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    The Book with the Catchy Title (Fire in the Belly)
    The Book with the Catchy Title (Fire in the Belly)
    The Book with the Catchy Title (Fire in the Belly)
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    The Book with the Catchy Title (Fire in the Belly)

    By Ken Lord

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    About this ebook

    The selection of a worthy activity is largely one of choice. You can be ambitious and energetic or lazy and unproductive. Productive activities aren't always work, but they do push your life forward. It isn't enough to plod along—not for you. You want certain benefits from life and it's up to you to achieve them.

    If business is the primary interest, then this book will show ways to support your business activities. If your interests are intellectual, it will show ways to improve your skills, develop your mind, and provide the satisfaction of accomplishment. It's easy enough to picture some self-motivators. It isn't always easy to assess one's own motivation. This book will help you do both. If it offers but a single nugget of advice, it would be that whatever you wish to achieve requires PASSION. This book will help you to find, identify, and use your innate passion to achieve your goal.

    Those who are passionate about an activity are in a hurry to achieve or conquest that which, to them, is success. Attacking your mission with passion does not mean you must jump into the deep end of the pool to see if you can swim. It does not mean that you must expose yourself to foolish danger merely to accomplish a goal. It does mean that more extensive planning must be completed; more extensive data gathering will be needed, more thorough deployment of resources will be necessary; and the activity must be shaped during its operation. Deadlines have a way of setting a firm endpoint for any effort, and the role of passion in the enterprise is to make a deadline unnecessary.

    Eventually someone will suggest that to employ passion in one's pursuits, sacrifice is needed. Activities consume finite resources: time, money, effort, choices, and passion. By necessity, these are exchanges and substitutes, one for the other. And yet, when life's challenges must be met, we must find ways either to increase or reallocate the resources available to accommodate the necessities.
    We'll explore those activities where you will expend effort, gaining techniques for developing and using that fire in the belly. If an activity is worth doing, worth doing well, worth doing quickly, it's also worth achieving thoroughly.

    The themes of this book are: "Ambition. Attitude. Work Habits. Planning. Persistence. Commitment. Performance. Evaluation. PASSION."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKen Lord
    Release dateJul 3, 2012
    ISBN9781476028606
    The Book with the Catchy Title (Fire in the Belly)
    Author

    Ken Lord

    Author of more than 60 works of nonfiction, fiction, biography, historical fiction, and YA. Senior citizen living in suburban Syracuse, NY. 40 plus years of computer experience and a comparable amount of adult education. ABA and BSBA from University of Massachusetts Lowell, EdM from Oregon State University, and doctoral credits from the University of Arizona. And, are you ready for this? An Avon representative for nearly 18 years, a top seller, well awarded, and "the cutest Avon Lady" in Tucson, Arizona.

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      Book preview

      The Book with the Catchy Title (Fire in the Belly) - Ken Lord

      THE BOOK WITH THE CATCHY TITLE

      By Ken Lord

      Copyright 2012 Kenniston W. Lord, Jr.

      Smashwords Edition

      PRELUDE

      Write a book, he told me.

      That wasn’t much of a challenge. I’d been writing books and other things for years. Reference books. Computer manuals. Sales technique manuals. Newspaper articles. Magazine articles. Several attempts at fiction. I’d even written a book about my interaction with him. I have things to say, I’m not shy about saying them, and I do have this skill—though I’ve never had any formal training about it.

      What about? I asked.

      Oh, I don’t know, he said. You’ll find the topic and the words.

      Any suggestions? I asked.

      He looked at me with a grin, and said, You must know what would be interesting and necessary. How about a book on motivation?

      I scoffed. There must be hundreds of books by now about motivating subordinates, organizational and downline members, children, students, and others. What makes you think a book on motivation is needed?

      "Probably a book on motivation isn’t needed, he said, but I’ll just bet a book on self-motivation could be useful."

      Well, maybe, I responded. Are you sure isn’t sufficient just to mimic old Adam Ant? I clenched my fist and raised my arm into the air, shouting, Up And At ‘Em, Adam Ant!

      Yeah, it’s A Bug’s Life, he said. I didn’t say anything about writing a book about how not to be lazy.

      Isn’t it the same? I asked. Ambition. Attitude. Work Habits. Planning. Persistence. Commitment. Performance. Evaluation. Wouldn’t it be something like that?

      Yes, certainly, but …

      But what? I asked.

      Those are all a part of self-motivation, to be sure, he responded. It was obvious he thought something more should be included.

      I paused and thought for a minute.

      What’s going on up there in the noodle? he asked.

      "I think there is far more to say about self-motivation than just that. They are important, to be sure. But many people put those kinds of efforts into their future. There has to be something more—perhaps the word is passion."

      OK—passion it is. He moved to leave. By the door he stopped, turned to me, and added, And don’t forget to get a catchy title. Books with catchy titles sell, you know.

      And he left. He’s been doing that to me since we met.

      He, should you ask, has been a primary motivator in my life. I’d like very much to share with you what I call THE FIRE IN THE BELLY: Motivating Yourself. And I’ll tell you about him in the Epilog.

      The themes of this book are: Ambition. Attitude. Work Habits. Planning. Persistence. Commitment. Performance. Evaluation. PASSION.

      PREFACE

      What makes a person successful?

      Is it, as some would have you to believe, as simple as being born of successful parents? For some it has been. For many, it has not. Sometimes the offspring of successful people are anything but successful themselves. Often successful people are successful precisely because they were not born into success and have seen that for them to be equally successful, they must expend extraordinary efforts.

      Is it merely the coincidence of being in the right place at the right time? There are examples of good fortune, but it’s my contention that being there when you must is as much a result of intense study and activity as merely a stroke of luck. Good fortune comes to those who are prepared for it.

      Is it the luck of the draw, as some lottery winners would have you to believe? Well, perhaps, but it can be well demonstrated that your odds of hitting the lottery are about the same as being hit by lightning. You can’t win if you don’t play, the gaming people would like you to know. That’s true, just as you stand little chance to be hit by lightning if you stay out of the rain.

      Is it strictly location, location, location, as the real estate people would tell you? While there is no doubt that a good location enhances the sale of a piece of property, real estate people sell property in any location and seldom turn down an opportunity that could bring them a commission, no matter the location.

      Should you cross your fingers and hope for the best outcome? You can do that, but if you do, you’ll receive the best that somebody else is willing to give you—and that may not be success. Should you read your horoscope daily, early in the morning, and allow it to guide what you do each day—from staying home in bed or getting out into the world and accomplishing something? It may be good for a laugh, but don’t live your life by it.

      Carpe Diem, said the character played by Robin Williams in the movie, The Dead Poet’s Society. Seize the day. Not awaken to it gently. Not take it as is comes. Not accept whatever someone sends you through. Not merely perform at minimum level. But SIEZE THE DAY! Grab it and shake it with intensity. Attack it with passion—accept nothing but the best. Second best is not good enough. Not for you, anyway.

      It makes no difference what your focus is. The steps for success in business are the same for success as a student, as a spouse, as a parent, or for any endeavor you may undertake. It’s a maxim that whatever is worth doing is worth doing well. It’s equally true that if something is not worth doing, you shouldn’t be involved with it.

      The selection of a worthy activity is largely one of choice. You do have free will to be ambitious and energetic or to be lazy and unproductive. While we think of productive activities as work, that is not necessarily the case. One does not, however, lie around and watch television productively. It’s a contradiction of terms.

      Let’s assume that a worthy activity pushes some attribute of your life forward. If business is the primary interest, then our desire will be to find ways through the list that will be presented in support of your business activities. If your interests are intellectual, then our desire will be to find ways to improve your skills, develop your mind, or provide the satisfaction of accomplishment.

      Accomplishment, after all, is a worthy purpose of living. Accomplishment may be the improvement of relations. It may provide the improvement to your financial health. It may be an advance of your intellect. It may be an advance in your security. It may be the recognition of your achievements. Whatever it turns out to be, it does involve a change from something before to something after. Thus, if it’s desired to achieve some altered state, a specific plan will be needed. The degree of change and the severity of the change itself will determine the schedule and the activities that fall along the timeline. It, and it alone, will consume the degree of passion needed by the investment of your efforts.

      Carefully distinguish between the efforts needed for things to happen more or less naturally throughout and those efforts that, if properly invested, can push the accomplishment along. A variation of the previous maxim, then, might be this: things worth doing well are equally worth doing quickly. At the least, some might be done more quickly when not impeded by outside and less controllable forces. Concrete, for example, is not poured hard. It’s poured in liquid form to set and cure. It must be dressed. There are chefs who will claim: Good food takes time.

      For everything in which a natural delay is attendant, however, there are tasks that can be accelerated significantly, reducing the risk and evoking decisive action that, itself, can bring about accomplishment. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, Admiral Farragut is reputed to have said. A stitch in time saves nine, speaks an Aesop’s fable. Lead, follow, or get out of the way is one of many guidelines for leaders. In business, compounding is a slow and progressive increase in the worth of an asset. It’s the aggressive investment of such assets that will derive the greatest return in the briefest possible time.

      Steady as she goes might be a suitable command for a tugboat captain in tight quarters. But any NASCAR racer will disavow that approach to the race—the race belongs to the swift. In keeping with the title of the book by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton: It’s Not The Big That Eat The Small; It’s The Fast That East The Slow.

      A case can be made that going fast promotes error. That may be true. But how important is it, really? Except when handling of dynamite, every error is reversible, recoverable, or the action is repeatable. So it won’t be the premise of this book that to achieve the results of passion it’s necessary to tear about willy-nilly, disregarding careful planning and caution of execution.

      What’s offered, however, is the belief that those who are passionate about an activity are in a hurry to make the achievement or the conquest that, to them, is success. Attacking your mission with passion does not mean that you must jump into the deep end of the pool to see if you can swim. It does not mean that you must expose yourself to foolish danger merely to accomplish a goal. Conversely, it does mean that more

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