If you’re like me, for as long as you can remember you’ve seen people who are more successful than you, and wondered how they got there. At least on a good day. On a bad day, you and I are just green with envy all over.
Being green is not a good situation for your business. Envy is a disease- it tears you and your business apart. If you look at envy closely, you can feel how it pulls you away from the very person from whom you need to learn- your more successful colleague!
My cure for envy is to hitch-hike.
By hitch-hiking, I mean do more than just standing to the side hoping to get something from people who are more successful than you are- like referrals or other scraps. Instead, catch a ride with them and watch how they drive. Let me explain:
I remember in the early 1990’s when I was running a non-profit magazine, and we had a little cubicle in a larger shared office, and an all-volunteer staff. The shared space included a much larger non-profit organization who had 17 paid staff. The executive director, a woman I greatly admired, had, in seven years, taken the organization from where our magazine was, to the success I saw then. How did she do that in 7 years, I wondered?
What did I do? I schmoozed her. How in the heck did you do that?, I asked her. I spent time talking to her fundraising person. How do you ask someone for $10,000?, I asked. And I learned a lot. Eventually I ended up doing some successful nonprofit consulting based in a large part on what I learned there.
The same in my business. Earlier this year I participated in a group run by Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. Why? Well, in part it was to benefit from the group itself. But, a bigger reason was that here was someone who was the next level up from me, who obviously had a successful business model, and whom I respected tremendously. So, I signed up to get more of an insider view of how his business felt. In short, to hitch-hike.
Everyone I know who is really successful, I’ve found out that they hitch-hike. If you find yourself green with envy at someone else’s success, my advice is to drop the envy, and hitch-hike with them instead.
Keys to Hitch-Hiking
• Identify someone a level up you want to schmooze. Ask them out to lunch, or if you can interview them, or sign up for one of their groups. Be respectful, and you’ll find that many people are fairly open. You think people are busy, and they are. But, not surprisingly, successful people received a lot of help to get there, and are often receptive to helping you if you are respectful and vulnerable in asking for help.
• Pay for help – it’s worth it. I have consistently paid for support every step of the way in my business, and more than 90% of the time it has paid off big time. And for the other 10%, I have learned valuable things about how NOT to run my business, saving me from potentially very costly mistakes. Make sure that the person you hire as a coach or consultant, or whose group you join, really resonates with you. And, once you decide, jump in with both feet. Ask questions early and often. Be persistent in learning what you want to learn. Great coaches and consultants want that, because it helps them get better at what they do, which is helping you.
• Carefully evaluate what works for you. Once you have taken in all of this information and experience, pass each new bit through your own heart and see which category it fits in:
1- Adopt. It fits who you are and you can joyfully adopt it.
2- Adapt it. It’s great information, and needs to be adapted or changed to who you are so it can work;
3- Adapt yourself. It’s great information, you need to adapt or change yourself to be able to use it successfully;
4- Drop. It doesn’t work for you, and you discard it.
Have fun hitch-hiking! It’s a great way to see the business world.
