In all of our lives, there is a silent force at work. Every day, in almost every way, it distorts the truth and oddly, gives us pleasure in the process.

That force is the need to assign blame to others. To insist that they caused this or that, made us look bad, held us back, interfered with our would-be success, left us alone, prevented us from being alone, made our companies fail, drove us to bankruptcy, denied us of love, loved us too much. It goes on and on. The music of blame. The perpetual motion machine that saves us from fault, from sin, from responsibility.

From everything we don’t want to face in ourselves.

From the fact that what we pretend is black and white - I’m right, they’re wrong- is always grey. Worse than that:

It is always our fault. Mine. Yours. Not the other person’s. Not the competing firm. Not the SOB who beat us to market or landed the promotion we wanted. Just us. Naked us. If we accept this, if we forego the urge to affix blame elsewhere, we have to stand alone, suck it up and move on.

Imagine a day when no one blamed anyone for anything. What a joyous, cleansing dose of self-reliance that would be. The blame game just sucks us into the black hole of escapism that absolves us from actually facing up to and dealing with our own shortcomings.

And it gets so absurd. In the Palin/Biden debate, the two people seeking to be a heartbeat away from the nuclear codes, were assigning blame for global warming. Biden on mankind. Palin on the cycles of nature. If there is a threat from global warming, what the hell is the good of holding a Salem witch hunt to find the imaginary culprits.

Similarly, a paralyzed and completely immoral Congress is about to go on a rampage of “Don’t blame us” hearings on who caused the financial meltdown. Having someone to blame will feel so good because no one who actually caused the disaster will have to look in the mirror and admit, much less feel, responsibility. We all know life is lived in the grey area, but we revel in the fairy tale of black and white. When we fail, suddenly it all becomes so clear. They did it. It’s his fault. She made it happen.

I’m innocent.

It may feel good to engage in this fantasy, but it is a charade that keeps us locked in a pattern of limitations that stunts our intellectual and spiritual growth.

There is one way to change this and it is a difficult pill to swallow. Admit that no one else is at fault. It is our doing. And our responsibility, our opportunity, our freedom to make it right.

Frightening as this may be, there is no greater form of liberation.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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1. It says one should lead a balanced life. Who defines that balance? And what the hell does it mean?

2. It is not wisdom. It is just convention. And convention often boils down to doing things the way they have always been done simply because they are done that way.

3. It is a set of quasi rules established by anonymous people. One of the “rule makers” established the idea that “it is not healthy to be a workaholic.” Well, what is a workaholic? What if I find work to be one of my great passions? Should I cut it off in midstream at a certain appointed hour because someone else believes I should leave time in my life for sitcoms?

4. It says adults should “act our age.” But it’s often far more fun and creative and insightful to act like a child. So you act your age and I’ll follow my own drummer.

5. It says we should care what other people think of us. Why? If I worry about them, I am living by their compass not my own. Madison Avenue hates me for writing Your Marketing Sucks. For suggesting that ROI is more important than aesthetics. Should I have the books burned and drop my work on a sequel? I don’t think so. But conventional thinking does.

6. It believes in the value of consensus. But that’s just another word for “committee.” And committees are where people with few ideas and zero guts to carry things out, hide. (Think U.N.)

7. It says greed is bad. But everyone is greedy. Some are just better at getting what they want. Is the guy hoping to get the state lottery to pay him $10 million any less greedy than Bill Gates, who made it and is now giving it all away?

8. It says that everyone should get a college education. I believe education is exhilerating but some of the wisest people in the world are college drop-outs. For the most part, schools teach you to memorize. Life, work, mentors: if you watch and listen, they teach you how things really work.

9. It says all people are created equal. Nonsense. Everyone deserves respect and the opportunity to excel to their highest capability, but born equal no. Some are driven, others are passive. Some are brilliant, others are not even close. Some are physically beautiful, others can radiate enough electricity to light a stadium and others …..well they’re just others. God bless them all but let’s not pretend they’re equal.

10. It says everyone deserves a steady job and a comfortable retirement. But some of us want neither. We want adventure, risk and the right to drop dead trying to create some form of magic.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Black is a Canadian media mogul now behind bars after his conviction on charges of mail and wire fraud by US courts.

To the world he is rich, imperious, unethical: a walking, talking symbol of greed in the raw.

And he may be just that. The media hates him, many former employees hate him, shareholders too, as well as the man and woman on the street. They all hate him…..and perhaps for good reason.

It’s a hate fest. Everyone, it seems, has piled on. Except, well, except Conrad Black.

I just read a jailhouse interview with “the devil” himself and I was stunned by it. I will paraphrase some of the highlights:

* Black says prison is quite civilized, he has adapted to it and met a number of interesting people.

* He proclaims his innocence but is not bitter, holds that he can take anything life throws at him and treat it as a learning experience.

* The accomodations are not what he was used to in the splendor of his pre-incarceration days, but it’s all just fine for now.

I don’t know the precise nature of Black’s crimes and given my faith in the legal system, I assume he belongs where he is. But there is an important subtext here. All of us are, at times, on the outside of mainstream thinking. Or we are viewed as being wrong or negligent or stupid or selfish. Black is viewed as worse, as a criminal and a Robber Baron, but the subtext remains the same:

You must always have faith in yourself.

You must always know how to adapt.

You must remain flexible in a life that constantly changes.

You must be tough enough to take the curve balls, without whining, and find a way to toss them back at the fates.

You must look at failure with naked eyes- bankruptcy, red ink, failed plans, loss of a job, death of a marriage, removal from an executive position - and like Black, right or wrong as he may have been in business, find a way to view it as a path to redemption. To future success.

We can never, ever abandon ourselves. It is true that no matter how much we are loved by others, we are born alone and we die alone. If we are to make major changes in business, politics, science, art - we will do it against the wind. Alone. Ask Van Gogh. Ask Copernicus. Ask Lincoln.

When Jonas Salk created his cure for polio, jealousy in the scientific community denied him of a Nobel prize. The man saved millions of children from lives of misery and he was treated like a villain. But he went on, presiding over the Salk Institute and working toward a cure for AIDS.

Salk and Black are in vastly different categories. Salk is a hero of mankind. Black is just another seeker of wealth. But both had to dip into that well of self confidence, that reservoir of personal faith, that failure to abandon themselves.

Next time you are in the cross hairs, remember you always have yourself. And that is your most powerful ally and most potent weapon.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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It was the late fall of 1960 and John Fitzgerald Kennedy was about to be anointed by the American people as President of the United States.

I was a kid on a school bus, too young and preoccupied with an out of control family, academia and a budding fascination with girls to care a whit about politics. Yes, I had watched Ike talk on TV from the Oval Office now and then, and pretended to listen dutifully in front of my father, but the Supreme Allied Commander and all of his peers could hardly hold a candle to the strains of rock and roll starting to blast through the windows of the older kids’ Corvettes.

And then, in a second, my world changed in a way I would never forget. Through that school bus window I caught a glimpse of JFK on television, through the window of a tiny Queens cape in Bayside, New York.

Somehow, the soon-to-be president and rock and roll were suddenly one and the same. There was an epiphany, a lesson that applies to this day; that still resonates!

Some people, some select few, are not merely people. They are magic in a bottle. Canned heat. Fire and ice. We can’t try to be like this; we are either born with it or not, but we can learn from it.

Last year, I spoke at the annual Siemens’ CEO conference, Ascent, in Berlin. When I would talk to Berliners — cab drivers, executives, waiters, anyone of every age–they spoke with pride of JFK’s glorious Berlin speech.

This year, when Barack Obama needed a rocket power boost for his primary run against Hillary, Caroline Kennedy evoked the name of The Rocket Man, her father, our JFK, and Obama’s trajectory shot skyward.

God makes very few JFK’s. But he makes millions who can study him and Thatcher and the handful of men and women who set the bar.

So many of us fall short because we make excuses. Families to tend to; no money to start with; illnesses to overcome; lovers to appease. But it’s all noise. I was asked to talk about the Oprah\Palin mini-bout by Fox News the other day. And as I prepared my thoughts, it struck me how both had much more in common than that which divides them.

* Both fought like hell for success.

* Both rejected the standard excuses.

* Both would not settle for mediocre.

* Both are making a mark on the world.

* Both reject conventional thinking as “crowd control” designed to keep them in place by threatened also - rans.

When you see greatness from a bus, refuse to get off when it stops. Take the wheel and drive yourself to the finish line. No one else will.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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Everyone we work with, everyone we befriend, everyone we love and trust, has two bios.

What do I mean by this?

When one of my sons arrived at college, he met a professor during his first week at school. The gentleman commenced the semester with an unusual classroom lecture, of sorts.

He posted a Power Point slide revealing, in brassy grandeur, all of his impressive credentials: cum laude, PhD, department chair, noted author, father of a half dozen theories, and on and on.

My son reacted in polar opposition to what this apparent show of intellectual superiority intended to elicit.

Restless in his seat, my son thought, “What a pompus stuffed shirt this guy is.”

And then the professor surprised him. Actually shocked him. And most impressive, endeared himself to him.

“Now that you have had the opportunity to absorb that side of me,” the professor said, “here is my other bio.”

Another Power Point slide appeared, this time revealing rather unflattering traits:

+ Alcoholic
+ Apathetic Parent
+ Lack Of Personal Imagination
+ Fear Of Taking Risks

In business, in friendship, in romance, we are taught to keep the unattractive bio, which we all have, under wraps. To hide it. To present a facade as close to perfection as possible.

But no one believes it. We all know, deep down, that we are all imperfect. And those among us who are most transparent, most willing to surface the “stealth” bio, are actually the ones we admire most and select to be our partners, in whatever form of partnership we choose.

Why? Because we are drawn to their courage. Their honesty. To the knowledge that we actually know them and they us and in that mutual admission of imperfection, we find a perfect union.

I was asked the other day what it takes to be a successful leader, be it a CEO, the head of a tiny department, an entrepreneur seeking success against all odds, a platoon commander leading his forces into battle.

It takes any number of unusual and exceptional traits, perhaps chief among them the willingness to show both bios instead of the fantasy bio you post on FaceBook.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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by guest blogger Regis Hadiaris

Throughout his life, my Dad taught me that I truly could be whatever I decided to be. His confidence in me gave me the strength to believe in my ideas, challenge conventional thinking, and take risks.

Below are 6 techniques I’ve used to successfully challenge conventional thinking in my life.Unconventional Thinking:

1. Identify and ignore “noise” in your life.
Noise is the unnecessary stuff that distracts your attention and limits your effectiveness: naysayers, gossip, opinions of news media, fear, etc. If you are determined to challenge conventional thinking, you have to train yourself to ignore noise.

I work for Quicken Loans, one of the nation’s largest direct mortgage lenders, in arguably the most challenging time for the financial industry in 20 years. If I listened to all the noise about how bad the mortgage crisis is, I would become paralyzed by negativity and fear. Instead of focusing on the constraints around me, I consciously look for opportunities. Don’t let yourself become a product of your environment; let your environment become a product of you!

2. Don’t recreate the wheel.
I’ve seen companies launch huge new initiatives without ever stopping to ask themselves: “has someone done this already?” Be curious! Instead of blindly jumping into a project, take a step back and think “someone must have run into this situation before, what did they do?”

We recently decided to focus on a particular marketing strategy at Quicken Loans. Instead of starting from scratch, we flew several key people to another, non-competitive company to discuss our plan. Because that company had already executed this strategy really well, the day we spent with them saved us months of trial-and-error.

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

- Albert Einstein

3. Take a stand.
A couple of years ago, I was leading a project that a senior executive didn’t agree with. He didn’t think the project could make an impact on the business. I believed that it would. We compromised, and he gave me 90 days to prove it. I did, and the executive was proud of the accomplishment.

It can be hard to challenge consensus. But if you truly believe in what you are doing, you can’t be afraid to voice an opinion or do things that others don’t understand. Remember: the thinking that got you where you are will seldom get you where you want to go.

4. Get excited when people tell you “no.”
So many people let others dictate what they can and cannot do. Before they know it, they have lost the ability to be effective. When people tell me “no, we can’t do that,” I immediately think “how can we?”

Every day, I have conversations about ideas that are too hard to do, solutions that are too complicated, and costs that are too expensive. If you attack these situations by creatively brainstorming alternatives, you can inevitably find ways to turn these “no’s” into “yes’s.”

5. Keep it simple like Forrest Gump.
“When I got tired, I slept. When I got hungry, I ate. When I had to go… you know… I went.” Forrest kept life simple. Do you?

At Quicken Loans, we have a “no big projects” rule. Why? Big projects usually mean lots of over-complicated ideas that simply aren’t needed to solve the problem at hand. You can have big visions but still execute them in small chunks. Doing this encourages constant improvement, and helps prevent marketing projects that are out of sync with current business needs.

6. Be effective, not busy.
My team completed over 1,100 internet marketing projects last year alone. While that’s an impressive accomplishment, I’m most proud of the impact those projects made. Every single thing we do has a legitimate business reason, or we don’t do it. And every morning we meet to discuss the thing we can do that day to be the most effective.

Every person on my team has (literally) hundreds of things on their to-do list. Our concern is not getting them all done. Instead, we ask ourselves, are we working on the right things, right now? Once we focus on being effective, instead of being busy, we automatically get into
a mental mode of challenging conventional wisdom.

Try one of these techniques, and you can take an ordinary day and make it great! Try them all, and you will hone your ability to challenge conventional thinking.

Regis Hadiaris is a marketer, blogger, speaker and innovator known for unconventional ideas and impressive results. He is the “Leader of Leaders and Pursuer of WOW!” on the marketing team at Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest online mortgage lender. His blog, Dot Connector, is a popular destination for ideas on being more successful at work.

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Conventional wisdom advises that everyone is entitled to a second chance. Make a mistake, make a bad choice, and the second chance is waiting in the wind.

“Entitled to,” are the key words. Perhaps you are, but in many cases you aren’t getting it. So often there are no second chances. None. Call the police. Pray to God. Petition the Pope. All to no avail. Life says no and its no. Period.

However, you have an opportunity in your career to achieve a true breakthrough. A major speech. An invention that has the power to change an industry. A financial projection everyone expects you to beat.

And you don’t. You fall short. All of the fairy tales of how life is supposed to work say, no problem, you’ll have another chance.

You don’t. In most cases, you blew it. Once you blow the speech, you can’t give it again. Not the next day. Miss the financial projection and the halo you once wore in the company is replaced by a cloud. The golden child is just another disappointment. You aren’t getting that promotion you were counting on. Not in the near future. This is life, not a Hallmark TV special.

Ever loved another person and fell out of love? Tried to rekindle? To make it work again? Well, if you have, and we all have, it doesn’t work. Once love is dead, it is D.E. A. D. It cannot be brought back from the once was. It is extinguished for eternity.

Is that fair? No, but fair is an artificial term as well. Nothing is fair. You can’t pin your hopes on fair. You can’t build your business on fair. You can believe that love, or lack of it, will be fair.

What you can do is to hone the art of recovery. There are no second chances but there are fifth and sixth chances. And that’s where the real opportunity lies and where the winners in the unfair game of life seperate themselves from the whiners.

When you fail at something, when you dissapoint, when you lose something of great value, when you see the success or the love or both slip away, a rainbow will not appear to save you. There will be no instant cure. Instead, you can, if you have the vision and the drive, embark on a new journey- of pain and joy and ultimately of determination and exhileration - and reconnect with your dream and exceed it.

The rub is that this will come not in the day after the fall. Not in weeks of the loss. Not after a good night’s sleep and a pep talk with yourself. When I was 17 I had a terrible loss and as it turned out, a wonderful learning experience. The loss crushed me. Depressed me. Isolated me. And my second chance, my fifth chance, took four years to materialize.

The experience taught me to build a buffer around all that I do. To go for everything in life like a wild-eyed dreamer but as I tear through the wilderness of business and love and art, I recognize that I will fail now and then, over and over again. I just leave the room and resources to recover.

It will take time. It always does. There is no Land Of Second Chances. But The Land Of Fifth Chances? I learned how to live there years ago. And I am deeply thankful for it.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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When I was a young man, I met ice cream impresario Tom Carvel: widely credited as the entrepreneur who created big league franchising.

What struck me most about our conversation was that Tom’s first store was an accident: when his truck broke down on a road in Westchester, NY, and he lacked the funds to repair it, he started selling ice cream from the spot where he was stranded. He was smart and flexible enough to recognize that his original business plan wasn’t as good as the accident he had stumbled on to …..and he let the latter drive his success.

Levi Straus. Nike. Gatorade. Craig’s List. All more or less accidents
or experiments that turned out to be major enterprises. There is such a convoluted irony, a staggering twist of fate, in a guy who decides to create a superior running shoe with a waffle iron, succeeding at it and then turning that track meet tinkering into a global business.

There is a profound life lesson embedded in this syndrome. Sometimes, many times, more often than we give credit for it because to do so would toss out the rules and violate the convention that empowers so many of the guardians of the status quo - the lack of planning, of wrapping everything up in a ribbon, is the true driver of exceptional success.

Instead of holding life close to us and seeking to pull all of the levers in perfect synchronicity, sometimes we are better off -more successful and exhilerated-letting life run away from us and seeing where the jet steam can and will take us. Like a kid on a beach watching our kite do the kind of aerial acrobatics we could never engineer on our own, we need to let the wind do its magic and marvel and learn from it.

The other day, I observed the absolute worst salesperson I have ever had the painful experience of watching, try to make a sale. She came to the scene of the crime with a carefully scripted pitch in mind and as much as she saw that it was the wrong pitch for the wrong prospects, she refused to listen, to stumble on to an opportunity to sell her product in a different way, to have an accidental success, to watch her kite waltz through the afternoon sky.

She was opposed to accidents. Immune to them. Determined to stick to the script. She advised us that she was a Harvard MBA, that we were the equivalent of poorly informed misfits and she wasn’t going to find a way to sell her ice cream from a broken truck, thank you, no matter how much we were cheering her on to do just that.

We wanted to buy her product. We wanted it to work for us. But she refused to help us fall in love with what she was selling. She was a Harvard MBA. She didn’t deal in love.

History is replete with accidents that evolve into epics. When Abraham Lincoln was running for President, he was an accident of a candidate running against pillars of the nation raised by writers of the rules, of the conventions, to win high office and preside over the nation.

When Lincoln and his adversaries arrived at the Republican Convention, it was the accident who walked away with the prize and the same accident who would construct an administration of men he could not easily control, so that he could watch them invent solutions for a plagued nation. Men of soaring ambition and substantial intellect. Men who might rush past him in the jet stream.

Precisely what Lincoln prayed for. Abe knew he needed a plan to save the Union. And an accident.

As you construct your companies and departments, as you help to guide their evolution, as you preside over your life, welcome the accidents everyone tells you to beware of.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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In life, it appears we have a myriad of choices as to what we are or will be.

But there are really only two choices : you can be a noun or a verb.

Let’s look at some of the nouns:

* Middle Manager
* Control Freak
* Nice Person
* Smoker
* Boyfriend
* Girlfriend

Do any appeal to you? Describe you? I hope not, because, conventional wisdom aside, this is so passive and so one dimensional, it is like being an inanimate object. And worse yet, it is how the world wants you to be. Safe and easy to define.

“She’s my middle manager for call center operations.”

“He’s my dry but safe boyfriend.”

Do you want to be safe and easy to define? I don’t think so. I hope not. I talked about this with a friend today. And it hit me big time.

A famous axiom says, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I will add to that by saying, “A noun is a terrible thing to be.”

Let’s contrast the nouns with some verbs:

* Thinking
* Loving
* Romancing
* Inventing
* Challenging

It really boils down to those who watch and those who do. Those who observe and those who act. The passive and the active. The active and the passive.

This is your choice. This is your life.

In physics, there are the applied type and the theoretical breed. The latter think they are superior. They opine. They postulate. Some add value. Most just secure tenure.

Twice in the world, physicists were the kings. When Einstein brought forth E=MC2 and when a group of theorists APPLIED their genius to The Manhattan Project and saved democracy.

They transitioned from nouns, “physicists” to verbs, “Savers Of The Free World.”

That is more than a word. More than grammar. More than an intellectual exercise. It is the difference between living life and not.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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From our earliest days, we are all taught to conform.

To play well with others. To refrain from rocking the boat. To know our place. To avoid uncomfortable situations. To be a team player. To blend in.

I have never bought this. And I would like to suggest that you toss it back in the face of the dispensers of this play-it-safe advice as well.

I mean, it all boils down to a single question: why would you want to conform?

I go to meetings all the time where people are nodding their heads in agreement whenever the senior person at the table-meaning the one with the grandest title- speaks. It can be pure corporate -speak nonsense that holds zero validity anywhere else but a conference room in the sky, but the bobbleheads are nodding up and down like leaves blowing in the wind.

They want to conform.

I wonder why not a single exective of major sway didn’t come out publicly and knock Citigroup’s loving embrace of subprime bottom fish. Or a big wig at Bear Stearns. Yes, I know corporate etiquette holds that we keep our mouths shut and conform.

And then banks go under. And the people running them need to be viewed as men and women who failed to live up to their fiduciary responsibilities.

If one big name would have said “Game Over” to the Wall Street Journal, what would have happened? They would have been fired? Would never work on Wall Street again?

No. They would be heroes. Legends. In demand by everyone and more important, men and women who could go to sleep at night knowing they live life by the way they see it, not the way “the book” says to live it.

What if everyone lived a life of conformity. What would we be missing?

Lindberg
Lennon
Dylan
Joyce
Madonnna
Hemingway
Parks
King

All said yes to a chorus of no’s. Imagine a world without them.

Actually we can’t. They saw to that.

Mark Stevens
CEO

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