Thriving in the Long Run.

The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past. Edition 216.

Successful individuals and firms tend to have a commonality to their success.

Behaviors that unite them regardless of country, industry or culture they operate in.

Things that allow them to thrive consistently over long run

They all display a sense of perspective, an ability to be perceptive, a constant hunger to pioneer and a dogged constant persistence.

Perspective: With time and experience comes a sense of perspective.

An understanding that the world does not revolve around oneself or the firm.

This allows one to become more empathetic, generous and invest in relationships.

Relationships for the long run.

A sense of perspective also brings with it the realization that life and career while in one way are short in other ways they span decades and will bring a tangle of good and bad, ups and downs. To succeed one needs to grimace and march on in the bad times while not losing all sense of proportion and propriety when the force appears to be with us.

Perspective is also important to companies, so they see where they fit in their eco-systems and can determine both who to partner with but also to visualize their category broadly enough to see opportunities and threats outside a narrow slice of geography, time, or market.

Successful people and firms also put things in perspective when explaining and making their case. They place things in historical or other frameworks to build convincing stories.

Perceptiveness: The Cambridge dictionary defines someone who is perceptive as one who is “very good at noticing and understanding things that many people do not notice”.

This noticing and understanding can be about being emphatic in how one deals with people or seeing a niche or hiccup in a process that many may miss or to be self-aware of one’s weaknesses and mental models.

Today we live in a connected, collaborative world where people are looking for customized solutions. While data informs, insight and the wisdom are extracted by the perceptive.

Perception can be honed and grown and will be a key for success as it will be what helps differentiate carbon based analog feeling individuals from increasingly powerful silicon based digital computing machines.

Perception means being close to customers and market trends and to pay attention to the little signals. A combination of EQ and an increased sensitivity to the finer shade of things.

Our perception and their power and precision will be what will drive profitable results.

Pioneering:  Long lasting firms innovate, invent and are idea driven. They do not let their roots tie them down but rather use roots to feed their wings to fly to the future.

These innovations can be across a range of a company’s system from supply chain to logistics to customer service to pricing to engineering breakthroughs to re-thinking their business.

To succeed as an individual eventually everyone needs to become who they are.

We need to find our voice and superpower and each of us in doing so pioneer by becoming special and differentiated in our own way.

Defining oneself is an act of pioneering.

Switching jobs, cities and goals are all acts of taking a different path and trading the known for the unknown.

These are all forms of pioneering.

Persistence: Part of persistence is continued practice.

Practice of a craft, a skill, an art.

A portion of it is patience and recognizing that the reaction to a thing is what will determine how the thing affects us and often not reacting but instead waiting is the most prudent thing to do.

A lot of persistence is recognizing that it is in the everyday doing, the everyday improvements, the everyday re-invention and repair after setbacks that forge us in the foundry and furnace of industry and life.

Persistence is practicing a daily resurrection.

It is sculpting each block of stone and placing them together that builds the cathedral.

Day by day.

Year by year.

The power of compounding skills, relationships, and returns.

How every “overnight” success comes to be…

Build Perspective. Hone Perception. Risk Pioneering. Remain Persistent.

How to thrive at work in the long run? Take a look inside my upcoming book consider pre-ordering Rethinking Work. Click here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/rethinking-work