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    Your Pursuit of Greatness: a workbook
    Your Pursuit of Greatness: a workbook
    Your Pursuit of Greatness: a workbook
    Ebook164 pages2 hours

    Your Pursuit of Greatness: a workbook

    By Ransom Stephens

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    About this ebook

    You have the potential for greatness and you know it.

    You hear phrases like “Do what you love.” You see it on bumper stickers “Follow your bliss.” And you’re going to get to it, right? Maybe next year, maybe next decade. But you’re also aware that, if you’re lucky, you only have a few decades before your time ends.

    With clarity and humor but neither reverence nor restraint, Ransom proves that you have everything you need right here, right now, to transcend your obstacles and fulfill your greatest potential.

    We’ll have our cynical moments, some sarcasm, too, but always with the complete appreciation that great challenges have been met by millions of human beings. There is no compelling reason to exclude you!

    - What you need to unleash your potential. (Hint: you’ve already used it thousands of times.)

    - How to use timescale to understand where you are, how you got here, and where you’re going
    What luck is and the three keys to improving yours

    - How to distinguish yourself from the crowd

    - Understanding of the kernal of truth behind “law of attraction” and how to use it

    - Where to find the people who can help you move forward

    - How to deal with gatekeepers and how to handle ogres
    - When to expect the inevitable frustrations and how to deal with them

    - Why you must never forget your purpose

    - Networking for introverts

    - Special advice for teens

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRansom Stephens
    Release dateDec 2, 2011
    ISBN9781466055575
    Your Pursuit of Greatness: a workbook
    Author

    Ransom Stephens

    Ransom Stephens is a former physics professor and fifth-generation Californian. After earning his PhD from the University of California–Santa Barbara, he taught at the University of Texas at Arlington and conducted cutting-edge research at high energy physics labs across the United States and Europe. He then moved into the high-tech arena, leaving academia to work for a wireless web start-up. He’s now a science writer and high-tech consultant living in Northern California’s Wine country, though he prefers beer. More about Stephens can be found at his website, http://www.ransomstephens.com.

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      Book preview

      Your Pursuit of Greatness - Ransom Stephens

      In the last decade I’ve presented The Pursuit of Greatness to thousands of people. The first audiences were high school students entering college and back then the title was How I Avoided Growing Up. Over the last few years, the largest audiences have been professionals in career transition (i.e., unwillingly unemployed) and the title was The Big Picture and Big Decisions. The words have evolved over the years, but the message hasn’t.

      The Pursuit of Greatness is for people at a point in their lives when they are making long-lasting decisions about who they are and what they want to be.

      There is something about this speech that fires people up. I’m no bubbly optimist, though I do understand the power of positive thought and can explain it in terms that make sense (and I will in Chapter 13). I make wisecracks. I rub your nose in your own mortality. I mix metaphors. I make demands of you and am prone to making light of your most deeply held beliefs. I don’t mean to be an asshole, but sometimes I am. Regardless of any of that, I am inextricably on your side. Maybe that’s it. Whatever it is, people really like the presentation and love this book. This simple message helps them move on:

      Rule 1: You are obligated to fulfill your Greatest potential. Go on, no excuses, get to it right now!

      Not only do you owe it to yourself, you owe it to me! And the guy sitting next to you. And your dog. (You don’t owe it to your cat though. Your cat doesn’t actually care about you.)

      Chapter 1. How to use this book

      This book will help you understand, recognize, and approach each stage of your own unique Pursuit of Greatness. In many ways, you’re making a transition into a new world. This new world business is more than a convenient metaphor. For the last 40,000 years or so, the worlds that people inhabit have shifted. The transition from physical evolution to cultural evolution reflects the fact that our cultural environments affect our lives as much as our physical environments.

      Economics is the monetary image of a culture. It is ultimately bound by physical laws, but the so-called laws of economics, including market forces, supply and demand, and monopoly and commoditization, depend on a combination of politics, religion, social norms, and the values and ethics of a society; the sum of which is culture. It is in this sense that the instant you begin your Pursuit of Greatness you begin the transition from one world to another.

      In the course of this transition, I’ll help you find ways to be realistic in charting your course to Greatness. And by realistic, I mean a realistic evaluation of the stakes; realistic yes, but not in the cynical voice of the jerk who asks, What are you, nuts?

      We’ll have our cynical moments, some sarcasm, too, but always with the complete appreciation that Great challenges have been met by human beings hundreds of millions of times and there is simply no compelling reason to exclude you from that level of success. That said:

      >>> Enlightening Blurb 1 <<<

      If you don’t believe you can do it, no one will. So believe in yourself but avoid misconceptions. It won’t be easy and it won’t be cheap, but there will be opportunities and you need to be ready.

      To get the most out this book read it all the way through and do the exercises as you go. Wherever you are in your quest, it will help you figure out where you’re going and how to take the next step. As you set out, the first reading will help you prepare, like filling your canteen before setting out to cross a desert.

      After the first read, keep this book nearby and as you work forward come back after you’ve had a success or failure and whenever you feel uncertain.

      I wrote this book for two people – you and me – and for one reason: to help us maintain the perspectives we need to navigate our separate ways with tempered expectations but without lowering our sights. We’re not on the same path, you and I, but in these pages our paths intersect. And hey, all kidding aside, writing this book and doing these exercises have been an enormous help to me.

      Each chapter describes a different stage in the Pursuit of Greatness. I can’t promise that this book will make it easier. Easier isn’t the right word. It’s not going to be easy. The stuff of Greatness shouldn’t be easy! If I can help you believe that success is possible, then I’ll be one big step farther along my own path to Greatness.

      This is a workbook and that means you need to do the exercises. Well, most of them (some of them?). This is the electronic version, of course, so you might be able to use your reader’s commenting feature (if it has one) to type in your answers. You know? If you paid full retail for this thing, send a note to info@yourpursuitofgreatness.com and Gupti will send you the interactive PDF version. It’s nicely formatted and has fields where you can type in your answers to the exercises.

      Type in a lot! What the hell, you don’t have to show it to anyone, right? And if you got a free, unformatted, no-bells-and-whistles electronic version, then use a notebook or buy a fancier version (at www.yourpursuitofgreatness.com).

      The exercises are designed to help you both consciously and subconsciously assemble the tools you’ll need. No matter how old you are, you have faced and conquered other challenges. It makes sense to dig through those experiences and use them to sharpen the tools you already have.

      Exercise 1.1 is the most important, do it right now:

      Exercise 1.1: List your top 10 all time Greatest successes. Include goals that you’ve achieved, problems you’ve overcome, and tragedies you’ve survived. Things like academic degrees, awards, athletic/artistic success, careers you’ve launched, products you’ve produced, children you’ve raised, illnesses you’ve survived, etc. If you have trouble digging them up, here’s a trick: think back to your earliest memory and then move forward year by year, consider each school you’ve attended, places you’ve lived, jobs you’ve had, things you’ve made, performances, and so forth. You can come up with at least ten and don’t worry about the order.

      We’ll need your most memorable experiences, too:

      Exercise 1.2: List several of your most poignant experiences, both good and bad. Include trips you’ve taken, enlightening encounters, relationships, losses, anything that stands out in your memory as a perspective-altering experience.

      Chapter 2. Mixed metaphors, silly rules, enlightening blurbs, great questions, irritating cliches, and boring anecdotes

      I read dozens of self-help books while writing this and I made a few discoveries. First, most self-help books really suck. I hope this one doesn’t. Second, they’re all twice as long as they need to be. Few of them make more than one point and whatever they have to offer is presented in the first chapter and then repeated ad nauseum with no further enlightenment. So this book is short and makes lots of points and only a few of them are repeated over and over again in a redundant, repetitive fashion.

      One thing that annoyed me while reading the pile of self-help books was that half of them advocated letting the universe/God/whatever guide you while the other half advocated a relentless, determined pursuit of your goals. As I read them, I found myself agreeing with both types of books. I therefore assert both approaches but with balance. Any reasonable analysis of the two principles leads to one of life’s most fundamental questions:

      Great Question 1: Each day and for every obstacle in your path you must answer this question: Will you float with the current or paddle upstream?

      The key to Great Question 1 is to answer it consciously.

      >>> * <<<

      As you travel along this river of time you’ll encounter stretches of calm and periods of rapids. Sometimes it will seem that you’re about to drown and other times it will feel as though the entire universe is designed to advance you directly to your desired fate. Most of the time, though, in nitty gritty everyday life, no matter how pure your desire, your will is cluttered by unimportant but urgent problems, irritating emails, immediate hassle, the lure of Facebook, or the Oakland Raiders blog. It is your responsibility to decide whether to go with the flow of time and let the obstacles and currents guide you downstream or to take your metaphorical paddle and row as hard as you can in the direction you want to go.

      Some days we have the vim and vigor to confront the universe/God/whatever and dictate who we are and what we’re about. On those days we embody undaunted ambition. Other days, like today as I write this, with a lingering headache and a pile of laundry, well dude, if there’s a hassle today, I’m going around it. Today it’s mellow Ransom cruising downstream picking

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