ThinkingInColor

Just Stop It.

Learn self-control.

Takeru Kobayashi of Nagano , Japan has been crowned the world’s greatest competitive eater. According to the website of the Nationwide Speaker’s Bureau, Inc., Kobayashi dominated the sport of competitive eating in 2004. At a Coney Island event, he ate 53.5 hot dogs and buns in twelve minutes and sixty-nine Krystal hamburgers in eight minutes! His performance reportedly sent shock waves through the competitive eating community. The Japanese native has been named the greatest competitive eater in International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE) history and some observers even consider him to be the finest athlete of our time. With dozens of records worldwide, he is undefeated in IFOCE competition. I suspect that Kobayashi, along with his fellow IFOCE athletes, never learned how to stop.

Learning when to stop—usually the mantra of those against driving drunk, overeaters or workaholics—applies to leaders too. When you achieve an important victory and find yourself swimming in congratulations, you have to put yourself on alert: has success changed your inner person? Are you still lean and hungry? Are you okay with simply edging ahead of the competition or do you feel a compulsion to totally obliterate it?

The moment of victory may double as the moment of greatest peril. Overconfidence in your success will create enemies. How does this happen? Here’s how: despite all insistence to the contrary, success causes a definite change to anyone who achieves it. First, you accomplished something that you never did before. Second, success removes tension and doubt incited by prior failures. Third, winning automatically makes you superior to your competitors. Overnight, all winners find themselves saddled by these new unfamiliar and even uncomfortable facts. You are no longer a “regular Joe.” You may think you are, you may want to be, you may try to continue to act like one, but it’s no use. People perceive winners differently than losers. There’s nothing you can do about their perception, but you can keep from believing it. To allow your success to change your basic view of yourself smacks of insufferable arrogance. Once you go there, it’s over.

Much like winning, losing also creates attitudes that negatively affect leadership. Losers become tentative, hesitant and fearful. Losers find it more and more difficult to believe that good things can happen. Losers develop sarcastic demeanors that deny faith, ridicule believers and impugn the successes of others. Losers shun winners. Losers convince themselves that life is unfair, that no good deed goes unpunished and that luck determines all outcomes. Losers suspect that winners got a leg up by an insider, that playing by the rules never works and that they have no chance to win against insurmountable odds. These are not collections of facts, but attitudes. No one wins until he or she loses the losing attitude.

Just stop it. I know it’s easy for me to say. You ask, “How?” That’s your worksheet. Attack it with a passion. No one can give you your personal formula for success, but you can identify the negative factors that must be eliminated in order to get there. How to stop wrong attitudes looms before you as your number one objective in your success strategy. I just know you have to do it.