Matt S. Law Studios

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  • Dig Your Well(s) Before You’re Thirsty

    Dig Your Well(s) Before You’re Thirsty

    “Dig your well before you’re thirsty.”

    This is a statement that I have heard many times from numerous motivational speakers, business leaders, coaches and salesmen through the years. It is a common sense statement that is not commonly observed—like most common sense. I like the metaphor of digging a well for three reasons.

    First, even in our industrialized western civilization we know what a well looks like because we’ve seen them in movies. Wells are deep. Digging a well is hard work and takes a long time. It is a major investment of time and labor to dig a well. You don’t get to take a drink of water from your well at the end of your first day of digging. Or your first week. It takes months of hard work before you get anything at all for your labor. It is a vivid example of the Law of Delayed Gratification.

    Second, once a well is dug, it provides water not just for the rest of your life but possibly for generations of people after you. Once the well is dug, you can continue to draw water out of it seemingly indefinitely. It’s not like gathering nuts for the winter where every nut you store equals one future nut you can eat. Each hour spent digging doesn’t provide you with X number of gallons of future drinking water. Digging a well, and completing it, taps into a vast supply of water that can keep you sated without having to keep digging from season to season. It’s a clear example of the Law of Increasing Returns.

    Third, water is vital for life. Everyone realizes that if you wait until you are thirsty before you start digging your well, you will die. I don’t think this is indicative of any particular law of success, but it is a reminder of the urgency of preparing now for the future.

    Because eventually there will be a drought.

    When a speaker or author invokes the Dig Your Well aphorism, it is used most often as a warning to take care of your finances. Save for a rainy day, keep some dollars stashed away for emergencies, contribute to your 401K, buy my success seminar.

    This is because most people spend the majority of their lives earning money. There is nothing wrong with being financially secure. In fact there is nothing wrong with being downright wealthy. But don’t be like the Hollywood cliché of the businessman who allows money to become his idol; who pursues it to the exclusion of all else in his life. He may have a deep, flowing financial well but a very shallow life.

    I contend that this statement, dig your well before you’re thirsty, is applicable to every area of your life not just your financial statement. That there are many aspects of your life that can and should be insured against disaster. There are other wells that need to be dug before the eventual drought comes.

    You have a marriage well. You have a health well. You have a faith well. You have an attitude well. You have a personal development well.

    Being able to provide for yourself financially is not an adequate substitute for a deep spiritual well when you have a crisis of faith. It will not help you to salvage an estranged relationship with your spouse if you have allowed the marriage well to run dry. Especially if your focused dedication to chasing after wealth is what caused the rift to begin with. Nearly every wealthy man on his death bed would gladly trade all his riches for another day of health. How many executives do you know who have traded their health for their career? Traded their relationships with their families? Traded their spiritual faith? How many people have dug so long and so hard in their financial well that they no longer have any joy in their life?

    They spent their lives digging a financial well and found themselves unprepared for drought in another area of their lives.

    Perhaps some of your other wells have been neglected. Maybe some of them you haven’t even begun to dig. Some of them have been poisoned by your neighbors. The reason there are so many unhappy people, so many marriages ending in divorce, so many people falling out of God’s favor—so much violence, hopelessness and despair—is because there are so many people that are thirsty.

    What are you doing today so that you, your family, and your descendants will not be thirsty?

  • Strengthen Your Core

    Strengthen Your Core

    I would rather be involved in a bad deal with good people than a good deal with bad people. ~John Sestina

    I apologize to those of you who landed on this page accidentally looking for proper plank technique. When I talk about strengthening your core, I am referring to the core of your inner self which will help you to have the proper alignment and foundation to succeed in all other areas.

    Your core is your character.

    When speaking or writing on personal growth I draw parallels between physical exercise and mental exercise; between athletic championships and personal success. So when I say that character is your core, I mean it is just like the foundational group of muscles that support the rest of you. If you have weak core muscles and only exercise your biceps, eventually you will injure yourself.

    Weak character will harm your development in finances, in relationships, in spiritual growth. You may be good at your job and spend a great deal of time exercising your financial muscle. But if that’s all you work on, eventually you will sprain a marriage, or strain your spiritual growth, or dislocate a relationship with your child.

    (Start humming Cat’s in the Cradle by Harry Chapin)

    No one wants to trust, associate or depend on someone of weak character. People are naturally attracted to those of strong character. The secret of success is character not talent. So…

    What are you doing to strengthen your core? What are you doing to exercise your character?

    Four score and two hundred plus years ago, Ben Franklin wrote about the method he designed and implemented into his life to develop his character. He created a list of 13 traits that he regarded as marking someone of good character. His 13 Virtues were: temperance, order, resolution, frugality, moderation, industry, cleanliness, tranquility, silence, sincerity, justice, chastity, humility. He focused on a single virtue each week and recorded his progress including his mistakes and failings in a journal. Over the course of a year he would spend four weeks total on developing each particular virtue.

    Frank Bettger, in his book How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling, developed his own list of 13 traits that he decided to improve using Ben Franklin’s 200-year-old technique. His own list of 13 virtues were designed to help him become one of the greatest insurance salesmen that ever lived: enthusiasm, order, think in terms of others’ interests, questions, key issue, silence, sincerity, knowledge, belief in others, smile, remember names and faces, service/prospecting, and closing the sale.

    Frank Bettger goes out of his way to mention in the book that while he had met many people that had learned about Ben Franklin’s training regimen to become a person of character, he had never met anyone that had actually applied it to their life. I heartily agreed with Mr. Bettger, thinking to myself, “Isn’t that a shame that so many people would be exposed to such a font of wisdom and choose to ignore it, condemning themselves to a… Oh, wait, I guess I’ve never done it either.” (In my defense I did have my own personal growth plan which may have been discussed in a book I published called Feed The Good Wolf).So all that exposition was just to introduce you to the following bullet points:

    • Your success in any field of life will be determined by your character. Weak character equals weak core equals general weakness everywhere (and greater predisposition to injury).
    • If you are not consciously exercising your character, it is getting soft and pudgy. Just like your mind and body, if you don’t use it, you lose it.
    • Don’t just blindly decide to “get better,” set definite goals and follow a plan. If it helps, make a list of 13 virtues that you would like to improve. Schedule, work your plan, record your progress.
    • If you want to see drastic results, hire a personal trainer.
    • Photos of women in exercise clothing increase web page traffic. This has nothing to do with helping you to develop your character,  I’m just on my “honesty” week.
  • Leaping/Looking ver2.0

    Leaping/Looking ver2.0

    When I launched my original blog site the very first post was entitled Leap Before You Look. The message was that you need to take action, you cannot get paralyzed by the endless process of getting ready to get ready. That being said, welcome to my new site. I am leaping forward, I am not quite ready, and yes there are probably going to be some empty sections of the site, BUT…

    Better to be moving and changing direction than watching from the same vantage point indefinitely.

    I am not suggesting being reckless and endangering yourself and others by leaping through traffic or off cliffs. But in our day to day lives, most of us are not at risk of plunging to our deaths, falling into vats of chemicals, or being pounced on by jaguars. Most of us face only the fear of making a mistake, and that is enough to paralyze us with indecision.

    Live your life like a missile not a bullet. The missile corrects its course as it goes. It is capable of compensating for its environment, changing direction, adapting, overcoming, intercepting. The bullet moves in a straight line. Bullets are obstinate and once they take off in a direction they stop once they hit the first obstacle they come across.

    Recognize that your first decision will almost without question not be the best option, since you are not making it based on experience. As you move forward, your perception and your perspective change and you can see the desired target with better clarity and precision.

    Stop waiting. Just launch.

    This may go against some conventional wisdom, like “measure twice, cut once.” But after all this is a blog not a piece of cedar. This is the 21st century information age. Mistakes can be deleted and edited. Change. Adapt. Grow.

    Welcome to the new 15 Minutes Site.