Top 20: Business, Career, & Life Lessons Learned

A few of the most impactful lessons and realizations...so far

These lessons, some learned or realized throughout my career, with some from the last year, have helped me grow personally and professionally. Sharing perspective and experience can be a meaningful way to help others find encouragement, accelerate learning, and bolster their own personal or career progression, or simply help professionals find fulfillment.

By taking a moment to record a few thoughts and share realizations, it may help support a few on their journey with People, Operations, and Culture, or just life in general.

1. “None of this matters, at the end of the day we're all gonna die. Let's have fun along the journey” ( CAMERON HEROLD ). Everything is temporary, we’re all just making money to live, so don’t make everything an emergency or end of world event.
2. Character over competence…yes both are ideal, but character is #1 (Steve Bisciotti & Jim Davis, Warren Buffett).
3. Everything involves sales, and in Operations everything is tied to the People formula.
4. "The more you make it about others, the more you are fulfilled and opportunities find their way to you." ( John C. Maxwell )
5. Leadership (not management) and Teaching is your path to fulfillment.
6. Developing others leaves a lasting impact, much more than giving something to others. ( Alex Hormozi )
7. Operations delivers on the vision, while Sales leverages Ops' success to further monetize and grow. If they aren’t working in alignment, neither is your business.
8. Culture is more important in business than everything, except character: these two attributes drive everything else. Aligned Character and Culture drive value, profitability, and growth.
9. "Empower your people, don’t suppress them." ( Simon Sinek )
10. Relationships matter…you will eventually value close relationships even more than you do today
11. Study Warren Buffett (perspective and fundamentals), Steve Jobs (marketing and creativity), Jeff Bezos (customer), Simon Sinek (leadership), CAMERON HEROLD (Ops) for many keys to the game.
12. The definition of professionalism has changed for the foreseeable future. If Alex Hormozi doing YouTube videos and interviews in “jorts” doesn’t prove that, I’m not sure what does.
13. You often don’t realize how much you appreciate something until it’s gone, and that performance or masterpiece you have witnessed has ended. I realized this with many, including Mears, Miller, Manning, and my dad.
14. Mindset matters. If you think mindset, perspective, or the lens which you look through isn’t important, spend two hours listening to Alex Hormozi and Andreessen Marc L .
15. Leadership without strings attached has the power to change the world by impacting people for the greater good, not a selfish agenda.
16. Let it go. Control the controllable, keep the main thing, the main thing, focus on what matters…can’t express enough how much this can help center you when times get tough, or distractions pressure your path forward (Several past leaders and various thought leaders).
17. Leave everything better off the way you found it…great overall guidance to remember on your journey. (Many have said something similar, most recently I heard it from Jim Collins, Good to Great)
18. Effort promotes achievement to a certain point, but being savvy, business acumen, and real life experience, while seeing the big picture and learning all you can, helps leverage resources beyond one’s own effort. The sooner you realize you need both hard work, knowledge from experience, leverage, and learning to be great, the better off you’ll be.
19. Start sooner and be intentional…once you are in a spot in life with enough experience and perspective, really sit down to evaluate what you’ve learned, what you enjoy, and where you want to go in life. You won’t get there if you don’t determine a focus and work towards it. Some of us realize it at 16, for others its 50 years into life. It’s doesn’t mean wait until it's “a good time” or convenient, it means allow for yourself to be in a spot where you recognize and want it, and have enough in your head and heart to go get it. Justin Welsh teaches this practice well.
20. It’s up to you to prioritize what matters to you. If you don’t, no one is going to do it for you. You are responsible for you…and no one is going to make it happen for you. So do it for yourself and commit to you, and it allows you to impact others in a more meaningful way. It will be worth it.? Alex Lieberman has been inspirational in being introspective and showing the importance with taking accountability for yourself. Accountability for your own life and career seems obvious, but how many of us coast through doing what we are "supposed to do" at various points along the way.

Thank you for reading. Please let me know what you think and share your own perspective and learnings.