Playing The Bigger Game - PART 6

Step 6: Surround Yourself with People Playing A Much Bigger Game.

Once you realize that intimidation is for suckers, it’s time to use that newfound knowledge to surround yourself with people who will force you to play a bigger game every single day.

If you’re not actively working to add more of these people to your social / professional circle, then you’re in trouble.

Here’s why:
As humans, we tend to live up to the expectations of our direct peer group. In fact, for the most part, it’s a limit – an average of maybe our five closest connections. Don’t believe me? Rich people hang out with rich people. Overweight people tend to have an overweight social circle. Health nuts chill with health nuts. We tend to hang around with people who reinforce our current set of behaviors, and we don’t deviate much.

Because of that, a small-game crowd can actively pull you down. Yeah, this is the sad part. Hanging with struggling business people? See what happens when you tell them you’re taking a daring risk. (”Are you crazy?”) Trying to lose weight? See how people react around you when you try to eat more sensibly. (”C’mon, live a little.”) If you decide to up your game, you’re rocking the boat for your own crowd, and they will – with the best of intentions – try and draw you back to “safety.”

It’s a tough world for those hanging with small-game crowds. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not advising you to ditch your friends and associates – far from it. Instead, you I’m saying that you need to be working on expanding your own circle to include more bigger-game people and be open to helping your current peers come along for the ride.

If your current peers aren’t willing to play a bigger game, be gracious and understanding. It’s not easy. You may even be squirming thinking about it. But nothing motivates like a good example, so focus on being one.

How do you find people who are playing a bigger game? It’s simple. Look for the people at the top of the food chain in your niche and consider their type of game. Does the thought inspire you or terrify you? If it’s the latter, there’s no shame in that. Maybe it makes no sense for a one-person operation to try and jump to the game of someone with a staff of hundreds.

So go one level down. Who’s one tier down from them? Can you play your game on their level? Inspired? Run with it. Terrified? Drop down another rung, and lather/rinse/repeat until you get to a point where that feeling of terror softens into the sense that “Oh crap, I might actually have a snowball’s chance of pulling this off.”

A snowball’s chance is good enough. It’s a start. Find people at that level and start networking your way onto their radar (more on that in upcoming Tuesday’s when I’ll give you notes on networking). Start stepping out and risking some public failures and they will do what they can to keep you from failing.

There’s nothing a successful person loves more than giving a boost to someone with chops, because they remember when someone a little higher up did the same thing for them. Leverage the hell out of that.

When you hang with people who play a bigger game, they actively pull you upwards. To continue hanging with them, you’ll feel a positive pressure to push yourself in all the right ways and to stop making excuses. They’re not going to accept your excuses and fears of failure. They’ll understand them, and they’ll empathize with them … they just won’t tolerate them.

And when that happens, you’ll push past your limiting beliefs and play that bigger game to the max so you can keep hanging with that group of real players. I’ll step you through how to start the ball rolling on. Game on.

Fortune Smiles on the Brave

The MEGA World of Lil Mogul
by Richard E. Pelzer II
aka Lil Mogul


As many of you know, Richard E. Pelzer Sr., Lil Mogul’s Dad and business mentor, would tell me, "no person or company can be great without first being brave." That statement always stayed with me as an entrepreneur. In an economy that's got a lot of businesses basing their decisions on fear, it's important that companies turn up the volume on their brave stance ... because no economic climate needs or rewards bravery more than one in crisis.

Scores of other brands were born and bred during economic slumps: Def Jam, Revlon, Charles Schwab, Microsoft, FUBU and MTV. At the start of the Eisenhower recession, April 1955, a salesman named Kroc inked a franchising deal with the brothers McDonald’s. And in 2001, another year of economic and social upheaval, Apple introduced the iPod.

Outlined below are a set of practices that can help drive your company bravest work, called "A Blueprint For Bravery."


1. Build A Brave Culture
Company philosophies are about as useful as a box of wet matches unless they're part of the culture. And a culture can't be brave unless its people are. The minute you get behind your own philosophy, you'll notice that brave people - clients and employees with extra fight in them - will start to find you. Building a brave culture can include exercises such as asking new hires to participate in random acts of bravery. Or instructing your planners write "brave criteria" into their briefs. A good employee is one who knows they're on to something when an idea makes them a little nervous.


2. Make It Real
Bravery's intangible. To make it concrete, give it a physical presence in the world. Start with an identity system that communicates your position clearly. For example, I write down my thoughts, I challenge myself to overcome my deepest personal fears, displaying them in frames on my office wall.

This isn't about dressing up the office. It's about committing wholeheartedly to the value you want others to embrace. By making this abstract quality real for you, you're extending the philosophy beyond work and into lives. And that gets poured back into your business.

3. Unleash Secret Weapons (In A Stealth Way)
An army that charges blindly into the fray isn't brave so much as suicidal. Before going to battle, arm yourself with intelligence, insights and brand strategy. Gather and examine all the data in collaborative, partnerships/client meetings. During these "Brave Sessions," identify the lethal "Weapon," or marketing strength, which you'll use to slay your client's marketing "Goliaths," or challenges.

Go deeper than your typical strength/weakness analysis, because when it comes to challenger brands facing goliath competitors, the best weapon will tend to be a secret weapon-an opportunity that hasn't been leveraged fully or at all.


4. Be Firm In Belief, Brave In Battle
Unless they have something to believe in a conviction that's bigger than the battle-armies will retreat. It's important to work with clients to develop a "Brand Belief," a guiding principle that gives creative’s and clients a greater sense of purpose and meaning. It's something to live up to, bigger than any one product or service.


5. FINALLY, Speak The Truth
Brave marketers can handle the truth. They rely on their teams to hold them accountable, to turn good ideas into brave ideas. They accept the cold truth about their own ideas for the sake of bigger, bolder solutions. And they step up to tell clients the truth for the same reason.

In business as in life, you can't teach bravery anymore than you can teach creativity. But you can establish a set of conditions that allows courage to flourish. And when you do, this otherwise immeasurable quality -- without which greatness isn't possible -- produces highly measurable results. I think Franklin D. Roosevelt said it best, and with perfect simplicity: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."