by Grantonio on September 10, 2010
Architect of Wow Just Got WOWed
Jason Northington is the Architect of Wow. And he just got ‘wow-ed’.
We have written a few books together, worked out together, and, when necessary, prodded each other for new heights. To prod us both, Jason has thrown a sentence at me that, out of some boomerang effect of some sort, I have been throwing back at him.
“Play a bigger game.”
It’s shorthand for ‘You are thinking way too small. Expand your mind. Expand your self-concept. Expand your risks.’
So, this morning, Jason, received a phone call…from Simon Sinek’s office!
Simon Sinek has spoken at TED conferences with his philosophy of life and business regarding the Golden Circles. Check out his video here. He also has a successful consulting business and building his speaking business.
You can imagine that when Simon Sinek’s office called Jason he was floored.
How did Jason make that happen? Well, that’s what wow-ed him.
“I was surprised. This was one e-mail that I didn’t try to engineer. I just wrote Simon and spoke from my heart.”
Now, speaking to Mr. Sinek does not necessarily mean a person has won the lottery. It doesn’t mean that hunger has been resolved in Haiti, or even that you get out of that ticket for not wearing your seat belt.
However, it definitely means that something is happening inside Jason. It means that a respectable person sat up and took notice. That is what it means to spark.
“I feel that if I would have tried to come up with something that it would have been engineered and fake. I just wrote from my heart.”
It’s funny, once you play a bigger game, have a bigger self-concept, act not only on your knowledge, but also on your heart, you get wow-ed.
What’s YOUR bigger game?
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by Grant R. Nieddu
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photo by Aoife city womanchile
by Grantonio on September 9, 2010
Value or Principle, or Valuing Principles
What is the difference between your values and principles?
Usually when I have a client who is ready to spark their life, we go through the VGOSPA model. If you have read the article, you know that “V” stands for Value and Vision.
So, the client will sit right down and write their values down, listing the things they value in life. I will then lead them to write what I call SuccessFiction; a future, visioneering narrative of the life they would value most. Thus starts goal setting…
Values. They are intrinsic to the human being.
They are what that person values. They may be “to be a good friend”, “to be the best in my career”, or “to live adventurously.”
But that is not the starting point. That is not where we should begin to spark.
Because values could be misguided. Values could be soul-destroying; “to make more money than anyone I currently know”, “to never be in a position to be hurt emotionally” (which could also mean they stay away from relationships).
You see, successful living, sparked living, is experiencing a life where intrinsic values meet extrinsic principles. It is resonance between the internal world and the external world.
Someone who does not seek first to know the principles of life first is destined for a hard road, no matter how strongly they believe in their values.
Someone who tries to fly ignoring extrinsic principles may just as well jump off a cliff to feel something they value; the feeling of flight. The Wright Brothers experienced resonance between their internal value (flight) and an extrinsic principle (gravity). More than that, they uncovered new laws and extrinsic principles in the process (such as the Law of Lift.)
It is this resonance between the two that is the starting point of Sparked living. Only by acknowledging the principles that are above and beyond ourselves, eternal in nature, are we ready to approach creating a Sparked, Ignited, and Explosive life.
What values are you chasing that may not be lining up with extrinsic principles? What values are? How can you begin to uncover extrinsic principles, aligning your goals with them?
