Minute With Mallon: Where Preparation Meets “Smart” Work
Welcome to Minute with Mallon!
Something I Taught:
Years ago, one of my mentors was a man named Colonel Harold Huff. He was the pilot of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, for two presidents back in the 1970s.
One of the things he left me with that I want you to think about is this:
"Winners don’t win because they're the best. Winners win because they put themselves in a position to win."
Sure, you have to have a little talent, but if you're reading this newsletter, you’ve already got that covered!
Colin Powell once said this: "There's no secret to success. It's got everything to do with preparedness, hard work, and learning from your failures."
Period!
So here's my question for you: where in 2024 do you need to do a little more preparation? Where do you need to do some hard work?
… Or better yet, some Smart Work? I was recently talking with a client about how everyone says you need to work hard.
No You Don't!!!
You need to work hard on smart things!
And you need to figure out what those smart things are.
Yesterday I was on a call with four leaders of a company based in Tennessee. The whole purpose of the call was to figure out EXACTLY what we needed to be working on within the region. What would deliver the biggest bang for the buck? And we needed to make sure that we were all in alignment. Through the discussion we narrowed our options down to three specific things we would focus our efforts on. Working Smart!
So for 2024:
● Where have you been putting off preparing?
● Where do you need to go deeper in your preparation?
● Where do you need to put some hard work into some smart things?
10 minutes of Smart Work can be more effective than a month's worth of Hard Work!
Just sayin’… 👍🏻
Something to Ponder:
"Don't confuse working hard with working smart. Efficiency is doing better what is already being done, whereas effectiveness is deciding what to do better."
- Peter Drucker
Something I Learned:
Over the holiday vacation, we were able to spend some quality time with friends, one of whom used to be a reading and gifted reading specialist.
I asked her what was the ONE thing she saw parents do that seemed to make all the difference.
She immediately answered, "regularly reading to their children when they were young." She went on to tell us that children who were regularly read to very early in their lives are different than the ones who weren't.
"The children that were not read to showed up to school with a vocabulary of around 500 words. But the ones who were read to could have 1500 or more words in their vocabulary. They're on a different level."
I happened to bring this up in our small group from church, (which actually isn't small at all!) 💥
One of the members is the principal of a middle school. He told us that the #1 predictor of a person going to prison is not being able to read by the 3rd grade.
GOING TO PRISON!!!
This was stunning! And it's totally unnecessary.
So think about it. If you have kids, read to them. If you can go and volunteer at a school once or twice a month to read to a class, do it!
In the pages of a book and the voices of caring volunteers, lies the potential to rewrite the stories of our children. We can help guide them toward brighter, more promising futures.
And thank God for people who dedicate their lives to the education of our children.
But they need our help!
Something I Saw:
My granddaughter Ileigh is having a ball!
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Hope you have an incredible week!
Robert
