Keeping the Proper Perspective in Chaos

Success isn't something you stumble into—it's something you build.

In this episode of On the Shoulders of Giants, Jeff Wells challenges one of the biggest mistakes professionals make: starting with the how instead of the what.

Too many people chase the next job, promotion, or business opportunity without first defining what they truly want and why it matters. Jeff explains why lasting success begins with clarity of purpose, how emotional commitment fuels perseverance, and why your career is simply the vehicle—not the destination.

You'll discover why creating value is one of life's most dependable principles and how consistently investing in others ultimately creates opportunities for yourself.

If you're feeling stuck, questioning your next move, or looking to build a career and life by design rather than by default, this episode will give you a practical framework for thinking differently about success.

What got your revenue here won’t get it where it needs to go next. On the Shoulders of Giants is the podcast from High Achiever
 for founders, executives, revenue leaders, and operators responsible for accelerating growth in complex organizations.

Hosted by Jeff Wells, each episode explores the leadership principles, operating systems, and decision-making frameworks behind scalable, sustainable performance.

We go beyond tactics to help organizations align strategy, execution, and resource allocation through a Revenue Operating System designed for clarity, accountability, and measurable growth.

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• B2B Growth Strategy
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, have you ever asked yourself the question, how do highly successful people stay emotionally buoyant in the midst of chaos and hard times? Listen, I just finished this live sales training with a sales team, and I'm sharing it with you in this podcast, answering that specific question. I hope you enjoy. There might be a little dust on the bottle, but don't be fooled because what's inside is wisdom. I'm Jeff Wells, and this is on the shoulders of giants. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. So it's been uh it's been a little while since we chat. And I was thinking about this morning the topics of the morning. And so I think we'll talk about some very specific things around the business in terms of both the balance of observations and specific execution. But I feel like I would be remiss not to step back for a second and revisit a couple of what I think are key principles for you personally. And to start with those, just kind of just to kind of reframe or set our mindset in a way that prepares us for the execution type topics that we'll go into. And some of these things we're revisiting in the sense that it's a reminder, right? Because it's easy to go through a session like this and hear something and you know, internalize it, but then we get busy and we forget about it. And so repetition is truly the mother of learning, right? And so it makes sense for us to revisit a couple of core topics. And let me just share with you the way I think about just in terms of business overall, all the way I think about our practice and the way we deliver for clients and those types of things, is first and foremost, as we come together in this setting, my primary intent, like my first intent, is to serve you as individuals. Now, you know, you may think that's funny when you think about it through the lens of the company is who, in essence, employs me in this function. But the reality is, my belief is that our primary focus is to serve the serve the people first, and that the byproduct of serving people makes a better place. And so that there's mutual reciprocity, right? We work on a personal side a little bit, and then we work on the business side, and those two things come together. And hopefully it's an equation that is a one plus one equals three equation, not one plus one equals two. So that's the general premise of this time. And so, in thinking about that, one of the things that comes to mind for me on your behalf is that this is a hard season. And sometimes in the midst of a hard season within a company or a market or the world for that matter, what we need is we need perspective, right? Like we need to keep the proper perspective. And what I mean by that is we have a tendency to get so mired down in the hard that we often forget about the bigger picture. And so, what I want to do is I want to take just a few minutes to level up our thinking for us to think a little bit about the bigger picture and just keep that perspective in mind, right? And here's what I'd say. If you remember at one point, I shared an analogy with you of a sailboat, and it was an analogy that Jim Rohn used to share a lot as a success coach, maybe the most prolific success coach of all time. And that was the analogy of the sailboat was really the theory that the winds around the sailboat change, and we can't control the winds. But what you can't control in a sailboat is the set of the sale. And the analogy is akin to us sitting in a broader market where things are challenging, or in a company where things are challenging, and understanding that yes, our success has a level of dependency upon the winds of change, but the primary indicator of success aren't the wins. It's the way we set our individual sail in the midst of the chaos. And what that means from a mindset perspective is us making sure that we're managing our emotions in the midst of the chaos in a way that allows us or enables us to make the best decisions possible at any given time for both ourselves and the company. Okay. So I share that because I want you to remember the analogy because it's it's a first principle that's timeless. Right? People who have high degrees of success have a unique ability to navigate chaos, and their mindset in the midst of chaos is different than their counterparts who are failing in the midst of chaos. Okay. And what I mean by that is that it's a mindset, it's the it's this mindset of understanding that opportunity is mixed with difficulty. And that in most cases, over the course of my career, as I've studied and looked at and experienced highly successful people and teams, they have the ability from an emotional perspective to stay buoyant in the midst of chaos and recognize that the biggest opportunities come in the midst of the greatest difficulties. And it's the people who can stay heads down in the scene, stay emotionally buoyant and look for the opportunities that bubble up and present themselves in the midst of difficulty, or begin to alter their thinking in a way that opens up the opportunity for them to thrive in the midst of difficulty. I say that because it's meaningful. Like I'm just telling you that from a career perspective, where we are today is going to pass. And it's going to pass quickly. It feels right now like we're running through mud that's up to here, but the reality is that the winds change swiftly. And what we want to do is do the best we can in the midst of chaos to look for opportunity that wasn't just keep us where we are and buoyant, it actually gives us the ability to accelerate success or accelerate our careers in the midst of that. And the ability to accelerate always comes down to a single thing. And that single thing is this that you will be rewarded in direct proportion to your ability to add value. So when you think about building the skill of navigating opportunity mixed with difficulty and figuring out where the value seems, the scenes that you run through to add immense value in the midst of chaos, that is the career accelerator. Okay. And it's a discipline and it's a mindset and it's intentional. It doesn't happen organically, it doesn't happen through circumstance. It happens by in the intentional pursuit of the process of adding value in the midst of chaos. Okay. That is a first principle that you could try to talk me out of all day long, and you'd never be able to, because I could give you a thousand examples of where that's the case. Even at a macro level, the biggest companies in the world have always been built in the midst of chaos. They've always come out of massive problems. And so I say that to say this it's not lost on me that you're sitting in a place and time where it's hard and that it's not easy. Like the opportunity on value isn't glaring right there. But we're starting to train ourselves to pay attention because the process of success is really about being attentive and responsive. It's about finding the value seems that you can run through and then being courageous enough to lean into those. That's the process of success. And what happens is it's really hard for you to hear what I'm saying and just say, okay, here's what I'm going to go do about it. And I understand that. That's okay. Because what happens with a human is that as you hear information, that information activates in you what's called a reticular activating system. And the reticular activating system is in essence, once you hear something, it gives you the ability to start to pay attention and recognize it in the marketplace. And I'll tell you the best example of this, the most simplistic example of this is if you go buy a car, let's go say you buy a Volkswagen bus, and you purchase the car, you get in the car, and you start driving home. All of the sudden, everything that you see on the road are Volkswagen buses. Like you can't believe how many Volkswagen buses all of a sudden there are on the road. Anytime that you purchase something that has a visceral emotional response, it kicks off this reticulacing system and it makes you aware of the circumstance. And being aware of the circumstances, you see, wow, I never saw that many Volkswagen buses before. Now, if you don't believe me, watch. Because what I just did was kick off your reticular activating system to the principal, that now you're going to be paying attention. That when you buy something, next thing you know, you see a hundred of those, you'll see that the principle is true. This is the same thing. When you get this type of information, if you'll actually allow yourself to ingest it, you'll start to see the concept and the principle play itself out in your daily environment. Okay. So that's why we do this. And we do it repetitiously because I don't want you to forget about it. I'm going to close just this section and I'm going to open it up to you guys for a minute. But I want to close this section with this. Success is not about default. Okay. Certainly there are people who have defaulted into success and been lucky, not good. Happens all the time. And if it would happen to me, I'd take it. Okay. Unfortunately, that's not happened to me. I've rarely been lucky. Right. But the reality is that this success is by design. It's not by default. So you've got to be personally thinking about what it is that you want personally, right? This goes back to the what and the why that we talked about. Define the what you want, get crystal clear, understand why you want it, which is the emotional fuel to drive the outcome of what. And then and only then can you rationalize are you in a vehicle that can provide that? The how. That's the company job, business, whatever it is. But everybody wants to start with the how. Don't start with how, start with the what. Constantly getting clear on the what, adding the emotional buoyancy or the fuel that drives you towards that outcome. And then only then can we continue to rationalize are we in the right vehicle to achieve that objective? Okay. That's the process. You need to spend as much time on that process as you spend on anything else. Working out, eating, working. Those are the most important pillars because as an individual, it's what allows that clarity is what allows you to sit in the vehicle, to think about it through the grid of how do I add massive value, trusting that in adding value, whether it's rewarded here today or rewarded somewhere else, the principle of value will reward that value contribution. I'm going to stop with this. You can argue with me all day long, but this is a natural law that's as prevalent as gravity. It works every single time. It's like every single time if I walk up to my roof and jump off the roof, I'm going to fall and hit the ground. That's gravity. This is as certain as gravity as long as you build the rigor and discipline around practicing it. Hey, if you liked this episode, do us a favor. Either subscribe or leave a review, or even a comment. All of those things help us promote the podcast and would be appreciated. Thanks for spending the time with us. And until next time, keep pressing. We'll see you in the trenches.