Does your boss insist that you party?

Jack Welch does. Jack was my boss for five years in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.  Back in 2001, I interviewed Jack for the third time, who as Chairman and CEO of GE, had been my penultimate boss at CNBC.  Here’s one of the last sound bites from that interview, “Welch: I think business is a lot about spirit.  When I think of spirit I think of energy, I think of excitement. I think of exciting others.  I mean what’s worse than a manager who sits around and manages people?!  I mean this is all about exciting people and making it more fun.

DVM: “But the world used to think and some still do that formality is part of big business, it’s what works.”

JW: “Formality is the killer of business!  Informality is what makes a company work, when everyone has voice, when the quality of an idea is not measured by the level in the organizational box, but only by the quality of the idea, this isn’t just about first names stuff.  This is about being able to try things, wing things.  This is about being able to celebrate.  Companies have a tough time celebrating, I mean every little victory, I mean - a ratings win at CNBC, get a keg, throw a party, do something!  This is where you spend your life!  Have a ball at it.  Why would you want to come to a place as a stuffed shirt and hang around a corporation?  It’s dumb, unless you had a ball at it!”

Jack is not just pushing keggers, he’s pushing spontaneous expressions of joy.  He's articulating two great traits of the healthiest psyches -- immediate and expressed happiness. Regarding spontaneity which is an under appreciated quality -- This is where young athletes with their leaping, hooting and hollering have it right.  This is where children are superior to adults.  This is where Julia Child with her great, loud “Oooooohs” and reactive squeals had it right. 

We’re all so scheduled these days that we often have to postpone celebrating until we find time on our jam-packed calendars.  To me, scheduling a celebration in the future for some bit of great news now nearly defeats the point.  I believe and have been taught by happy people that exuberance is not only justified, it is fitting.  Indeed, it coaxes more success. Good fortune requires recognition at the moment of awareness. 

Spontaneity is a key ingredient of joy and joy is fundamental outgrowth of a life well lived.

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Check out Donald Van De Mark's series on the 19 Personality Traits of the Best Human Beings

Donald Van de Mark is a motivational speaker and has interviewed hundreds of leaders in business and politics including: Andrew Weil, MD, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, Jack Welch, Starbucks' Howard Schultz and Intel's Andy Grove, in his nearly 3 decades as a correspondent and anchor at CNN, CNBC and public television. He is the host of The Wisdom of Caring Leaders and The Wisdom of Teams, training videos used by corporations and schools to teach leadership skills.

Donald integrates practical tips from these great leaders to provide a riveting motivational speech on the personality traits of successful people.

Bill Bradley, the former U.S. Senator and basketball star described his life purpose to me this way, “I want to be a medium, or I want to be a vehicle for improving the quality of people's lives. Whether it's their health, or whether it's their spiritual well being, or whether it's their economic circumstances. That's where I get the deepest fulfillment, when I'm doing something that actually can improve the quality of life of other human beings.”

Abraham Maslow , a psychologist who studied motivation and exemplary people, reasoned that a healthy self-worth also makes a person less self-focused, more problem-focused and ultimately willing to take more initiative and carry more responsibility for the greater good.  He writes in his book, "Motivation and Personality," that self-actualizing individuals “customarily have some mission in life, some task to fulfill, some problem outside themselves which enlists much of their energies… this is not necessarily a task that they would prefer or choose for themselves, it may be a task that they feel is their responsibility, duty, or obligation… In general these tasks are non-personal or unselfish, concerned rather with the good of humanity in general, or of a nation in general, or of a few individuals in the subject’s family.” 

Think of George Washington who really wanted to be on Mount Vernon, his farm rather than the White House.  Think of your favorite friends who become trustees of friends' and family estates – when there’s little or no reward and a lot of headaches. 

A key reason that these strong souls are able to take on responsibilities small and large is that they work at it in a very planned way. In other words, they prepare.  

“More important than the will to win is the will to prepare,” is a favorite quote of Charlie Munger’s, the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. So much disappointment in life stems from our inability to turn dreams into goals and then goals into realities.  And that is due in large part to a lack of preparation.  Preparation requires study, organization, provisioning.  I don’t know any successful person who is not organized and prepared.

Simply wanting and even exerting blunt effort for something is not enough. Carefully planned preparation that maximizes your efficiency and impact is what works. More important than the will to win is the will to prepare. And here’s the next and more subtle point about how the best among us prepare; top performers clearly distinguish between wants and goals or means and ends, but the best among us often take great pleasure in the means, the doing, not just the achieving.  As Maslow puts it, “Our subjects are somewhat more likely to appreciate for its own sake, and in an absolute way, the doing itself; they can often enjoy for its own sake the getting to some place as well as the arriving.” 
 
My partner, Damian Smith is a top flight ballet dancer.  He says that working with the great French ballerina Muriel Maffre “is all about the process” rather than the performance.  For Damian, working with Maffre is a glorious lesson in preparation – the deconstruction of the steps, Maffre’s rigorous focus on the “honesty” of every gesture and the fierce discipline she brings to each rehearsal.  Maffre’s devotion to her art is so exactly prepared and intensely personal that the performance is secondary.  Indeed, the fact that it’s witnessed by thousands is tertiary. Just before the curtain rose on their first major pas de deux together in 1996, Damian will never forget that Maffre whispered to him, “We do zis for ourselves, not zem.  We have invited zem to watch.”

Love of your daily duties and preparation for great goals will not only make your life's dreams attainable, it can make much of the effort, a joy.  No wonder the best among us are more joyful.  That trait will be the subject of another installment.

If you believe someone would enjoy and benefit from this post, please share it. Just click on the + Share button and you will see lots of options for sharing it with friends including email, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Thanks!

Donald Van de Mark is a motivational speaker and has interviewed hundreds of leaders in business and politics including: Andrew Weil, MD, former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley, Jack Welch, Starbucks' Howard Schultz and Intel's Andy Grove, in his nearly 3 decades as a correspondent and anchor at CNN, CNBC and public television. He is the host of The Wisdom of Caring Leaders and The Wisdom of Teams, training videos used by corporations and schools to teach leadership skills.

Donald integrates practical tips from these great leaders to provide a riveting motivational speech on the personality traits of successful people.