A good friend of mine once gave me this advice on getting rich (however you choose to define rich).

Here’s the quick version:  Build deep, meaningful, authentic relationships and help a lot of people.

That’s it.

Recognize a need (it’s an opportunity). Serve or meet that need. Provide a continual stream of service to perpetually meet that need in lots of peoples lives. Get rich intentionally while simultaneously freeing up your time.

For more fancy insights on how to break the old rules of business and happily embrace the new rules, go here and here.

From a distance, it can appear that leadership is the nail, and a specific, one time event is the hammer which drives that nail into the wood, thus solidifying the nail in it’s rightful place as leader within a given community. It seems as though a single strike sets the leader in her position, holding fast the rest of the community around her. Therefore, at times, watching tenured, successful leaders can be difficult. Their leadership status seems almost unattainable and far removed from your own lifestyle and current, personal leadership responsibilities. She’s the CEO. You answer her assistants, assistants phone. Get the picture? Leading large and leading well can sometimes seem practically unimaginable. Practically.

But wait there’s more!…You’ve also won a huge supply of patience and perseverance!

As most great leaders and visionaries can attest to, leadership does not commence all of a sudden with a loud bang and a TV interview, and it hardly ever starts with an instant, massive following. Leadership does, however, begin with the steady accumulation of many great moments: a lifetimes worth of wise choices, of deciding to serve others instead of your own self, of integrity, of perseverance through pain, and the pursuance of an outstanding goal. Great leaders who are worth following do not develop overnight or in a single instance. Great leaders develop with every decision that they make, with every conversation that they have, and every action (whether seen or unseen) that they partake in.

Society, in nearly every community, is in dire need of great, willing and humble leaders. If you want to fill one of the vacancies, start living every moment with purpose, vision and a mindset that is open to leading and serving others. If it burns within you to lead, then lead! You can start now. Greatness in leadership will develop over time.

SportsCenter is composed of the extraordinary, uncommon events that happen every day in the world of sports.

Even the most avid sports guru couldn’t find enough time in her day to watch, analyze and report on every sporting event held every day throughout the entire world.  ESPN doesn’t have the time either.  In fact, they usually only have about 30 minutes.  They don’t show every single moment of each game.  They show highlights.  They show the extraordinary, the best of the best, and that’s it.  They broadcast the same information, told in slightly different ways by slightly different people, over and over, and they are extremely successful.

Why?

Highlights grab people’s attention.  Showing highlight after highlight keeps people’s attention.  The reason highlights are so attention grabbing is due to there characteristic uniqueness.  There are millions of mundane sports moments every day, but only a select few moments will actually be exceptional.  Only a few will be worthy of a top-play spot.

Think of the last thing that grabbed your attention.  Was it something that happened normally in your day-to-day routine, or was it something out of the ordinary, far away from routine & normalcy?

Great leaders and visionaries grab our attention by being exceptionally different.  They break molds and they interrupt routines.  The best way to grab someones attention is to break one of their habits, break their preconceived notion of what their brains are used to telling them is true.

Great athletes amaze us because they don’t follow the routine.  They make preeminent, abnormal plays.  Great people–people whom we remember & pay attention to–follow the same plan.  Do something uncommon, grab a lot of people’s attention, and use that attention for something remarkable.

I don’t necessarily love running, but running with her makes it a joy.  Running brings us closer together.  

I find this incredibly interesting because running is…well…painful!  Some days are more challenging than others, but if you’re going to run with my wife, than you should expect to run to a point of experiencing at least a little pain.  

We connect and grow through pain.  There is no greater experience than going through a difficult challenge and coming out alive at the other end; stronger for having finished, and finished together.  In times of high stress, when you are dedicated to the task at hand, you force yourself to bring issues into the light and into proper perspective.  Communication becomes clearer.  Strengths are fed.  Weaknesses are trumped.  You cut out what’s not crucial, and you focus on the core.  If you want to grow as a sports team, go through a tough loss.  If you want to  grow your business, push it to get better during a recession.  If you want to build a stronger friendship, sacrifice some time.  If you want to grow a marriage, run hard together.  

If we’re focused, pain can actually bring us together.  A lot of us live in fear of pain.  We don’t like making painful decisions, we don’t like activity that causes us physical pain, we don’t even like to think about pain.  We like comfort.  We like the feeling of apathy.  That’s fine, but don’t expect to grow.  We can live in comfort and ease, but we can’t simultaneously get better.  

Many times, pain can be a fast-track towards success, or pain can cause total breakdown and disengagement.  How do you respond to pain?  How does it influence your decision making?  Do you sharpen with pain or slump?  Use pain in the face of challenge as a tool to take you where you want to go, faster.  Don’t forget to breath.

…take into consideration global networking, the Internet, and scarcity.

We actively observe–every day–as the ways in which we communicate, connect and work, continually transition, thus transforming life as we currently know it.  For us, this change is becoming a way of life.  We adapt and conform in order to make the most of this global networking transformation.  Our children, on the other hand, will not have time to adapt and  conform.  They will just be in it, no conforming necessary.  They will be born into a world that is both very expansive and at the same time extremely small and accessible.  They will be globally connected from the moment they are born, and this aspect will be a natural part of their every day life. 

So, give them a break–a head start, so to say.

My name was never highly ridiculed (I wasn’t one to take other kids’ harsh words to heart anyhow), but I do remember such comments as: “Go park your car Parke!” or “free parking today, eh Parke?”.  Ha Ha.  More than anything my name has been misspelled or mispronounced.  Most people leave the ’e’ off of the end, or they just can’t seem to say my name correctly.  They come close but don’t quite make it.  Example: The night before my wedding, during the rehearsal party, the lead singer of the band we hired proclaimed from on stage that “this one goes out to Part!”  Tragic, eh?  Here’s another: My now Father-in-Law called me Clark for at least the first 4 months of my dating relationship with his daughter–now my wife–still his daughter.  Again, tragic, but well worth it because he let me marry his daughter. Ha! 

Okay, so what’s the point Parkay?…I mean Part…I mean Parker…I mean…Parke!

The point is this:  New kids will need new names that give them exclusivity.  They will need a scarce yet still memorable name that gives them automatic #1 coverage on Google, Yahoo, Digg, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever other new search engine or social network that may be available at that time.  Think SEO not great, great, great, great grandma when you name that tiny, kicking, floating blob with its rapid heart beat and squishy brain. 

Trust me.  Your kid will thank you.

PS  The name is just a head start.  In order to genuinely stand out they’ll have to be spectacular.  I’ll leave that foundation up to you to form.

Your product sales are not DEAD they’re just FLAT.  Don’t shed a tear.  Simply ask yourself…

…why?

Some reasons and subsequent solutions expounded upon by me, originally taken from Dan Roam:

1. Your clients are not themselves growing.  If your clientele isn’t pushing upward and onward (or even attempting to) than they probably won’t be looking to upgrade your product.
2. Your clientele doesn’t need your product any more.  Do you offer the most comprehensive product in a growing industry?  Are you at least a year ahead of your nearest competitors?
3. The most common reason: Your clientele is uninspired by your product.

If struggling with #3:

1. You are either not making your customer happy OR
2. You are not targeting the right clientele

How do you solve both challenges?  

• Come to a better understanding of who your customers are and a better understanding of what they want.

It doesn’t matter if you CEO a Fortune 500, run a small business, sell t-shirts on eBay or pastor a new church; you need to know who you are reaching, who you are selling to, who you are trying to serve.  Know them inside and out.  Know what they need.  Know what they want.  Inspire them.  Blow them away.  Help a lot of people.