Be Your Best

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

I wrote an article last month about meeting Cal Ripken Jr., aka the ‘Iron Man’ of Major League Baseball / Hall of Famer, and learning more about his incredible record-breaking streak of the most consecutive played games in professional baseball (surpassing Lou Gehrig’s previous high mark).  If you missed this article, you can find it on my blog at ToddGifford.com.  Well, meeting Cal Ripken Jr. got me thinking about a personal streak that I have going: I have never missed a day of work sick for 23 years (since 1987).  Yes, I have had some days in those 23 years where I was not doing so good and probably should not have been at work, but I still made it through the work day.  Why do I bring this up?  I am kind of proud of this streak, and it is a bit of a motivator for me.
I never really thought about it until about seven or eight years into it.  Then, it became something I was consciously aware of on a daily basis.  No doubt there were days I felt like crap and should not have gone in, but I wanted to keep the ‘streak alive’.  It may be more ‘odd’ than it is impressive.  In the limited times I mention this streak to other people, I get more of a “that’s interesting…” than “wow, that’s awesome”, or “do you expect people in your company to never have a sick day?”

Bottom line is continuing this streak is a goal for me, and it helps keep me motivated to stay healthy enough to never miss a day sick.  It is also my own personal ‘claim to fame’ so to speak.  Not a public claim to fame obviously, but something I feel good about achieving and continuing to achieve.  Can I go 25 years without a sick day, or 30?  We will see.

Ironically, as I am writing this, I am not feeling that great.  Picked up a bit of a cold from my kids — but I am at work keeping the streak alive!  What is your streak or claim to fame?  Everybody has a claim to fame whether they know it or not, and many times more than one.  Identify these and rally around them!  It makes life and work much more interesting.

The Risk of Inaction
This is a concept that has popped up for me several times in the last few months that I felt worthy of mention, and addressing it can improve your results in whatever you may be doing.  So many times during the day or week we run into decisions involving some degree of risk in both personal and work situations.  It could be very minor things with small degrees of risk or big decisions with substantial risk involved.  What I have found is that very few of us or people that we look to for advice ever talk about the risk of ‘inaction’.  Whether you are talking to an attorney, your manager, your spouse or significant other, your child, etc… inevitably they always refer to the ‘risk’ of doing a particular thing.  If you do X, then a bad thing could happen.  If you do Y, something else bad could happen.

This tends to have a negative affect on us, making the pain of ‘doing’ something or the fear of failure when taking action a ‘possibility’.  What is rarely talked about or acknowledged is the risk of doing ‘nothing’ — which almost always is far greater than the risk of doing something.  But because it is not commonly talked about, it is largely ignored and not considered.

Doing Nothing is Generally Accepted as ‘Safer’
Throughout my life, all through school, and then in my work career, it has been sort of a generally held assumption that doing nothing was always safer than doing something.  Possibly it has to do with the fact that “if you stay in the same spot there is a degree of comfort and a sensation that you  cannot take any wrong turns.  Forward movement could result in a wrong turn.”

Over the years I have clearly seen this non-action = safe theory not to be true, over and over.  The reality is that success comes as a result of taking action with some calculated risks and ‘failing’ a certain amount of the time, in order to learn, and then applying that new knowledge to more action with some risk, and so on.

Be on the lookout for situations where you are concerned with the risk of some action.  A good tip:  instead of comparing the risk of that action with not doing it — compare the risk of doing ‘something’ with doing ‘something else’.  Forward action of any kind nearly always beats doing nothing!

Be Your Best and Happy New Year!

Todd D. Gifford