Jim Collins (10 To-dos for Young People)
Photo by Alexis Brown on Unsplash
About seven years ago my dad encouraged me to read Good to Great by Jim Collins. I have been a fan of Collins ever since. I was captivated by the concept, "Good is the enemy of great." Throughout the book he describes how the best businesses in the world become great by continually seeking to perfect their core business.
During my senior year of high school, I stumbled across this video of Collins. In it, he is speaking at the Drucker Centennial, a celebration of what would have been Peter Drucker's one-hundredth birthday. The whole video is great, but the section I would like to direct your attention toward is his 10 To-dos for Young People. (The section begins at forty-seven minutes and lasts about six minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qZP4kaYcXU
10 To-dos for Young People
Build a personal board of directors.
Turn off your electronic gadgets.
Figure out your three circles.
What is your question to statements ratio, and can you double it?
If you woke up tomorrow morning and discovered that you had inherited twenty million dollars, and you also discovered that you had a terminal disease and only had ten years to live, what would go on your stop-doing list?
Start your stop-doing list.
Unplug the opportunities that distract you.
Find something for which you have so much passion that you are willing to endure the pain.
Articulate the values that you will not compromise.
Prepare to live a life where at age sixty-five you are one-third of the way through your work.
There are so many of these "to-dos" that have impacted my life over the last couple years. Powerful statements like "Effective people take time to think," and "just because something is a once in a lifetime opportunity is a fact and not a reason," ring in my head daily.
I hope you can extract the wisdom from this clip, and that it has as big of an impact on your life as it has had on mine.
Over the next few months I will occasionally circle back to one of these to-dos and provide more of my analysis. Until then, check out Jim Collins and his work on his website.