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Traits for Winners and Whiners

Written by: Carson Tang

Article Overview: Create Big Results In your Business and Personal Life by Knowing and Applying Producer Traits While Eliminating Procrastinator Traits. Life is full of experiences. The best ones are where you learn from them. Recently I had the benefit of a lesson reminding me the power of understanding what you are doing to enhance or sabotage your life. Do you know someone who puts off things until they are due? Whines about having to do things that are outside their comfort zone? Is a nay sayer or negative about anything you want to do no matter what it is? Does this sound like someone you know?

Traits for Winners and Whiners

Here is an experience you may have had or will encounter eventually.. I am working with a team of eight top notch volunteer performers, and one consultant. The consultant is a carry over from a legacy system for a web site we are rebuilding (actually building new from the ground up).

We had the luxury of the consultant helping us with the site (he is more proficient than any of the team in programming and code meaning we rely on him in this area). Understand, the consultant built the legacy site ensuring he was the only person who understood it and would be the only one able to fix anything on it. This made him indispensable, but also demanded a huge portion of his volunteer time for the site.

He agreed with my assessment where an automated web platform was the best path for organization. He said he had been trying to get it approved and developed for the past five years. I wondered how in all these years he did not even start. The Board came to me and requested me to find a solution for managing their site as it would be abandoned soon as the consultant had tendered his resignation for.

My conclusion was the website MUST be automated and it must be built in a way where the organization will never be at the mercy of one individual ever again. I proposed the solution to the Board, built a team, spearheaded the development of a brand new website simple enough to easily locate tech support, and had the plan approved in one meeting and underway within one to two weeks.

The consultant questioned and disputed many of the suggestions from team members that did not resonate with him. This slowed progress to a crawl. My feeling was this alpha dog (or alpha male) zone the consultant enjoyed over the last few years was going "beta" even though he had resigned and would be gone soon - but when? Clinging to ether space using imaginary obstacles doesn't serve a pragmatic state of progress. Ever look for perfection? 'Perfect' doesn't exist. Get yourself started once you have a foundation for certainty instead letting paranoia or minutia drag you back into your comfort zone and not have you start at all.

Being well into the project we hit a challenge, the consultant rhetorically asked "didn't you think through if the system would work, or if it would work before you decided to adopt it? Who decided to go with this system anyway" Well, the answer was 'Yes' and 'all of us decided'. One thing is for sure is we cannot predict the future and neither could he with the system he was advocating and so proudly implying would have had no challenges with an "I told you so" attitude. First no one likes to be in the presence of those who are snub and self righteous, and second since his system is not conceptually different than ours there was no way for him to know if his system was to have any challenges as well.

We resolved the challenge and kept moving forward. We knew what was needed and what had to be done. Along the way as we moved further away from the consultant's comfort zone where he seemed to be losing control of the site to the team I saw more personal innuendos and pokes in the communications shared amongst the team from the consultant including him being condescending, creating dissension, lecturing, telling others their ideas or suggestions were 'ridiculus', and referring to "we" as who is taking a position when it was just him and one other team member since the others haven't even chimed in. After a few more of these experiences I challenged what he was really saying including asking him to clarify who the "we" was he referred to. His final response was "or for f*ck's sake. I'm not reading beyond the first sentence. I quit."

What lessons are we reminded of, or do we learn from experiences like this?

There are different people in this world and we approach work and life differently. That includes those who are counter productive to you achieving you goals and outcomes while trying to maintain control to remain in their comfort zone. They may create dissension and a rift in the environment or do whatever creates fear and stress to get their way since their are fighting for their comfort zone or status therein. Many are 'quitters'. When confronted they get rash, lose control and become irrational, in part because they are Procrastinators.

In the alternative those who will take a vision to the reality and inspire others are the Producers. They create and inspire hope, create and advance a shared vision, and they further an initiative and can get people working together to achieve incredible results in just a short amount of time.

The following are their characteristics (see if you recognize some of the traits of the consultant below):

Producer

1) Winning attitude and mindset
2) Optimists
3) Responsive
4) Responsible
5) Belong to a circle of those those who celebrate with them
6) Control their circumstances instead of allowing it to control them
7) Entertains success
8) Cheerful
9) Usually feel good about moving forward

Procrastinator

1) Complainers and whiners
2) Wallow in victim state
3) Doom and gloom pessimists
4) Rash in actions
5) Mantra is "should have", "could have", or "would have"
6) Reactive, controlled by circumstances
7) Very set in their ways
8) Loose control easily
9) Their lives are driven mostly by emotion
9) Entertain and invite failure into their lives
10) Fearful and create imaginary obstacles

Do you want to be the Producer or Procrastinator? The above outlines what to look out for. If you see it in yourself either embrace it or lose it depending which side of the fence you are. If you want real results for you, your loved ones and those around you be the Producer.

By Carson Tang

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Article Tags: beta, conclusion, legacy system, male zone, obstacles, resignation, team members, tech support, volunteer performers, volunteer time, web platform



Related Forum Posts
Re: Great at one thing OR good at everything? - [quote="babyjoy214":tb4042ja]I heard this from my dad "Jack of All Traits, Master of None"[/quote:tb4042ja] Personally, I see myself as being a good at a lot of my passions, but not "great" enough to earn a living from any of them. I feel that our society favors those who specialize and pigeon hole themselves into one thing. In fact, I don't think you can even get a high paying job without spending 6 years studying that one subject in college + post grad studies.


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