending habits are, how much value they contribute to your company, or any other revenue-centric data point, demographics are the wrong tool.
When it comes to developing less-valuable customers, you need to have the right expectations -- they are unlikely to become top-tier customers no matter how much love you show them.
Getting a customer to add fries to their order is a classic example of cross-selling. Given that existing customers are about 50% more likely to try your other products than new customers, you should absolutely make sure these patrons know all about your full menu of offerings.
Strategic account managers (SAMs) must make relationship management their main concern -- anticipating, preempting, and addressing the major pain points and potential sacrifices of their best customers. To this end, the most effective SAMs are trusted collaborators, problem solvers, and project managers and are able to bring innovative solutions to the table, all in service of playing a high-touch, defensive strategy at the top end of the customer-value pyramid.
In the customer-centric world, not recognizing who the high-value customers are -- regardless of which products they have bought -- is a cardinal sin.
There is now widespread agreement and corroboration from experts across multiple fields that the value customers bring to the balance sheet is real, that is should be measured, and that is should be reported to (and demanded by) investors!
For the most part, Wall Street judges the worth of firms in two ways: top-line growth and bottom-line growth. A firm's top line is the gross revenue generated from the sales, and the bottom line is the net income, or profitability, of the firm. A note from Investopedia on the subject: Both these figures are useful in determining the financial strength of a company, but they are not interchangeable. Bottom line describes how efficient a company is with its spending and operating costs and how effectively it has been controlling total costs. Top line, on the other hand, only indicates how effective a company is at generating sales and does not take into consideration operating efficiencies which could have a dramatic impact on the bottom line.
Today, if you're not lean and agile in the technology and product development fields, you're irrelevant.
In general, it is essential to get cross-functional buy-in for customer centricity (or any strategy) to succeed, and there is no better way to do so than to make its incentive compatible for as many employees as possible to embrace CLV and begin to work with each other to best leverage it.
