Thanks http://www.flickr.com/photos/nosha/ for the pic.
Everybody has heard the saying that “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” or something similar. The traditional way of understanding the saying is that when you are holding a prize in your hand, you shouldn’t throw it away to find out what’s behind door number two. Our subconscious minds take the saying a little differently though. They say, “A bird in my hand is worth more than the same bird in your hand”. When you own something, it takes on a completely new level of value. You form mental and emotional attachments to your property incomprehensible to everyone else.
I’ve been keeping my eyes open lately for a potential house to purchase. An ongoing theme that I’ve seen so far is that people feel that their homes are worth more than they really are. As a buyer, I look at the home as a piece of land, a structure and a whole bunch of living space. The sellers look at it as a home with memories. A place where they grew up or raised their children. The place where they held parties and had great times. You can’t put a dollar amount on memories but then again, you can’t sell them either so they are worthless to the buyer. When selling your house, you have to be realistic about how much the actual house is really worth and not what it is worth to you.
On a smaller scale, we as human beings are just as bad. There are many things that we would never buy (or never buy again), but if we already own them, we cannot get ourselves to get rid of them. Think about your old comic book collection or clothes that you haven’t worn in years. I thought about this recently when looking at my collection of domain names that I own. There are some domains that I continue to pay $8.99/year for that I would never even think of buying if I didn’t already own them. There are many domains that I own because of an idea I had that I never pursued or because of an old project that is not in existence anymore.
To see the extent of the value gap between owners and potential buyers, watch this video by Dan Ariely, where he speaks about what Duke basketball season ticket holders are willing to sell their tickets for and what non ticket holders are willing to buy them for.
Lucky people get passed the inexplicable emotional attachment to the bird in their hand and think realistically. Unlucky people think that they may make some money off of all the old “stuff” they hoarded for all of these years and continue to pack everything away. The amount that you will make off of the sales and the frustration you go through to sell it are not worth the money you are spending on storing and maintaining your possessions.
Looks like I am going to do some spring cleaning. What are you going to do about those birds in your hand? Let me know in the comments.
If you’ve been following this blog, you will know that to get lucky, you must open yourself up to as many new opportunities as possible.Keeping your eyes open to see any changes that can lead to new opportunities and listening to as many people as possible to hear new points of view that can lead to new opportunity.It seems pretty obvious that if things aren’t going as well as you would have hoped, you would open yourself up to new ideas and new points of view.If that’s the case, why are so many businesses and organizations banging their heads into the same wall over and over again?
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– Albert Einstein
Being new in town, my wife decided to help out some local organization by joining committees for their fundraisers.She was full of excitement knowing that she was not only going to be helping out her community but also, she will be able to share some of her ideas to make the events even more successful.They welcomed her onto the committees with open arms but to her surprise, they were unwilling to listen to any of her ideas.Even though they complained that they lost money of some events and would love to raise more money on others, they were determined to not only redo each of last year’s events but duplicate them completely and have the same people run each part.
My wife sent them an email saying that she was disappointed that she wasn’t involved more than just running errands that nobody else wanted to do.Here is the response that the committee leader sent to my wife:
Hi,
First of all, i apologize for not including you more in this. Most of the year to year things, carry on from year to year, so the ones who have dealt with these things in the past continue to do them year to year. Most of the committee does nothing more than helping to set up, dealing with the night of…I think because the core committee can do this with our eyes closed already, we didn’t bother to set up any “real meetings” with the rest of the committee.
“Who is wise:Hewholearns from all men.”
– Ethics of Our Fathers
When will people learn that if they want change, they will have to open their eyes and start doing things differently and most of all, listening to other ideas and points of view.If you never want to get lucky, go ahead and continue doing what you’ve always done with your eyes closed.
On Saturday night I had the privilege of going to a hockey game with my brother to see the Montreal Canadiens play the Washington Capitals.Although the Canadiens lost with a couple minutes left in the game, I did come away from the game with a valuable lesson.
There was one beautiful play where one of the Canadiens (can’t remember which one) broke through the Capital’s defense and made it all the way down the ice, a little past the blue line when he decided to pretty much pass the puck to the Washington Goalie.When I say pass, I really mean it.The entire game, the Canadiens were slapping the puck at the net and on this play, it couldn’t have been going more than 5 mph.
I was a little disappointed but my brother who is a much bigger fan than I am reminded me of Wayne Gretzky’s quote “You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take”.He said that you never know but sometimes those shots go in by some fluke.
This got me thinking about many things in life.There are times where you have a chance to do something but you don’t feel that you are 100% ready yet or the timing just doesn’t feel right.If you don’t go for it, you will definitely not succeed.On the other hand, even a miserable attempt at the net can end up as a goal.A goal is a goal, no matter how it’s scored.
Go ahead, take your shots, even the ones that aren’t all lined up and perfect because if you don’t take it, it’s for sure a miss but if you do make some sort of effort and take the shot, you never know.You may score by some fluke.
Another example of this was given to me by my insurance broker.He said selling insurance is a numbers game.You will have success in proportion to the amount of phone calls you make.There is no real special trick, it’s just get on the phone and don’t stop calling.The same goes for hockey.Keep taking shots on net and eventually one of them will go in.
The more shots you take, the luckier you will get.
I just had a conversation with a friend of mine who has five twitter accounts, one is personal and then four of them are each a stream for different topics.I don’t know what all of them are but the ones that I do know are great ideas.One of them is a pipeline of jobs for a specific niche.It’s great and it is something that the niche needs.He is doing a great service for the people looking for those positions as well as the organizations that he is publicizing.
My take on this was that the beauty of twitter is that it is authentic and completely transparent.It is a live human who is doing all the tweeting and there is no editing.The tweeter writes about his life, his ideas, his passions and people follow him because they are interested in what he has to say, they crave social interaction and they like to be part of other people’s lives.Social media opens up conversations between consumers and actual people in companies rather than just the corporate image that traditional media projected.
@comcastcares is a great example of a real person tweeting about real things in his life and also representing a company by offering instant customer service.More people are changing their view of Comcast each day just because this guy exists.He is a human face for the corporation.
I told my friend that he should use one account for all of his pipelines and people will follow him because of his authenticity.I told him to at least announce that it is him behind each of the accounts to be transparent and people will be able to follow the feeds that they want.Instead, he is using the different accounts to collect feeds and spit them out in one location.It’s a good idea but in the web 2.0 world, is this what we really want or need?
I consider myself somewhat entrepreneurial and I have tons of ideas all the time.I have thought about creating different twitter accounts for different ideas but at the end of the day, I decided that whatever I do on twitter, I want to be completely authentic.If I start a business and want to tweet about that, I’ll do it on my account.If the business grows, I’ll let other people in the company have their own accounts where they can tweet about different aspects of the company and let their personalities shine through.
I’d love to hear what you think about this.Am I right?Am I completely off my rocker?Let me know in the comments and then follow me up @flid2.
Over the years I have spoken to many very successful business people and entrepreneurs and every single one of them told me the same thing.To be successful, it takes a lot of hard work and you need a little luck.A few of these successful people even made the connection that the “little luck” comes from the “hard work”.Most of them didn’t put 2 and 2 together and realize that the only reason they got lucky was because of the hard work they put in.Regardless of what field you are in, you will not get lucky sitting on your rear playing video games all day, unless you are in the gaming industry and you are learning from all the playing that you are doing.My point is that if you want to get lucky, you have to look for the luck.A real estate investor cannot not sit at home on his couch all day waiting for a seller to ring his doorbell and offer him a property.A successful real estate investor is constantly doing research, meeting with people, networking going over numbers.All of that is hard work and if he keeps it up, two things will happen.One, he will eventually find an investment property to invest in, either through his research or networking. And two, he will become more knowledgeable in what to look for and therefore be able to spot more opportunities that less skilled investors don’t see.
Take for example, two people starting businesses in the same field at the same time in the same area.They both work on building their business to become profitable but after a year, one of them closes.Two years down the road, the business that stayed open is extremely successful.From the outside people might say that they got lucky.The economy might have turned or other factors might have come into play.Looking at the first company, you might see that the company failed and closed up shop.Looking at the second company, if you look deep down into the business, you may see that the company failed as well, and it probably did.The difference between the two companies is that one of them took the failure and closed up shop while the other learned from their failure, fixed their mistakes and kept going.Chances are that the second company failed many more times but kept going ahead with their business plan.As I wrote in Lucky Failures Can Lead to Success, the way to success is to work through the failures because failing is the road to success.
A lucky person gives everything 110% effort and is always going the extra mile.Luckortunity comes from all the extra experiences, looking at the big picture and pushing yourself forward.An unlucky salesman will knock on three doors, get rejected three times and then realize that sales is not for him.A lucky person will knock on those same three doors, get rejected and then keep knocking until he makes a sale.It might take him 100 tries or more but at the end of it all, he made a sale and had 100 chances to refine his sales pitch, figure out what works and build up his confidence.
These examples can be used for anything.Some people are lucky in love by finding just the right person, some are lucky by finding the right home or job and some are lucky by building a successful business.The point is, the harder you work, the more luckortunity there is and the luckier you can get.
Previous Posts in this Series: 10 Ways to Increase your Luck.
Picture this.You are 20 pounds overweight on December 20th, New Years is right around the corner.This is the perfect time to make a new years resolution.You are more than determined to get to your goal weight and you decide to start the moment that the ball drops in Time Square.You plan for the next 11 days how you plan to lose the weight.NO more eating after 8:00 PM, cut out 10% of your calories, drink less soda and alcohol and more water and finally start exercising like you’ve been wanting to for as long as you can remember.
Since you are extremely determined and organized, you whip out your laptop or a notebook and start making charts of what you need to do, how you are going to track yourself and set clear goals.You feel great about yourself and completely prepared for January 1st when your new lifestyle will start.You are going to be great!
Well, you still have a week and a half to go until you have to change your lifestyle so you might as well enjoy yourself while you can, after all, you won’t be able to indulge yourself for a long time.
A few large meals later, maybe some late night drinking, snacks in bed while watching a movie and holiday dinners, you look at the scale and are somewhat disappointed that you now have an extra 5 pounds to lose.You’re not as optimistic about your new years resolution at this point but you are still determined.
New Years Eve comes and you find yourself at a party with food and drinks going late into the night.You may choose to partake thinking that “the diet starts tomorrow” or you may hold back which can be the ultimate temptation.Whatever the case, the next morning is going to be very hard and keeping to your new program will get harder each day.The percentage of people that come to this point and stick to the program are (from my experiences) very low.
LUCKORTUNITY
The Luckortunity over here is to always start things right away.Never push things off because they will get harder and harder as time goes on.The greatest chance you have at succeeding is moving ahead at full force when the idea hits your head.A new idea, whether it’s your own or someone else’s, can give you a high that will give you the extra push to get things done.If you start on that note, you have a better chance of building momentum to keep going toward your goal.
My new year’s resolution for 2008 is to get lucky.Lucky in general, in everything I do in life, from business to social to family and everything in between.This post is the beginning of me keeping to my new year’s resolution.I know that it’s not January 1st yet but I figure a few things; first, if I start now, it will get me in motion so that by New Years I will already be well on my way and have enough inertia to keep going.Second, if I start now, it will be pretty pathetic of me to not even make it to New Years for my New Year’s resolution so I will be forced to keep it up.Lastly, starting early, working hard and being persistent are some of the keys to getting lucky.
I wrote on the Luckortunity (or introduction) page that there is a major difference between “chance” and “luck”.“Chance” is winning the lottery, something people can hope for but “luck” is something people can strive for.I am convinced that every single person in the world has the potential to be lucky on a regular basis.Through this blog, I am going to go through my own personal luck and give you tips on becoming lucky yourself.
This self improvement blog is full of advice on how to increase your luck and improve your life. You can start off by reading 40 Ways to Increase your Luck.
