Overachievement: The Science of Working Less to Accomplish More by John Eliot

Author:John Eliot [Eliot, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

Building Confidence: A Case in Point

Not long ago, I got a call from an old college friend of mine, John Katen, who is one of those naturally confident thinkers. After Dartmouth, John went to work for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) where he decided, after a couple short years, to step off the fast track to start his own IT consulting company. He quickly made it a success—and then, in the midst of a downturn in the economy, took a whole year off—without any income—to travel around the world. He had no assurance that when he returned he’d be able to pick up any new clients. And as it turned out, when he got back to the States, he found the economy even worse off. So what did he do? He turned down a series of offers from companies eager to hire him as a consultant! He confidently knew how he had to position himself for the long term and these companies were unwilling to pay him his assessed value. He held firm in the market. Marriott International came knocking, understanding the worth of his skill sets, and thereby giving him the kind of contract that brought the kind of authority he needed to accomplish impactful things. Two years later, what was initially a short project has turned into an on-going highly productive relationship between Marriott and John’s company.

Now married, John thought his wife Lynn’s employers were ignoring how good she was. He advised Lynn to ask for a promotion and more money. “I can’t do that,” she said. He had another suggestion: “So work for yourself.” He called me for some additional ammunition to persuade his wife to quit her very good job in order to go into business for herself. Lynn was working for a large American bank handling their federal and state licensing problems. Now that banks are allowed to expand their business around the country, they are required to keep track of all the laws and regulations relating to insurance and financial transactions that often differ from state to state. Lynn’s bank had fallen behind in researching the relevant out of state laws, and, by her calculations, was losing millions of dollars in uncollected revenue. John advised her to research these different norms, and then go to her bosses with a business proposition: for providing, updating, and maintaining a database of regulations specific to each client that would allow the company lawyers to keep up with and qualify the bank for the licensing requirements in every state in the union in which they were doing business, she would charge $100 an hour.

John spent the weekend designing a database that would accommodate all the licensing information his wife would need and stayed up all night writing the computer program to execute it. He walked her through the entire process of persuading the bank to sign her on as a consultant. The freedom of working on her own (and actually making more money than she was as a full-time bank executive) was her dream.

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