The Road to Your Best Stuff 2.0: Pushing Your Career, Business or Cause to the Next Level…and Beyond

By Mike Williams and Les Brown

Do you want to do something amazing with your talents toward your life's work?

Use The Road to Your Best Stuff 2.0 to customize your way forward. If you're serious about making a real impact, dig in! Reap the rewards from your efforts! No matter your field or your level of achievement so far, The Road 2.0 has something for you. Tap into your passion and your gifts—your stuff—with a comprehensive approach to achievement!

Through intensive and careful self-development, you will be challenged to examine and maximize your personal, professional, organizational, and promotional dimensions to push your way to the highest level of your unique stuff. Whether it's in a new career, a new non-profit, a start-up business, or a freelancer, here is a place to get you on track or build the track just for you. Bring your ideas, skills, talents, and energies fully into the marketplace. Put methods with your passion and make something powerful happen.

This second edition, The Road to Your Best Stuff 2.0, provides a deeper dive into the process of identifying strengths, weaknesses, habits, priorities, and possibilities than the original. Each chapter, with its questions, actions, tips, and resources, gets you closer to that ideal match between your potential, your commitment, and your passion. Your work will get results.

Get on it! Take The Road to Your Best Stuff 2.0 to someplace special!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Williams Solutions
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9780980053456

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

This book is based on a simple principle of achievement. I express that principal in this way:

We are endowed by our Creator with distinct, unique and powerful stuff. Embracing and developing our stuff allows us to achieve at our highest level, making our own special mark on the world.

In this book, your stuff is the combination of qualities you possess that are the foundation for what you can achieve in your life. It is the essence of what you have and can build on, including your strengths, your ideas, your skills or talents, your experience, your habits, your standards, and your passion, as applied to your life’s work, whatever the work might be. Your stuff is the fuel for what you can do, become or accomplish.

World-class achievers in fields of all kinds start their pursuits with some measure of talent, drive, confidence and expectation. In aiming for your best stuff, we are looking to maximize opportunities for you to achieve at your highest level. In the same way that it works for the highest achievers, it also works for others. With the right mindset and skill set, all kinds of things can happen, to bring out your best stuff. The Road to Your Best Stuff is your way to get there.

This book’s perspective on achievement is based on my work as a consultant, strategist and coach, as well as several jobs, projects and professional experiences. It is also based on interviews and observations with achievers at various stages of success in their fields. This includes established and startup business owners, grass roots and large-scale nonprofit organizers, freelance entertainers, and fast-track professionals. This book also reflects consultations and interviews with a variety of civic and community leaders. I draw on my experience as an activist, broadcaster, trainer, program analyst, designer, marketer, and manager, as well as several job and freelance experiences. Together, they have been a window into areas I might otherwise have missed. Those experiences provided a chance to appreciate and better understand challenges, pitfalls, rebounds, and breakthroughs over several decades.

What those achievers have in common is a desire to distinguish themselves in their respective fields and in many cases to attain major financial success in the process. Those who reach the high levels have talents, traits, passion and commitment. It shows up in their work and in their results.

I have worked directly with scores of clients on hundreds of projects, trained several hundred others, and interviewed and observed many more. I have seen and noted patterns of accomplishment, obvious shortfall, and a reluctance to reach fully for obvious potential. Each of these patterns deserves our attention. So, the pages that follow provide some of that attention, with an emphasis on the requirements for establishing a high level of success, and continuing that success to even higher levels.

This second edition, this 2.0 version of The Road, reflects a look beyond what was provided in the original version. This second look led me to enhance and clarify even sharply several points raised originally. So, there is a broader set of examples, updated information, and the opportunity for a deeper dive at the end of each chapter.

Many of the achievers mentioned are nameless, and several are mentioned with first names only. I tried not to make it about the people, but about the situations. On the other hand, I do refer to my role as a strategist for motivational speaker Les Brown in some detail. Our collaborations, presenting programs and products in personal and professional development, as well as a variety of broadcasting projects, tie into my work as a marketing and organizational consultant, not only with Les, but with other high achievers, not as well-known as Les. Significantly, the work with Les and the many people I have met, interviewed, consulted with and observed have greatly influenced my perspective, both directly and indirectly.

In the pages that follow, we connect large-scale, continuous success to four dimensions—personal, professional, organizational and promotional. Whatever your chosen field, we will use a comprehensive approach for helping you rise to the next level, and the one beyond that. Many examples involve unconventional careers, hopefully setting the stage for a more open view of finding the best fit. The reality is this: you have to be tuned into the elements that represent who you are, in order to establish a foundation for long-range, continuous rising success. This is in the personal dimension.

In addition to the personal dimension, where you explore what you want, the professional dimension tells you what you will need to do to qualify and achieve. Next, in the organizational dimension you determine how you need to conduct yourself to be effective and attract support. Then, in the promotional dimension, you get ready to connect with the marketplace, the universe, in a way that will allow you to connect, succeed, and grow.

When you have a sense of yourself as viewed in personal, professional, organizational, and promotional ways, you can dig in, draft a plan, and get moving. So, you will explore often overlooked aspects of yourself, personally and professionally, to set up a more comprehensive approach to getting where you ultimately want to be. Remember: no matter how smart you are, being smart will not be enough; no matter how talented you are, having talent will not be enough; no matter how good your financial or logistical skills, they will not be enough; and no matter how good you are at pitching yourself, your pitching skill will not be enough. Each area must fit into the larger picture.

By looking at several fields, and learning from people whose contributions provide clear examples, we can get a better view of our own prospects and needs, and set a better course for a bright future. But if you have no burning desire to change the world, your life or your field in some real way, then what follows may have little value. This is a good time for a gut check. If your aims are high and your intentions are serious, this book can help you do something special with your stuff. Or if you know that you have more to do, but have no idea what or how, keep reading. This could be a great adventure.

We are about to explore how your view of yourself will determine how hard you work, how masterful you become, the resources you attract, and how well you can gain, repeat, and expand your success. How we see ourselves will always play a major role in determining the quality of relationships we form, the extent to which we can build trust, the ease with which we present ourselves in the marketplace, and how well other peoples’ views are factored into our decisions.

When I was midway through writing this book originally, I ran into an old buddy whose track record in business had earned the envy of many who know his accomplishments. He has earned millions through a variety of ventures, having reasons to feel good about what he has accomplished. But in our conversation that evening he made it clear that he sees himself as an underachiever, someone who didn’t get further because he had internal issues. He was certain he could have done bigger and better things if he had been more comfortable with, more accepting of, himself. He said the fact that he could have done much more bothered him. His candor shocked me. We hadn’t talked in depth in a number of years, and it seemed that those years had taught him some things about himself he was comfortable sharing.

When we caught up several years later in a different setting, the entrepreneur confirmed what he had told me earlier. But he made it clear that he wasn’t finished. He was working with younger people, making sure they were less likely to sell themselves short, blocking opportunities, as he had done. He is a good communicator, so I’m sure he’s giving them something to think about, opening eyes and making an impact.

No doubt, when you have a limited view of yourself, it blocks your commitment to good habits, promotes poor decision-making, and lowers your expectations. And once expectations are lowered, everything negative falls into place to make sure you fall short.

There is no question that what you know can make a big difference in how far your business, career or cause can go. But as successes begin to mount, and you are looking for ways to go to higher levels, more of the keys to breakthroughs will come from your inner search. The better you know and adapt to what you learn about yourself, the better prepared you will be for the challenges at the next level and beyond.

# # # # #

Here is a key for getting the most from this book. Once you absorb each chapter, use the hands-on follow-up information to take a deeper dive into the issues raised. If you consider this book a self-coaching guide, you will be hitting the mark I was seeking. This book is a resource for greater resources, intended to make you more empowered by reading and working its content. It is as much a book about questions as it is about answers.

The Road presents a method of digging in to learn a lot about yourself and your possibilities. Use the tools and techniques provided to move dynamically forward. It is my sincere hope that you will use this book. It has value if you apply it.

So, all the best to you, as you go forward on

THE ROAD TO YOUR BEST STUFF 2.0.

Mike (signature)

I. PREPARATION

Chapter One:

THE PERSONAL DIMENSION

IF you want to reach some major goal or milestone of achievement and sustain it, you will need a solid sense of who you are: your own history, your ideas and aspirations, your strengths and weaknesses, the values and standards you hold, and other things which make you you. Who you have been is a key, but not the only key, to who you might become or what you might need to overcome, to establish your special place on the planet.

1. Examine who you are, what you want in your life, and why.

Actively explore and get to know yourself practically, beneath the surface.

Step back and take a long, hard look at yourself. If you take the time, it can be revealing. Consider your strengths,

Reviews for The Road to Your Best Stuff 2.0

[Glenn Norris · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I think if you truly want to know the truth an if you truly want to grow and succeed that you must do self evaluations and that you need to get other peoples evaluation of you as well. You will also need a trusted master-mind team of supporters that are with you and willing to help you. He did a good job focusing in these areas.