Five Elements of Success

Good morning, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht, encore series of Digging Deeper.

Just this morning, actually I was fortunate. I read a number of newsletters and things that come in during the course of
the weeks is how I try to stay up on the industry and up on really everything that's going on in the world. And read a great
one this morning. It's from Guthrie Chamberlain who writes a Wisdom-Trek blog. And this morning's writing from Guthrie
was the Five Elements of Success, and I thought he hit a real home run on this. So, the five elements - passion,
determination, self-discipline, perseverance, and faith. So, let's talk about each one of those.

Passion. I got to thank a lot of you for some of your comments to me, by the way. I am passionate about what I do. And
passion is such a key to success. It's very interesting. One of the examples he used was Bill Gates of Microsoft and Bill
Gates had this dream and this passion for putting a computer on every desk, both at the office and in the home. And wow,
you look today, of course it's often no longer a computer. It may be a phone or an iPad that go along with your computer
or an addition to your computer. But his passion for that and some others that we had the same sort of thing going on
from Apple at the same time. But their passion for that business really helped drive a whole change in society, a whole
technological change, tremendous growth in productivity in the entire world. Just really a sea change driven by the passion
of a few guys out there.

Determination. If you think about determination, we face a lot of obstacles as we go through life and we go through our
business and the determination is sort of that stubbornness that says, "Well, I don't care what I face. I'm going to fight
through this and make it happen." So, one of the examples he used for determination was Dolly Parton. Dolly, I guess in
her high school speech or something like that, said that she was going to go to Nashville and become a big star. And
everybody poo-pooed her and said, "Ah, that ain't going to happen." Well, she is the most awarded singer-songwriter
perhaps in history at this point and created Dollywood and all this other fan stats and charities and things like that. And
aren't we glad that she had a determination to not listen to folks and tell her that she couldn't do this, and she couldn't
do that because she did it? And so, passion and determination.

The third one is self-discipline. Boy, that's one I've struggled with in my entire life. I've always liked to have fun. So, if I
have a choice of sticking to it and going and having fun, I'm off having fun almost every time. But luckily, I've developed
some self-discipline and gotten some things done in life. But self-discipline really is that I'm going to use the word
determination. It's the determination to stick to what you got to do and keep doing it and really not get distracted
constantly. And boy, today's world, there's so many distractions, so many ways to be distracted. We just live in a total
distracted world with the iPhone and everything else and email and all of that. So, it really does take a lot of self-discipline
to get your work done, to stick to your goals, to keep the main thing main, to work on the important things and not end
up on some tangent doing something else or just having fun like I like to do.

His example there was Jenny Craig who learned self-discipline when she lost 45 pounds. And she took that self-discipline
and turned it into Jenny Craig Diets and became a very wealthy person around that. But she really learned the discipline
through her own diet, which is pretty interesting.

The fourth element of success, perseverance. And kind of like determination, perseverance is sort of the long run, if you
will, of determination. It takes a long time to find success. I know it's taken a long time for me to find my greatest success
in my career. And I'm sure a lot of you have been at it a long time and success is pretty incremental. And by the way, it's
not always incremental in the right direction. So, we have to persevere. We have to fight through the down cycles in the
economy. We have to fight through people challenges. We have to fight, fight through industry challenges, and sometimes
we have to fight through bad luck and bad choices, bad decisions. But sticking with it in the long run, that's perseverance.

Guthrie reminded us of the Walt Disney story, and Walt liked to draw things and he liked to create cartoons. And he went
to his local newspaper who told him he wasn't very good at that and that he should give that up and try something else.

But Walt persevered. So he went back to his garage, which by the way was mouse infested. And I guess out of that came
something famous because he created some things around some mice. But that perseverance that Walt had obviously
ended up in a whole bunch of great things. And the Disney movies and productions, Imagineering, and of course the great
parks that they have out there as well. So, perseverance.

And then finally faith. And I love the quote from Miracle on 34th Street where the mom tells little Susan that she has to
believe. That faith is believing when your common sense tells you not to. And I think that really describes it very well. Faith
can be a lot of things. It can of course be in a higher being. It can be in your own abilities to overcome, or it can be just in
the idea that you have that this is going to work, that this is going to play out well if we just stick to it. But faith is certainly
one of those key elements of success because again, it's never a straight road between where you are in success. It's a
curvy road that's got lots of bumps and lots of potholes. So takes passion, determination, self-discipline, perseverance,
and faith.

So, wishing you lots of success out there and try to maximize those five elements. Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.