I was having a conversation recently with a friend about the best pieces of wisdom and advice that we have gotten in our professional lives and I thought that I would share them over the next few posts to (hopefully) help you kick start 2024 with a bang!

After a couple of weeks with no business travel over the holidays, I am once again on the road.  I am currently staying on the 6th floor of a hotel.  I decided to take the stairs down to breakfast this morning (gotta love Marriott hotel’s free breakfast!!!) to stretch my legs a bit and get a few more steps in.

The hotel that I am staying in was renovated about a year ago so everything still looks fairly new. As I was walking down the stairs I noticed that as I passed each floor the wear and tear and dirt on the stairs got worse.  Clearly, with each floor you go up, fewer and fewer people are taking the stairs.  This got me thinking about how people can differentiate themselves in the professional world (don’t ask me why I made this connection, my brain works in weird ways!).

The harder something gets, the more most people will resist doing that thing.  This creates a real opportunity for the other people who are willing to put in the work and do the hard things that others shy away from.

One of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.”  The best attribution I could find for this quote was Warren G Tracy’s Student.

Although this observation is focused on entrepreneurs, it’s relevance, I think, is broader than just to those of us that play in that sandbox.  I think it is eminently powerful for anyone at any stage in life.  If you are willing to work just a little bit harder than almost everyone else around you, consistently over time, success will almost certainly come your way. 

So the next time the little voice inside your head is telling you to “take the elevator”, turn the other way and head to the stairwell, no matter what floor you are on and overtime, those little extra efforts will compound and you will stand out further and further from the crowd.      

See you next week with another piece of wisdom that I try to live by.