HR Pulse

Pushing the envelope for growth and success

So just how far are you willing to go to ensure true success in business and on a personal level?

While thinking about this, I came across an article called The five traits of wildly successful people. One person’s story caught my attention because this man pushed the envelope from when he was a child.

Here’s the piece that truly impressed me:

Growing up, Sugar Ray Leonard would wake up, get dressed for school, and walk with his siblings to the bus stop. As the yellow bus would pull to the curb, his friends and siblings would step up into the school bus, but young Sugar Ray Leonard, who is now a six-time world champion boxer, would refuse to get on. As the bus drove away, Leonard tightened up his sneakers and ran behind the bus all the way to school.

“The other kids thought I was crazy,” Leonard said, “because I would run in the rain, snow—it didn’t matter. I did it because I didn’t just want to be better than the next guy, I wanted to be better than all the other guys.”

The article ends with the comment: “Does what you’re working on excite you so much that it inspires an irrational sense of commitment? Are you willing to chase the school bus for years - before seeing any return? If so, keep running. If not, maybe it’s time to think bigger.”

Similarly, we all remember the story in Jim Collins book Good to great about Dave Scott, the six-time winner of the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon.

As Collins tells it:

“In training, Scott would ride his bike 75 miles, swim 20 000 meters, and run 17 miles - on average - every single day. Dave Scott did not have a weight problem, yet he believed that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would give him an extra edge. So, Scott - a man who burned at least 5 000 calories training a day - would literally rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off. Now, there is no evidence that he absolutely needed to rinse his cottage cheese to win the Ironman; that's not the point of the story. The point is that rinsing his cottage cheese was simply one more small step that he believed would make him just that much better; one more small step added to all the other small steps to create a consistent program of super-discipline.”  

Living in a world of ‘instant gratification, which is made easier by being able to buy products online and yoga lessons on YouTube with the click of a mouse, we have raised the so called ‘Gen Y’ to working age. The media has described this group as one that works smart not hard, may often feel entitled and expect things to fall into their laps.

I still believe that there’s no substitute for hard work and you need to push your own personal envelope at every opportunity.

If you’re a business executive or community leader, wouldn’t you want a Sugar Ray Leonard working for you? How successful could your company or organisation be if every member in it had a goal they were striving for, and you saw the value in their running behind the school bus?

Passionate commitment is a rare and exquisite thing

You find it in small patches across our society – the student who walks kilometres to school in the hopes of one day graduating from University; the person who starts out as a driver for a large organisation and works their way up the ladder into a senior leadership role; the matriculant who waitresses to put herself through a computer course because her dream is to own IT company.

It’s easy to look at business leaders and other icons that have ‘made it’ and think that had a leg-up that we didn’t. In many instances, though, this isn’t the case. Opportunities surround us all every day – we have to be aware of them and when they appear fleetingly, we have to be prepared to grab them with both hands. I will always remember Gary Player saying, “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”

I love how the author closed his article, too: “Sugar Ray Leonard kept at it, to the point that others thought was irrational. It turns out irrational commitment leads to irrational success.”

So, how far are YOU willing to go for irrational success?