UFC 187

Once again Way of the Warrior has partnered with Celebration Cinema to give away tickets for UFC 187 on the big screen. Enter to win below and let us know which location that you are looking to head to! Celebration! North, RiverTown, Benton Harbor, Crossroads (Portage), Lansing, Mt. Pleasant, Carousel (Muskegon)

What kids can teach us about customer service

When you are gifted with children a couple of things happen immediately. First, you get first hand knowledge of just how wrong you were about the idea of love. Kids allow you to understand what unconditional love should be like and makes you strive to be a better person, husband, father, employee, human. Second, children show you what you are actual willing to do for another human being. Things you would have never even entertained as a single person, you do without even thinking - parental muscle memory. 

Quick! Your child has a runny nose and you are nowhere near a Kleenex, you are going to use your shirt to collect someone else's snot. Maybe you are out to dinner and your child fills a diaper all the way up their back, spilling out every opening in his or her clothing. In a tuxedo you are cleaning that child up because they need you and you are happy to do it. Your daughter experiences her first break-up and you cancel your plans to spend the night watching her favorite show or movie eating her favorite ice cream in hopes of making her feel better.  

Are you willing to do the same thing for your customers?  

When I talk about surprise and delight this is what I am talking about. I don't mean customer service at the expense of your family life, I mean treating customers like they belong in your family. This is what Gary Vaynerchuk refers to when he says "what is the ROI" of your mother. The answer is immeasurable, what a mother does for a child is something that cannot show on a spreadsheet, just like the ROI of your child. Being a parent is one of the greatest jobs on Earth, so why would you not want your work to reflect how you would treat your family? 

Your customer has bad days, your customer needs empathy from time to time. More importantly they want to support a brand that treats them with respect but they want to love a brand that treats them like family. This can be hard because like your kids, sometimes the customer is just wrong and the easy thing is to just let them be wrong. The hard thing, the thing few people want to do, is to help them to understand that they might not be thinking this through and there might be a better way. Similarly when your child makes a mistake, I mean a big one, likely you don't turn your back on them and more than likely you warned them of the consequences - still you find yourself working through a solution. You have clients that could use the same guidance and empathy.

Stop treating customers like they are a modern inconvenience that keeps you from doing what you want to be doing, they are the reason you are in business in the first place. Instead pretend it was your job to help them, give them value, and treat them like family. 

Can you be "the best" and still be good?

Over the weekend the “fight of the century” happened between Floyd “Money” Mayweather and Manny “Pac-man” Paquiao. A seminal sports moment where you witnessed the best defensive boxer in the history of the sport close the books on THE only fight left that people wanted to see. The buzz behind the fight was so large that the announcers had to take the unprecedented step of filling time because the PPV system crashed trying to get all those households in to watch the fight (we can talk about the misteps from the PPV industry later). Top the night off with an estimated $500 million in potential revenue to be split between the two camps and you have a seemingly incredible evening.

Or do you?

The fight certainly didn’t live up to the hype, but how could it. Floyd Mayweather is a pugilistic alchemist who just isn’t there when you want to hit him, not very exciting to watch unless you love the sweet science. Manny is a violent boxer who couldn’t find Floyd to manifest his skillset.

My question however is different, Floyd will retire (if he keeps his word) a perfect 49–0 tying Rocky Marciano’s record — if I am a betting man, he takes one more fight because 50–0 is just too tempting. But for all his skill in the ring that translates into money, he just isn’t a very good man. In fact, very few people that possess a high skill level in any trade seem to be able to balance that idea of being the “best” and still being good.

In sports, the examples are seemingly countless, in just the last week Floyd Mayweather and his domestic violence issues resurfaced, Jon Jones (former UFC champ) was involved in a hit and run, and La’el Collins was passed over in the NFL draft because he is a person of interest in a murder.

That was last week.

Here is a list of the top 50 criminal athletes and every one of their brief descriptions illustrates how brilliant they were at said sport — and the horrible crime the committed despite it.

In politics, it gets even easier because we don’t have the hero complex we have about sports icons so we tend to drop the hammer on politicians immediately upon even a hint of wrongdoing. Last year Governor McDonnell of Virginia showed the state isn’t just “for lovers,” that it might also be for lovers who commit fraud, obstruction of justice, and take illegal gifts. Here is another fun list (from 2000 on) of all of the government officials acting on our behalf, that have gone astray.

On a more granular level, we all know someone who has ascended to a position of power only to cheat on his or her husband or wife, embezzle money, or just become a terrible person. Which leads me to the question at hand, can you be the “best” at something and still be good? Or is there a universal teeter-totter that attempts to keep it all in balance?

As a species, human beings are communal, we seek out groups of people and have since the beginning of time, but something happens to us as we ascend the ladder of success. It seems few, if any of us, are wired to be able to keep a work-life balance or even a perspective on what actually matters. Let’s get back to Floyd, he fights once or twice a year and is the highest paid athlete of all time. Imagine for a second if you made $138,000 a second as he did on Saturday night and you were not due back to work until September.

What would you do?

I would travel with my family and do some amazing things in my community or at least that is what I hope I would do. But don’t have that net worth, Floyd does, and Floyd has been involved with seven different physical assaults on five different women that ended in either an arrest or a citation, plus a list of other instances where the police were called and no one was charged. I am not making excuses for his terrible behavior but, what if our brains cannot actually manage that sort of opulence? What if we aren’t supposed to be that rich because it steps over a line that you cannot come back from?

In the past week the sports world, specifically the fighting sports world, has shaped that question for me. Jon Jones, the most dominate fighter in the history of MMA (sound familiar) was involved in his 4th run-in with the law and this time it was a hit and run accident that found a pregnant woman with a broken arm. Jon fled the scene, but not before he came back for a bunch of cash but left his pipe and rental car agreement in his car for law enforcement to find- just to keep it sporting. What is the Stan Lee quote?

“With great power, comes great responsibility”

Even in the Marvel universe those characters struggle with the gifts that human beings (even the mutant kind) can mentally manage. They say that success begets success and I know that to be true. But what if there was a limit? What if the idea is to spread it around? What if, and this is a big one, what if you are supposed to use your success to put everyone else first and you, last?

Maybe that is the secret. In every case you just read people put their needs and more dangerously, there wants ahead of their family, their community, or society at large. Perhaps that is the problem here. Too many mirrors in the ivory tower, when what they really need — are a few more ladders.

I don't have time (and other myths you tell yourself)

I had drinks last night with a dear friend who I had not seen in a while. I was able to have drinks because the person, who they came to town to meet, told them they “didn’t have time.” I cannot in words tell you how much this phrase angers me, but I am going to try.

“I don’t have time for_____________”

I am going to let you in on a secret.

That is bullshit.

An excuse we use when we have no other excuse. The reason 90% of us say we don’t have time is because we don’t actually know what truly matters to us. Each person gets 24 hours in a day to do with as we please, take an hour lunch, binge watch Netflix, go to the gym, spend 2 hours on Instagram, we can do with our time as we please.

What we don’t get to do is complain about the decisions we make and how we spend that time. What we don’t get to do is say that we don’t have time, because you do. If you want something bad enough you will find another gear, you will cut something out of your life, you will find the time. I know this because I used to think my job was busy, right up until I took this job.

In business today there are really only two currencies that matter more than money, time and relationships — because both can bring you money, but you cannot buy time or meaningful relationships. So ask yourself how much time do you have in a given day and with whom are you going to spend it. Because every time you tell someone you “don’t have time” for him or her, you spend a bit of relationship currency until you run out and he or she stops answering your calls and in the connection economy that can be a deadly habit.

Instead of using the tired line “I don’t have time” or the more insulting alternative “I am too busy.” Try taking an honest look at your day and see what you can cut out to do what actually matters. Relationships matter, they are difficult, hard to manage, they take time, they are messy, but that is what our economy is built on.

We use “social” mediums built around the idea of crafting relationships to share content, to work through issues, celebrate life events, share cat videos, or pictures of dinner and all of this is built around using time in order to accomplish it.

You cannot make time, but you can find time — every time. How do I know this? Because there is always someone who is working harder than you are, there is always someone who hustles while you sleep, there is always someone who will never say “I don’t have time.” That person is going to beat you to the finish, that person is going to close the deal, that person will write a book, start a speaker series, that person is going to win — every time.

The Monster is always coming

“Daddy! Over here quick!”

My daughter screams from her tent in the yard and I run over to see what she is doing. In her Minnie Mouse tent she stood in the corner in her “fighting stance” with a huge grin on her face.

“What’s up honey?” I asked

“The monster is coming” she said.

“He is?” I feigned surprise as best I could.

“The monster is always coming dad” and then she smiled in a way that I knew she really enjoyed the fear and was ready for the fight. She was embracing the fear that comes with the unknown monster hunting her in her own yard and was waiting for him.

The monster is always coming.

Isn’t that the truth, you see the thing about fear is that it helps you if you can learn to control it. The lack of fear keeps you from making rational decisions because you fail to recognize it; the appearance of fear allows you to react when danger reveals itself.

The human brain is divided into three parts; the reptile or lizard brain (known as the amygdala), this is where the fear lives, the middle brain, is where your emotions live. This is the brain that can help feed the fear to paralyze you or feed the third brain to help control it. The third brain is called the new brain both because it is the newest evolution in the human brain and because it is where you rationalize the world you live in. This is where you can start to control that fear.

As an example, I have always said there are only two types of people in the world, those who can take a punch and keep fighting – and those who crumple and quit. If you are the three year old excited in a tent waiting for the monster to arrive, you likely are the get back up sort of person. The type of person who understands you might not beat every monster but if you don’t get up and fight, the monster wins – every time. The type of person who uses the emotional brain to dull the fear and heighten the rational response to the monster, call it the “not in my house” response to fear.

There are as many monsters in business as there are in my backyard, competitors, new innovations, price, weather, fluctuations in the market, employees, customers, managers, culture, email, social media, global economies, scope creep, bad project management, or any other disruption.

The monster is always coming.

How will you respond? Are you the type of person who takes things head on? Will you get out of the tent and invite the monster to dance? Or are you going to wait until the monster has devoured 30% of your business until you launch into crisis management? Much like customer service the ROI of taking the monster head on is much greater than waiting until there is a problem to take some sort of action. By that time, some of these monsters can do so much damage it would be very hard to recover in time to save your employees, customers, or the business itself.

The speed at which the world works in 2015 only increases the speed and number of the monsters you will encounter over the course of the year. How are you going to respond? I know what my daughter will do, right foot forward, left foot back, hands up, and head down, ready for the fight.

The monster is always coming.

Will you be the hero of this story? Or  become a causality consumed by fear and the digital age?