WHY NOT ME?

You Can Be or Do Anything---ANYTHING!
Suck It Up, Princess and Get Busy Making It Happen!

I've just gotten back from an annual guy's weekend in mountains of extreme western North Carolina. For 23 years we've been getting together in some form to golf, hike, eat, drink, laugh and attend the Gathering of the Clans and Scottish Games on Grandfather Mt.

We had a wonderful time playing golf (shot a good round despite the strained back muscles--*never accept last minute swing tips from your scratch golfer friend), relaxing and drinking on the deck of a restaurant looking out over 40 miles of mountains and deep, curving valleys, and hiking up to Table Rock (despite the five-foot-long Rattlesnake in the path on the way down that caused Pat Houghton to wet his shorts.) But, it was on the long, lonely drive down there that I experienced a great "Fred Selfe moment."

Somewhere along the way I picked up the mobile phone and returned a call from Dr. Charles Sydnor. He's been a mentor since college and I always enjoy the chance to talk with him--about Nazis (a subject on which he is an expert) or football or business or just to catch up on life. Dr. Syndor (he KEEPS asking me call him Charlie, but I simply cannot do it, just as I cannot call my friend Virgil Goode anything other than "Congressman Goode") recently retired as CEO of Central Va. Educational Television and is back helping Emory and Henry and the new president, Dr. Reichard, with major development projects like Fred Selfe Stadium and the Center for the Arts. We talked so intently about the college's new sports complex and raising money for the $5 million project that I almost missed the first chapter of a new book on CD I'd purchased for the trip--Donny Deutsch's Often Wrong, Never in Doubt.

I've been watching Donny's show, The Big Idea (weeknights 10pm CNBC), for a few months now and really enjoy it. Could be Donny's style: refreshing, open, caution-to-the-wind, friendly and relaxed. Or perhaps it's the jeans, blazer and open collar dress shirt look, or the tough Queens, NY dialect, or the way he easily goes from politics to economics to pop culture that makes the show attractive to me. Whatever it is made me pick up the book on CD and now I had to go back and start it again. And I'm glad I did.

The "Fred Selfe moment" came when Donny described his life philosophy that took him from Van Buren High School to his multi-million dollar advertising agency and the CNBC show. He calls it: "Why not me?" It is the process of being driven by looking around at what you want, then converting that passive "wanting" into a true sense of ownership of the "want." Hey that guy has a successful business and I'm smarter, cooler, a better salesman, a better leader, possess a bigger set of cajones--why not me? The answer has to be I CAN! Ninety-nine percent of people are not born "great"--they work at it. They pull themselves up from the coalfields of Virginia or out of the streets of Brooklyn with the mindset that they can be or do anything. If you dream of being the CEO of a major company, take the steps to get there. If you want to be president of the U.S. know--really KNOW--that you CAN be that and get to work making it happen.

Once you own the "WHY NOT ME?"--change your thinking to I CAN BE/DO ANYTHING anyone else can be/do, you just have to figure out how to go about it. Simple.

That's really what The Big Idea is all about about probably why I like it so much. One night it's Bill Gates, the next night it's a mom, Alicia Shaffer, who turned her need for a better, more fashionable way to carry her baby into a million dollar product, the Peanut Shell sling.

If your sitting there with a big idea, or just looking at your mediocre company and wondering why a competitor is getting all the business or media attention, ask yourself "Why not me?" --I can do that--then taking the steps to make it happen. The only thing separating you from that success is the decision to BE that thing.