John Maxwell can make the old new again and the tired seem fresh. He did this brilliantly today by quoting Charles Swindoll’s old parable of the duck and the eagle. I’m sure you’ve heard this one before: the duck and the eagle are in school along with a whole host of other critters. the curriculum, of course, makes the duck climb and fly, when what he really excels at is swimming. Unfortunately, because he is so busy in remedial climbing he never gets a chance to swim. Rabbit, in the meantime, has to work at swimming and gets cramps in his leg muscles that should properly be used for jumping. The eagle, of course, is a rebel for getting to the top of the climbing tree in a whole new way. John brought the whole issue back to leadership with this: are we asking ducks to be eagles? Are we frustrating our eagles by making them haul ducks around in life? And – most interestingly – do you have the ability to assess people correctly? If not, you need to find someone else to help you get people into their right positions.
The next topic was on time management. Bottom line? Don’t do it! Manage your life instead.
The next principle is this: experience is not the best teacher. John listed a few points under that:
- Our attitude toward unplanned and unpleasant experiences determines our growth. In classic Maxwellian terms, the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is not the number of failures, which are about the same. It is in our reaction and attitude toward our failures.
- Lack of Experience is costly.
- Experience is also costly. You pay either way, but with experience you learn!
- Evaluated experience lifts a person above the crowd. Don’t let your experiences just sit there! Gather them up and evaluate them. Learn from them. Wisdom is nothing more than evaluated experiences.
John’s last principle before lunch break was that the choices you make, make you. Our life is the sum total of the choices we have made up to this point. Don’t complain, don’t blame, just make new choices. Another point he made is that your choices need to be excellent. No one pays for average. Go the second mile. As John said, the second mile is so much less crowded than the first mile. Reflect the Creator’s excellence by being excellent.
As a bonus, John threw in a quick ninth point. Those who start the journey with you seldom finish with you. There are people who will come and go in your lives: learn to recognize the value of all of them, and learn to let go of those who need to move on.
And with that, we did move on…to lunch.
