How to be successful| Reflections on a conference with Barack Obama

Welcome to the You Unleash Podcast with Femi Akami, the podcast where we explore how to unleash your potential in the workplace, your hustle, and life in general with practical steps. Sometimes I'll use stories from my past, and trust me, I have got some stories for you. And sometimes I'll just tell stuff I've learned, and other times we get people who know a lot more than I do to come in and just tell us what they know and how we can transform our lives. This is third pass, so third podcast. So I'm really looking forward to um to this. We're getting quite getting into a rhythm, which is one of the big lessons we can all take from this, is you just need to get going. There's an old there's an old Chinese proverb that says you take each step at a time, you go as far as you can, and then you take the next step, and that's what we're doing this podcast. I have become a believer that done is better than perfect, so let's just keep going. I've got a special edition for you today. Now, one of the things I want to encourage us to do if you don't do is take notes, take notes and journal as much as you can, and this is something I've been doing for a long time. Now, the other thing is, of course, is you need to take time to read those notes. And I went on holiday a few days ago with some of my good friends, and we got to talking about a few great people, and we ended up talking about Barack Obama. Now, it turns out I've actually attended a session, a speaking session with Barack Obama where he spoke to about 10,000 of us, and looking back, he dropped some really salient and powerful points. And as I went over my notes, I just realized I have to share this. Now it's gonna be a bit sort of on the go as I go through these notes, but I'm going through my notes and I'm just gonna pick out the powerful ones that I think he mentioned, and as I go through them, if I think it's worth expanding on, I will, and sometimes it just speaks for itself, really, and you take it from there. Okay, so let's jump in without much further ado. So looking at this, and this was a session where he was speaking to trainers, developers, coaches like myself. So they asked him questions and he answered. But let me get let me go through my notes. The first one education is important to liberating families, and what he was getting at here in this first one was just the simple fact that there's not a lot of many ways families, whatever your financial background, can release yourself from financial challenges or from poverty, but education just work harder, education, and that family can liberate itself, and that was one I thought was quite powerful, and it made me want to invest in education for myself, my family, and I think we should really invest in education for ourselves because when you think about it, you are your biggest product, you are the thing you can take to the market, your confidence, your skill, your eloquence, your ability to do your job. Education is important to liberating yourself, and as a consequence, it your families. The second point you mentioned was it's not about where you were born, but where you go, and this is an odd gun. A lot of us are born in different places around the world, but that matters not a lot, it's about where you're headed, what's the destination? You could have been born anywhere in a shanty village, somewhere in the deep forest of Brazil, and you can end up becoming one of the greatest people in the world. It's your choice, it's your core, it's your responsibility to make the best of yourself. So it's not about where you are born, but where you go. Spoke again about the other thing that we should think about is people don't think about what they're trying to accomplish a lot, so they have no compass. The point is mentioned here is that a lot of us, because we don't have a purpose, we don't have a sense of what we want to achieve in this life, we have no compass. Now, if you think about a compass, it's what people use when they're going on on sort of adventures, journeys to sea in the jungle, just expeditions, and it helps them find north, it helps them know where they're going, and having a clear idea of who you are and who you want to be allows you to make decisions, it allows you to decide if you go left or right. So, if you think about it, somebody who's going to the north pole without the compass, if they start drifting south, they open up their compass and it directs them north, and they know, yes, I'm going north, and what it does is helps them have a direction. So, have a sense of purpose. If you haven't got one, try and give yourself a sense of purpose, and that will help you have a direction. Your purpose becomes your direction. Number four is if you work little by little, you get to the top because you get good, and this is a powerful one, it's one I love actually. There's a great story about two groups of people who are given some clay, and the first group was told, You can only make one pot of clay, but you can take all the time you want to plan, design, strategize, and make that one pot of clay. The second group was told, Here's your clay, you can make as many pots as you want, keep making it, and when the buzzer goes, you submit the pot you think is the best. Now, which team do you think had the best pot? Some people probably say the first team who had all the time to design the pot. But in in looking back and you think about it, it's actually the second team because the first team spent so much time thinking about what the pot would look like, the design, the colors that what they came up with was okay, but not great. But the second team kept making pots and they'll break it and start again. They kept making pots over and over, and by the time they submitted what they had, it was perfect through just practice, practice, practice. So, my message to you is this is a good one is if you work little by little, you get to the top. Don't worry about the end goal, just keep chipping away at whatever you want to be, whatever you want to do, and you end up getting good. A good example of something he used to illustrate this post that he spoke to Bill Gates a long time ago and he asked Bill Gates, is how did you become so successful? And Bill Gates just said he just wanted to make computers great and then he became rich. Think about that. All Bill Gates said was, I just wanted to make computers great, and the wealth was a secondary thing. And the powerful message here is for most of us is whatever we choose to do, just think about doing a great job. And it I think it ties nicely into my previous podcast. If you haven't listened, check out our second our second podcast. Focus on service, just focus on trying to do a good job, and you'll be surprised that success will follow you. So the message here is just focus on doing a great job. So we're getting some really good stuff here. Most things are worth doing are hard, and this is true. Because if it wasn't hard, guess what? Somebody would have already done it. If something is hard and what doing, that should be acceptable to you. Because if it was easy, it would have been done. So if you're trying to do anything and it's hard, it's tough, it's challenging, don't give up. Because if it was easy, everybody would do it. You're trying to build a company, raise a family, develop your career, turn your life around, break bad habits. If all of this stuff was easy, trust me, everybody would be doing it. You're the man in the battlefield, you're the man in the arena, you're the woman trying to make a go of their life, trying to achieve something. So don't worry about what people say. It's not easy, it's hard, you know it, but you're going for it. And that's the encouragement from that one I'd like to give you. An interesting one he also gave us. He spoke a lot about some advice he always gives his daughter, Sasha Amalia. He says, I tell my daughters, adults don't know what they're doing. It's amazing anything works, but when we work as a team, we cover each other. Now, he was kind of talking about in this case about the White House because he was trying to let his daughters know that government is a shambles, and it's only in those rare moments when people work together that we get things done. And for me, what I took from it, what I'd like to share with everyone is to ever with to with everyone else is a lot of times in the workplace in life, we just like to think everybody has it together, and there's this grand perfect plan that that's going quite well, and you don't fit in, and it's too clever. It's a lie. A lot of times, people are struggling with incompetence, or in some cases, teams aren't working well together, and in some cases, people don't even know what they're doing together. But people walk around with a false confidence or make it look like they know what they're doing, and this would the the key for you here is just to think about it this way: just do your best and try to do your best to make it work, but let's not pretend there is some grand perfect plan. If there was, the whole world would be a lot more better than it is, and it is not, so just get in there, be confident, and do your best. Half the people in the room are blagging it anyway. Right. The other one I'd like to talk about is let me go to my notes, hard work, carrying your weights, honesty. These are things that we should do. Carrying your weight, always bring something to the table. Don't look at, don't ever coast in any group, in any team, as long as you do something. And I remember this, I worked for a guy a long time ago, and when I joined the team, I said, What do I need to do? and he said, Fermi, I'll just give you one thing try and find one thing the team needs and get really, really, really good at it. Just one thing, and believe me, guys, I found one thing, I got really good at it, and I stayed in that team for five years on a job that was meant to last six months. I found something good and I stuck at it, I became the best at it, and I lasted. So these are things that we can really all learn and pick up as we go along. Um, I've got a few more I want to share with you. Make decisions. Make decisions, make decisions, and if they don't go well, fix them. But the one thing you cannot do is paralysis by and by analysis. If you have something you want to do, make a decision, and if it doesn't go well, turn around, fix the decision by making another decision. What you cannot do is not make a decision. Number two, have a thick skin. If you do good, people are gonna talk. If you don't do good, people are gonna talk anyway. Right? Good, have the ability to focus on a thing to its conclusion. It's amazing how in this year, in this in this time of social media and and and so much technology that we lack the ability to just focus on one thing to its conclusion, and you don't develop it in a week. This is something that comes over years and years, so you have to hone this talent. So have the focus your ability on one to have to focus your ability on one thing to its conclusion, see it through to the end. Another thing he spoke about for himself is that he has the ability to take the long view, not get too high, not get too low, and this is good for us. Most of the time, we we we love to think about short-term wins, short-term solutions, and we're not patient. Whatever you're doing, you're raising kids, you're building a business, you're building a career, you're building a family, you're breaking a habit, you're trying to be the best you can be. Take the long view. Don't look at it as a day at a time, as something that's going to happen in a day. Rather, look at it as each day I'll do my best. And when things get really crazy and successful, don't get too excited or believe the hype. And when things get too low, don't think, Oh, I'm not good at this. Just treat each day as it comes and keep working away at it. Okay, right. Finally, I'll just run through some more. Change is hard. Change is hard, and I'm gonna be talking about change as we go along over the um next few podcasts at some point. But if you want to do any change, break it into component parts. A mistake a lot of us make is we try to ram through change at the same time at once, but that's not true. There's a method to change, and I'll talk about that in one of my next few podcasts about how to manage change. But for you, take away this change is hard. So if you want to do any change, break it into component parts. It's like trying to achieve anything. First, you set you break it into a small part and try to achieve that. So think about it this way: you have a bad habit of watching Netflix and you want to stop it. The first thing you could just do, decide to do is all I would do is I won't watch Netflix for one day a week because it might be hard to just not watch Netflix at all. So for one day a week, you start watching Netflix, and then you start to increase it to two days a week, three days, so you break it into component parts until one day you install it from your computer. Okay. So finally, he wrapped it up with this powerful message. If you are kind, if you're useful, you'll live a pretty good life. And I think this was a beautiful one. We all have a role to play. If you're kind and useful, useful to your family, useful to your peers at work, useful to your friends, useful to your spouse, useful to your community, and you're kind. You live a pretty good life, and really that's all we want. We have a role to play. Play your position and play it well. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Your Unleashed, where we share ideas and how to rocket in the workplace and life. Don't forget to share and like our podcast with your friends and let us know what you think. We're not where we want to be, but we are definitely better than we used to be. And don't forget, Dawn is better than perfect. Episode 3 is in the books. Get unleashed. I'll see you next week.