In my search for a new advisor, I am finding the same response from professor after professor.  Though delivered with some difference by each one, I have been left to keep searching.  So when one professor who I will call Dr. C agreed to meet with me, I was optimistic.  We found a shared free time in our schedules and arranged the meeting.

As we talked about my background and the daily routine of Dr. C’s graduate students, it became apparent that we were not a good fit.  I could sense his uncertainty as he declared that conclusion, but the uncertainty was not in the conclusion but in my response to it; he was concerned about expressing himself inappropriately.  I quickly thanked him for his forthrightness and agreed with his conclusion.  Our conversation ten became more much enjoyable.

And it was also educational.  In an effort to support my continued search for a new advisor, I asked questions about the perspective of the professor.  Dr. C began talking about that perspective.  I should have been taking notes, because his monologue really opened my mind, particularly with the ideas of creating new knowledge and the apprenticeship nature of the PhD program.  I’ll need to think about these ideas some, but I left both discouraged and encouraged at the same time.  I’m discouraged that I am learning just before the beginning of my fourth year what I should have learned my first semester here.  But I am encouraged because, knowing now what I should have learned previously, I feel more capable of achieving my objectives and making real progress in my program.

And this is where it is.  I am not going to stop until I win.  I will finish what I started, and whatever results from that will result.  I will do this!

It’s now official.  The professor I’ve been hoping would be my new advisor — who I will call Dr. B — has now bowed out, leaving me right back where I started.  I got tired of him dragging his feet on this matter, given that I need an advisor to take care of some loose threads in my progress towards my degree, not to mention my eventual need for a dissertation committee, chaired by an advisor, to pass my dissertation proposal.  So I wrote a letter responding to numerous points he had raised in our earlier conversations and then asking him to commit to be on one side of the fence or the other.  He came back with a short refusal.

On the face of it, it’s fine that he refused.  I wouldn’t want to work with someone who thinks the fit is not good.  At the same time, I wasted half my summer waiting on this guy to quit dancing and decide, time that might have been put to good use, only instead to find myself right back where I started.

I’ve debated including the letter I sent to him in this post.  I’m still not completely sure about including it, which I interpret to mean I should not include it here.  However, if you are someone with hiring authority and considering hiring me for a position, I might share that privately with you.  Reach out if you are interested.

All in all, I feel disappointed.  The person I once admired as being full of wisdom has been replaced with a myoptic miser who lacks vision.  That said, I remain undaunted.  This situation gets the same response I gave to my ex-advisor.  If this guy doesn’t want to help me, then I will just find someone else who will.  And that’s my attitude going forward.

I ended up waiting for almost 6 hours while the mechanic was trying to overcome issues with his parts supplier, so I made a great call getting a new book.  And in six hours I got through a lot of this book.  It didn't take me long to finish it thereafter.  I have to say this is one of the best books on success that I ever read.  Not only has it confirmed much of what I've read elsewhere about the mindset of success, but it also gave me new ideas to think about.

For example, Cardone talks about ethics in approaching success.  By ethics, he means that success is a duty, an obligation, and a responsibility.  I've heard him talk about this before but never really understood the idea until I read his book.  Without success, you won't be your personal best or live up to your potential.  Because ethics regards a system of appropriate behavior, not being successful, in the mind of Cardone, is inappropriate.  Thus, success is an ethical duty, obligation, and responsibility.

In thinking about that idea, I agree with it because success in business and in life provides the means by which we meet our obligations to ourselves, our family, and the broader community.  Without success, our ability to meet those obligations is severely diminished.  So in thinking along those lines, I'm on the side of Cardone.

Having a high interest in goals, I was curious about Cardone’s perspective on making goals when I saw his chapter on goals.  One of the themes of this chapter on goals is a diatribe against realistic goals.  We hear this all the time, especially in the SMART acronym in which R stands for realistic.  But Cardone doesn't believe in realistic goals.  He says,

“I truly despise the word ‘realistic’ [sic] because it is based on what others . . . have accomplished and believed possible.  Realistic thinking is based on what others think is possible — but they are not you and have no way of knowing your potential and purpose.  If you're going to set goals based on what others think, then be sure you do it based on what the giants on this planet think.  They will be the first to tell you, ‘Don't base your goals on what I have done because you can do even more.’  But what if you set goals based on those of the top players of the world?  Steve Jobs’s goal, for instance, is to ‘ding’ the universe — to create products that forever change our planet.  Look at what he has done with Apple and Pixar.  If you're going to set goals comparable to those of others, then at the very least pick the giants who have already created massive success.”

To me, that idea makes a lot of sense.  It reminds me of something Will Smith once said: “Why should I be realistic?  What's the point of being realistic?”  He goes on to talk about how extraordinary achievements are not made by thinking small.  I think that's what Cardone is getting at here.  Goals should be unrealistic because, in Cardone’s mind, only goals based on big dreams have the ability to inspire their achievement.  That’s something to think about as I consider my own goals.

His chapter on competition also changed my thinking.  For so long I've thought about competition as being something good, even desirable.  But competition is not the objective of the successful.  They don't want to compete; they want to dominate.  As I think about that difference, I can see many ready advantages to dominating my space.  It provides so much opportunity and freedom that I don't have if I merely compete.

I was also impressed by this thought: “Your biggest problem is obscurity — other people don't know you and aren't thinking about you.”  That one really got me thinking, and I could see that it's totally true.  All of my past unsuccessful entrepreneurial efforts were just that because of that one word: obscurity.  No one patronizes the business they don't know about.

Here's another idea that turned me around: “Learn to commit first, and figure out how to show up later.”  When I first read that, it made absolutely no sense to me.  Why would you commit to doing something without knowing whether or not you can do it?  The loss of integrity with yourself is you fail could be massive.  The uncertainty attached to that approach provides a huge risk that, before reading Cardone’s book, I've always rejected as being above my threshold.

But after reading his book and especially the experience at the end where he talks about applying that idea to his personal striving for success, I'm thinking he might be right.  When you commit, you put yourself on the island, and when you commit without really knowing how it's going to work, you put yourself on the island and burn your boats.  That puts you in a space where you have to make it happen.  Results come from one thing and one thing only — action.  It's really what the 10X Rule is all about.  It’s not so much spending 10 times more time working as it is using the time you have to produce 10 times the results because you fit 10 times the action within the time you have.

That leads me to the last idea I found really impressive.  Cardone’s book has a chapter on time management, which like my interest in goals has always been high on my curiosity list.  There's really two parts to his idea that impressed me.  The first is the idea of balance.  Most people think in terms of either-or; “I don't have time to do everything, so with the time I have, I must do either this or that.”  But Cardone takes a different approach.  He doesn't think in terms of either-or; he thinks in terms of all.  Because he wants it all, he arranges his day so that he can have it all.

That brings me to the second part that impressed me.  Cardone said, “To really understand, manage, maximize, and squeeze every opportunity out of the time you have, you have to fully understand and appreciate how much of it you have available to you.  You must first take control of your time — not allow others to do so.  If you listen to people discuss the topic of time — especially in regards to the amount they have at work — you'll probably hear a lot of complaining.  People act as though work is something to get through, yet in reality they spend very little of their time even doing it.  Most people only work enough so that it feels like work, whereas successful people work at a pace that gets such satisfying results that work is a reward.  Truly successful people don't even call it work; for them, it's a passion.  Why?  Because they do enough to win!”

He then talks about the need to work harder and get more done in the same amount of time.  This makes sense when you consider his 10X Rule, which is assessing the effort needed to hit target and adjusting thinking to dream big.  Big dreams inspire big action, so the 10X Rule is about massive action at 10 times the amount others give.  And that really is what it all comes down to, because results come from action and only from action.

If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it.  There's a chapter near the end where he gives 32 qualities of successful people and a brief treatment on each one.  I’m thinking I might adopt that chapter as a sort of daily primer to start my day.  Each day I read one section about one quality, and then after 32 days, I start all over again.  There seems to be some mindset here that I have in part but not completely.  And as I think about the concepts in this book, I feel impressed that it contains much of what I've been lacking in order to have the success I've been dreaming about for years.  We'll see what comes of that.  So again, if you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it.  In the very least, it will get you thinking about the assumptions behind your thinking and the approach you could take to life.  And that in itself would by good, even desirable. 5 stars.