Success?

I'm way behind on my reading, at least the reading material that I subscribe to that hits my inbox. I do my best to stay on top of it, but there are times where I'm more than a month behind. Take this article for instance - Want to be Extremely, Wildly, Radically Successful?. It was written by Joel Petersen, Chairman of JetBlue Airways and published more than a month ago on LinkedIn... but I'm sharing it now...

To summarize my understanding of Mr. Petersen's point in his article: there's a ton of articles out there (online) containing quick lists of things you need to do, almost presented as mere tweaks you can make to your daily life and be amazingly successful.

Mr. Petersen reminds us that all of these quick fix articles out there are the "Unplanned Offspring" of Stephen Covey's hugely successful book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Having worked with Mr. Covey, Mr. Petersen understands perhaps more than most what Mr. Covey was trying to communicate in his book. There are no quick lists or quick fixes to be more effective and therefore more successful. It takes hard work, it takes reflection and the understanding of oneself and the courage to make fundamental changes in oneself to be balanced and make the right choices in your personal life and professional life quickly and easily, almost subconsciously, because in the core of your being you know who you are and who you want to be and everything you do reflects that. Whew!... run-on sentence, I know... but you get my point.

Mr. Covey's book was passed to me by father. He read it when it was first published in the early 1990's and he was in his forties then. He passed it to me after he retired and I was in my forties. I read it and it had a profound impact on my life.

Mr. Petersen's article reminded again of how important that book is. It reminded me to make sure I continually come back to it and read it and practice it's teachings and pass it along to my kids... hopefully before they're forty :)

D