Posts Tagged ‘Success’
Four Laws
January 6th, 2010 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
Four Laws for a Lifetime Personal Growth and Fulfillment:
1. Always make your future greater than your past.
2. Always make your contribution greater than your reward.
3. Always make your performance greater than your preparation.
4. Always make your gratitude greater than your success.
CEO Reveals Secret
December 19th, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
by: Sandra Chereb
For decades, Jay Thiessens hid a painful secret as he built his machine and tool company from a mom-and-pop operation into a $5 million-a-year enterprise. During the day he hid behind the role of a harried businessman, too busy to review contracts or shuffle through mail. At night, his wife, Bonnie, would help him sort through the paperwork at the kitchen table, in the living room, or sometimes sitting up in bed.
Other tasks he delegated to a core group of managers at B&J Machine Tool Co. who had no idea their boss couldn’t read.
“I worked for him for seven years and I had no clue,” said Jack Sala, now the engineering manager for Truckee Precision, a B&J competitor. “I was his general manager. He would bring legal stuff to me and say, ‘You’re better at legalese than me.’ I never knew I was the only one reading them.”
Few people knew of his shame and most burning desire: To be able to read a simple bedtime story to his grandchildren. But he couldn’t keep his illiteracy secret forever. “It became too hard to continue to hide it,” said Thiessens, who has begun to read at the age of 56. “Since I made the decision to let everybody know, it’s a big relief.”
On Wednesday, Thiessens will be honored in Washington, D.C., as one of six national winners of the 1999 National Blue Chip Enterprise Initiative Award. Sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and MassMutual, the award recognizes small businesses that have triumphed over adversity.
Thiessens’ torment took root when he was in the first or second grade in McGill, a small mining town in central Nevada. “A teacher called me stupid because I had trouble reading,” he said. All through school, he was the quiet little boy in the back of the room.
“I think the teachers just got tired of looking at me so they passed me on,” he said. He graduated from White Pine High School in Ely 1963, getting mostly C’s, D’s and F’s. He made the honor roll once, in his senior
year when he landed A’s in auto mechanics and machine shop.
The day after graduation, Thiessens moved to Reno, where 10 years later he started a small machine shop with his last $200. Today, B&J specializes in welding, machine parts and precision sheet metal work. With 50 employees, the company conducts $5 million a year in business and just broke ground on
a new 54,000 square-foot expansion.
Despite his success, the stigma of being labeled a dummy haunted him through adulthood. He compensated by being a good listener. He rarely forgets details and has a solid grasp of math and figures, a trait essential to the industry, others say.
“The majority of everything we do is technical,” said Randy Arnett of A&B Precision, B&J’s longest competitor. “It has more to do with math, geometrical shapes, than verbiage.”
“He’s always been a decent competitor,” Arnett said of Thiessens.
Two years ago, Thiessens was invited to join a local chapter of The Executive Committee, a kind of CEO-support group where non-competing chief executives discuss business trials and tribulations in confidence.
Thiessens was reluctant. “He was concerned he wouldn’t measure up to the rest of the group,” said Randy Yost, committee chairman and former CEO of Placer Bank of Commerce in California. “About 6 months after we met, he told me he had a reading problem,” Yost said. “At that time, he was very tight-vested about it.”
Thiessens confessed to the rest of the group last year.
“He was a little teary. His voice was shaking,” recalled Doug Damon, a group member and CEO of Damon Industries, a beverage concentrate manufacturer. “It was clearly a difficult thing for him to do.” Damon was surprised by Thiessens confession. “I knew he was a high school graduate, and so I guess I automatically assumed he knew how to read. He’d been very successful in his business. Who would have thought?”
Thiessens feared titters and jeers from his college-educated CEO peers. Instead, he was overwhelmed by support. “As much as I respected him for what he accomplished, it enhanced my respect for him,” Yost said.
Last October, Thiessens found a tutor to instruct him for an hour a day, five days a week. That’s also when he told his plant managers. The rest of his employees found out last month.
Thiessens recently read “Gung Ho,” a book on employee relations, as a management team project. It was slow going as he underlined all the words he didn’t know and later sought help with. But he finished it. He wants someday to be able to rifle through mail as quickly as his wife and “round file” the piles of junk mail that comes across his desk.
More importantly, he hopes his story will encourage others to learn to read.
“There is no shame in not knowing how to read,” said Mrs. Thiessens, his wife of 37 years. “The shame is not doing anything about it.”
Plan to Succeed
December 13th, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
The successful always has a number of projects planned, to which he looks forward. Anyone of them could change the course of his life overnight.
Great Man
October 11th, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
“A great man is hard on himself; a small man is hard on others.”
Failure vs. Success
October 5th, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough. – Og Mandino
Love and Loss
October 5th, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs gave this as his second story of his Commencement Address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.
I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started?
Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT.
I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple.It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Trying
October 4th, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
“So what do we do? Anything – something. So long as we don’t just sit there. If we screw it up, start over. Try something else. If we wait until we’ve satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late.”- Lee Iacocca,Former Chairman of Chrysler Corporation
The Key to Success
September 5th, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” - Bill Cosby, Actor and Comedian
Don’t Give Up
August 23rd, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict. – William Ellery Channing
Life is What We Perceive It
August 7th, 2009 | Author: Pure Thoughts Admin
SUCCESS PRINCIPLES
Life is how we perceive of it. There is a positive side
and a negative side to everything and every
circumstances. You can either look at a cup as “half
full” or “half empty”. You can look at the hole of the
doughnut or the doughnut itself. The choice is yours
and yours alone. But remember that the choices you make
will determine your success or failure.
MOTIVATIONAL QUOTE
