You know how back in March I told you that you could make your own luck?
Circling back today and telling you a story of how I just did that, and how you can, too.
Sitting in the Nashville airport last December after an Impact Eleven speaker training event, Sheri Jacobs looked at me and said, “I know everyone in the association world, but they don’t know I speak. I wish they could see me speak.”
And I asked her, “Then why don’t you just have them come see you speak?!? Why don’t you invite all your association friends to an auditorium, and just… speak…?!?”
Her eyes lit up with the idea and she asked, “Would you help me do this?”
I always say that my main business strategy is to “do interesting things with interesting people and interesting opportunities will arise.” I learned that strategy from former US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew way before he was the US Treasury Secretary; he’d used that strategy to leave a lucrative, partner track law firm job to work on an itty-bitty campaign promise that would become AmeriCorps, and in the process met the Clintons and the Obamas and had a storied career as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Hillary’s Chief of Staff at the State Department, Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, and eventually US Treasury Secretary. Not bad, right?)
Here’s the kicker: I didn’t know Sheri. And she didn’t know me. We’d just met for the first time at that event. And she seemed like an interesting person to do interesting things with, so I did.
And, right there in the airport, sitting at the food court, before either of us went to get on our flights home to Denver (her) and Boston (me), we cooked up an idea to throw an event for the biggest associations and the best speakers talking about topics important to those associations, all while inviting speaker bureaus to be in the room with the buyers of what we provide.
A couple months later, we looped in Matthew Emerzian. We didn’t even fully explain the idea before he said, “Where do I sign up? What help do you need?”
Then we asked five more speakers and an emcee to trust us, join us, and share the cost of production with us. I reached out and said, “I can’t promise anything, like how many or who will be in the room, but this is what we are trying to do, and I hope you’ll say yes.” And they all said, “Yes! Where do I send the check.”
We knew we had thought leadership important to the world.
So we stopped waiting for permission to share it.
We stopped waiting to be invited to someone else’s table.
We built our own.
No big organization. No gatekeepers. No six-month runway.
We just decided to build the thing we wanted to be part of.
And this past Thursday… it happened.
It. Was. Amazing.
A packed house of 85 association leaders and 15 of the biggest bureau agents.
A sold out room.
A room created with moxie.
A room filled with possibility.
We created every bit of it.
We didn’t wait for luck to find us.
We made it.
And the best part?
You can do it too.
On stage, I gave a sneak peek of my next book.
I spent 20 years in executive search completely livid every time someone said, “I’ll know greatness when I see it.”
If you know it when you see it, it means you’ve seen it before. And if you hire only what you’ve seen before, you are contained and constrained to only where you’ve been before.
You won’t build the future.
You’ll just repeat the past.
My next book is going to get to the hidden traits that lie beneath what we think of as greatness so that you can identify the “it factor” in others… and yourself.
And if you want to see the recording of my talk — and get on the inside track for what’s coming next — sign up here and I’ll send it to you.
Because here’s what I know to be true:
You don’t need a fancy title or a perfect plan.
You just need the guts to start.
To bet on your ideas.
To bet on yourself.
And when you do? The world makes room.
So… what are you waiting to build?
