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Remember when you were a child and one day you decided to do something to help someone? If not think about it and it will come to you. For me I decided to help the local electric company by “painting” one of their electrical transformers. I decided that green was not a good color for the large box sitting in my neighbor’s yard. I went into our garage and found a can of “paint” a dark black paint that was amazing. It didn’t even need a lid. So off I went old paint brush and paint can to paint the ugly green box. I spent a good part of the day painting the box. The paint didn’t really get good coverage and after painting the box several times it was time to go home for dinner. After a few days I realized the paint still had not dried. So my plan backfired. I did not achieve what I set out to do, I know the electrical worker definitely did not sing my praises, and I know my parents would not have been happy with me had they found out what had transpired. Because you see, my premise was completely wrong. My first premise was that the electrical company would appreciate their newly painted black transformer. I am pretty sure they would not have liked it. My second error in my premise was that just because something is black and liquid in a paint can doesn’t mean it is paint, in this case it was used motor oil. Now I can go easy on myself I was probably about 4 or 5 at the time. However I am quite sure the person that ended up discovering the oil probably wouldn’t have gone easy on me.

This is a problem for a lot of people even in adulthood. They come up with plans and they execute them expecting to be rewarded for the efforts, but instead everything goes wrong. It happens every single day. The reason for this is simple someone did not check their premise. You see everyone comes up with a premise before they take action even if they don’t know it. In my MBA program one of my classmates worked for an entire semester on a major marketing project. She worked very hard at it and then presented it to the class. Now the idea was to come up with a marketing plan to grow a fitness center. Her idea was to market to obese people. At first glance you may think, “Well of course they are the people who need it.” Of course you would be correct. These people do need it, but at the same time you would fail the assignment. So why would a professor flunk you for your inspirational approach to fitness? Well for one because it would be highly unlikely to work. You see gyms are not full of obese people, sure there are obese people there, but one of the reasons why many people are obese is because they don’t work out enough. In marketing one of the rules is: Know Your Customer. Now my classmate was a gym member, she knew what the clientele looked like. So why did she decide on a project that pretty much assured a low grade? It’s simple; she failed to check her premise. She approached the project from the view point of getting people to do what they should do. The problem is her idea differed from reality. In reality people who are health conscious dominate the gyms of the country; there are others there who are overweight, who have decided to make a change in their lives. But the idea of a marketing campaign designed to get obese couch potatoes to come in and replace the traditional demographic represented in the gym is corporate suicide. By not questioning whether the people she was targeting would actually be interested in becoming members of a gym she failed the reality test. There is a reason why companies target a particular market segment. And while the customer having a need is a factor there is something that trumps it. They must be willing to take action on that need.
So when you find you are getting unexpected results it’s time to check your premise. Lives are ruined because people didn’t do it. Relationships end because people didn’t do it, businesses have failed because people didn’t do it, and people have died because people didn’t do it.

Don’t believe me? Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “sure it’s common sense but people don’t do things without knowing the consequences of their plans.” Well then I ask you to check your premise. Your premise is people consider the ramifications of their actions with a full, honest and realistic evaluation. So I offer the vegan parents of a new baby. Convinced of their lifestyle and its impact on their health they concluded that their child should be raised the same way they lived. Now you may think this is their right as parents to decide what their child should eat and how they should be raised. The flaw in this thinking is believing what is tolerable for an adult is tolerable for a child. In this case it was not, the child died and the parents were arrested. The parents never thought when their child got sick that it was the diet that they were feeding their baby. They probably searched for causes, maybe they felt they were unlucky, or that the child was just born unhealthy. But had they checked their premise they might have learned that their choice of diet for their baby was not sufficient to sustain life.

It’s a sad story, but it plays out daily in people’s lives. A favorite quote of mine is “The truth is sometimes what you believe it to be, and other times what you decide it to be. My task is to make you decide to believe differently.” The first part of this quote is part of the problem. If people decide to believe something simply because it fits with their personal views and beliefs but does not reflect reality it is very likely that the conclusions they come to will be in error. Working from a flawed premise will create flawed and unpredictable results. So the next time you find that someone is not reacting the way you think they should, check your premise. The next time a plan goes awry, check your premise. And the next time someone disagrees with you or your plan, check your premise, because for sure one of you is wrong.

A recent conversation I had really made me think about what was different about those people who are successful and those that are not. If you ask 10 people you are bound to get 10 different answers. But the chances are none of them are going to really be the difference between the two. In fact you will probably hear a few answers that come right out of a motivational speaker’s latest book, it’s their power to manifest, it’s their superior attitude, it’s their ability to work smarter not harder. While these may be true it’s not the reason they are successful. You will also inevitably hit the comments such as, “They are just lucky” or “They were privileged” or the inverse, ”They never faced oppression or adversity” These aren’t the main difference either. In truth these later responses aren’t even in the ball park, they are simply the noxious ideas of those who cannot admit that others have done what they could not.

No the real difference between those who are successful and those who are not is their willingness to remain open to possibility and seize opportunities that present themselves. There are countless stories of people who have come from tremendous disadvantage only to lift themselves up and achieve an incredible amount of success. One popular TV personality arrived in the U.S. as an illegal immigrant who didn’t speak the language; today “The Dog Whisperer” can be seen several days a week on the National Geographic Channel showing people how to deal with their dogs. You might be tempted to think that this is an isolated example, not likely to happen again, but if you search you can find people coming from all over the world and becoming successful. Some of these people have escaped war, imprisonment, or persecution but today they stand as examples of what is possible if one only takes advantage of the opportunity that is all around us.

Attributing these people’s stories to luck is a disservice to them and their struggle. If you listen to their stories what you will find instead is a willingness to take a chance, and a tenacity to keep trying to make their lives better. They are not worried about not getting the breaks others may have had, they are not concerned that with the obstacles they must face. They simply saw an opportunity to make their lives better and they took it. Some working in conditions and against obstacles that the modern American would turn their nose up too and decide it wasn’t worth it. The trouble is these same people go on to spread their poisonous views about success not only to strangers but their children and thus create another generation of people unwilling to see the opportunity right before their eyes.

Whether it’s the person who took a popular packaged food item, printed instructions in Spanish on the package and sent it to Mexico creating an annual income in the millions, or the immigrant from Iran who came to America with nothing but end up making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in the financial services industry, they all have similar stories. They saw an opportunity and they took it.

There is a reason why America is called “The Land of Opportunity” and each day immigrants are taking advantage of this opportunity. Even people as far away as India and China have found that they can share in the opportunity of the US, in fact are beginning to create that opportunity in their own countries. The sad thing is that right here in America people would rather complain and curse about others success than simply take the initiative to grasp the opportunity right in front of them and make something of themselves.

It is my sincere hope that you do not allow this false reality to distract you from the opportunity that you are bound see if you only look for it.