I’ve been organizing my resources including books, CD’s, and videos.
I found a box of cassette tape programs. The one I’ve had the longest is a six-cassette tape set named Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale. I got it in about 1973 at age twenty-four. It was given to me by the president of the civil engineering firm where I worked named Parrott, Ely, and Hurt. I am grateful that Mr. Ely cared enough to pass that along to me. That type of gesture from a real leader to a young person can make all the difference.
Do you know who Earl Nightingale was? I recommend that you search for his name and check out the wealth of information online about him, including YouTube videos. This would be time well invested. I’d loan you my cassette tapes, but I’m concerned they might fall apart!
Earl Nightingale was a speaker and author on character development and motivation, living from 1921 to 1989.
In the early 70’s he had a five-minute radio show called Our Changing World. It came on in Lexington at 7:00 am, which was a time I was often in the car and able to listen.
When I had a sales team working for me in the early 80’s, I bought the Lead the Field program for each of guys. Mr. Ely had set a great example.
I wish I had consistently used one technique Nightingale taught. I did it for a while years ago, but I was not disciplined enough to keep it up.
He suggested that we take a blank sheet of paper, write the significant goal we presently have at the top, and write a list of ideas about how we can meet that goal. He said to do this for one hour a day, five days a week, every week. That would be 260 hours a year thinking about how to do what we want to do. The objective of the exercise is to write twenty possible activities that can fill the day helping us meet our goals. He said to write even the absurd ones.
Besides this brainstorming uncovering some ideas that we might not think about otherwise, it embeds our goal into our subconscious mind. And we begin to lead the field.
He said that instead of doing this, people often seek advice from people who are not qualified to give it and that we don’t read as much as we should.
An hour commitment is tough for me. I’m going to begin tomorrow, Monday morning, doing this for twenty minutes a day, five days a week, for at least February, and then maybe increase my time from there. I can do it!
A few well-known quotes from Mr. Nightingale are:
“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal.”
“You become what you think about.”
“People with goals succeed because they know where they are going.”
Google him now. You’ll be glad you did.
