Do you ever wonder how someone with less education and training than you makes far more income? In this episode, Jimmy shares four methods of personal value-creation that will help you achieve success and worth.
Episode Keys
- The importance of reading to increase your speaking and writing capabilities.
- How to expand your vocabulary for FREE in just a few minutes each day!
- Why you must increase your value to the marketplace to reach uber success.
- When you should learn new skills in your professional life.
- What the difference between charisma and character can make in your lifetime income!
Podcast Transcription
Hey, hey! Good morning! Hey, this is Jimmy Williams, and I tell you, I am having a blast this summer, getting back to normal and I want you to know you are going to be in for a treat today. Hey, this is Live a Life By Design, your Monday morning moments of motivation, and I have some things to share with you today that I believe will be a focal point to your upcoming success realization. And I’m going to talk to you in just a few minutes about it, but I just want to say thank you first to all of our listeners and subscribers. We are excited about an upcoming surprise that we’re going to unveil for the podcast to get you, the listeners and subscribers, involved in a little bit more of a discussion with those of us here on the podcast. So be in tune for that. It’ll be coming about the first week of August, so very, very soon, and we certainly are excited to see what we can do to help get your input as we continue to improve the show. You know, many people have asked me either in emails, telephone calls, or just face to face conversations about how they can achieve success when working for another person’s company. Too often, it’s not, you know, “you must establish your own enterprise to find true success,” and that’s not necessarily a hundred percent true. So today, we will share with you four simple, yet effective methods of increasing your value in the workplace. And that will pay you extraordinary dividends in your career.
Before we get started, though, did you ever recall an old, old commercial by Wendy’s hamburgers? And the Wendy’s restaurants have this little bitty old lady that would come up to the restaurant and ordered one of the hamburgers from a competitor and the lady opens the bun of the hamburger, and there is very, very little – about the size of a quarter – hamburger patty in the middle of these buns. Her only phrase to the person working the counter was, “Where’s the beef?” And so Wendy’s used this very successfully throughout the eighties of letting people know they have 100% pure beef patties, that type of thing, and it exceeds the circumference of the bond and these things. But my point I want to drill down on here is “where’s the beef”. The marketplace asks this question of each of us, literally every day and it’s expecations of what you bring to the market. So you’re going to learn the four methods I personally used and I continue to use to bring greater value creation to the services we provide the public.
So the first method of personal value creation is to expand your vocabulary. Don’t be a lazy professional and rely strictly on your current speaking vocabulary. One of the easiest methods of increasing your capability to communicate is a real simple one, that is, to read. Yes, you heard me, read. When we read books that are written by other highly intelligent people, we gain a tremendous amount of personal growth. Now there’ll be one of those people that say, I’m going to read a hundred books this year, because if I asked you about any particular volume that you read mid-year you most likely would not be able to tell me the salient points of the book and how you applied them in your life. I would rather that you read 12 good books this year, but you have excellent points that you’ve learned from the books. You’ve applied these points in your life – professionally, personally, whatever – and they have made a difference in your performance. I would say to you, I would rather you read the same book 12 times this year, then to read 12 books simply to say you read 12 books. Make sense?
But if you are informed of new words through reading, there’s another simpler way to do this. This is a free app you can load on your phone to help increase your vocabulary. If I told you, as I said, it is free, would you take advantage? So this free app is what I say one of the best resources that we have available to us in vocabulary. If it’s free, how much more of it can we take? All of it, right? Load it up on the phone, use it constantly. It doesn’t get any better than free resources when they’re available to you. So the free app is the Merriam Webster app. You know, the Merriam Webster dictionary publishers. This dictionary app is really cool. It’s got vocabulary games, it’s got a word of the day. It’s got a built-in thesaurus so you can look up different words to be used in place of maybe some rather trite words you’ve used before, and you’ve used them too much, and they’re frequently being used in your writing or speaking. This app to me is one I refer to daily, seriously. Every day a new word is given in the app and it increases your understanding and broadens your vocabulary. So after learning the new word of the day, I use it intentionally in three to four sentences so that I understand the application of the new word in my overall vocabulary. It is that simple. The more you are in command of communicating clearly to the marketplace, the more probability for success, and not just success, but success at an uber level.
When I was in undergrad school, I recall a gentleman asking the question. Now he’s a business major, and he asked the question, why do I need to take a speech class to graduate? It was one of the general education courses, and I’ll never forget the doctorate, the PhD in Speech that was teaching the Introduction to Speech class. He said a remarkable thing that I’ve never gotten out of my mind at this point. He simply said this, “What good are you to the world if you can make the best mouse trap possible, but not explain it or speak of it to a group of people?” When he said that it really honed in to my thought pattern that, hey, I could be the most brilliant CPA on the planet, the most brilliant wealth manager on the planet. But if you cannot talk to people or explain to your prospective clients how you do what you do in a cogent and coherent manner, then you will not reach the highest level of success that you may be capable. To me, vocabulary is everything. Practice it in your writing, as you write letters. Don’t use the same routine of words. Use your mind, go to the Miriam Webster app, look up some new words, use some things that are different for you to expand that vocabulary. This is your first personal value creation method.
The second method of increasing your value to your career is to learn new skills. This one strategy is incredibly powerful. Don’t be the type of person that waits for learning opportunities in your position of employment. Take the initiative to seek a deeper understanding of the role you currently hold. Find a more efficient means of communicating so that you can save time and can deliver a more valuable service to your employer, clients, or customers. Let me use a very pertinent example. The Walt Disney Company… We all know of the Walt Disney Company with Disneyland, Disney Parks in Florida all over the world. The Walt Disney Company is a fantastically profitable company. Its CEO, Bob Iger has a keen understanding of how to drive shareholder value. If Disney does well, Iger does well. In 2018, Iger earned total compensation of $65.6 million. Now I don’t know who all listens to this podcast, but I’m going to take the opportunity to venture that that is a lot of money to any of our listeners or subscribers. It is a lot of money. Did I mention that is one year. That’s not a lifetime. Now, why, would you ask, would any company pays someone such a large sum of money? Well, the answer is simple. Because of the exceptional skills Iger brings to the company and increase in value to the shareholders they experienced from his leadership, that’s how you gain a $65.6 million compensation package. Do you think Bob Iger simply performs the tasks asked of him by his supervisor, in this case, the board of directors, does he just simply do enough to get by? No way! If you wish to gain more success, you must become more valuable to the marketplace.
Now you are a human being. You are of great value to your children, to your spouse, to your parents, your siblings, your community, your church, that it’s not what I’m referring when I say valuable to the marketplace. What I’m talking about is, is that if you have a solution that is unique, that resolves a big challenge that many people are facing, you will have great demand for such service or solution. This is how you bring great value to the marketplace. So in this respect, learning new skills and challenging your current talents will do you wonders in creating personal value in the marketplace.
Setting challenging goals and protecting your time are the third methods of increasing your value. Goal setting, I hear you gets a bad rap from people. Why should I write down tasks? Just to check them off. This is a to-do list, not goal-setting. So let’s talk about the importance of goals. And I want you to know you must have right written goals. If you don’t, you simply have a dream. That’s my definition. So this goal-writing process is very, very simple to implement. By properly setting down these goals and defining what you wish to achieve in the process of reaching your goal will bring you greater success. It will help you grow as a person. Remember the purpose of the goal is to simply show that you check something off of a list, but rather it helps you change to become the person you desire. Another of my favorite quotes of Jim Rohn: “ambitious people know that everything they do and every discipline, they adhere to form the links in the chain of events that will lead them to their final destination.” Go ahead, set your one year, three year and five year goals. Challenge your current strengths, your current wisdom base. Become someone that others seek for advice and assistance. This is how you increase your probability of success.
Now, this fourth method is one that will possibly challenge you to even consider as a concept, but it truly is a difference maker, a motivating movement for you to improve your life. You’ve got to understand the difference between charisma and character to increase your worth. The market hires people of character for long-term success. People buy from individuals with charisma in the short term. If you truly desire a better, more fulfilling life, it is important that your character be unimpeachable. Your words must be brought to life by your actions and deeds. This doesn’t mean that you must become perfect because there was only one man on this earth that could accomplish that state of living. No, it is more important that you take responsibility for your actions or inactions so that others will respect you.
I know several people that have boldly offered to do certain tasks that I knew would not get completed. When one of the people asked me why he wasn’t given the project to supervise its fruition, I plainly and sincerely informed him that I didn’t have faith it would be completed timely. When I explained the last two projects and results to him, he quickly lowered his head and stated, “I understand.” However, I did merely mention the cause, but rather, I helped him rehabilitate his reputation within the company by mentoring him through a couple of projects while honing his communication skills. Today, I could ask this person perform any tasks within his capability and have no worry about it’s timely completion. His character is now much stronger than his charisma. You see, he had excellent charisma. He could talk an Eskimo into buying an icebox. I mean, this guy has so much charm, but what he had in charm, he lacked in character.
So this week, your challenge is to work on these four methods of personal value creation and increase your success in life. Read the book “Leading an Inspired Life” by Jim Rohn if you wish to gain significant progress in this area of your life.
Big, big news! In a couple of weeks, the Live a Life By Design team is launching a new Facebook community that will provide tools, strategies, inspiration, and valuable insights into building a bigger, better, and bolder you. So stay tuned. One of the greatest opportunities we have to increase our value is to develop our capability in our sales, by developers. I mean these capabilities, we can bring more to the marketplace, solve more challenges for our world and give everyone an opportunity for a bigger, better, and bolder lifestyle as well. Thank you for joining me today. Do me a big favor this week. Spread your smile so wide that you could eat a banana sideways and let’s hope that it catches on with those you meet. Until next week, go ahead, live your life by design.
