Great Escape Podcast episode 10 - A Little Escape - Tenacity

Little Escape episodes are recorded wherever I am and usually have a lower level of audio finesse.

- [Stuart L. Morris] This is The Great Escape Podcast. Episode 10.
- [Announcer] We are Go for liftoff in T minus 30. All systems are a Go.
- [Stuart] Well actually it's the 11th episode because I started counting from zero which is a bit of a geek joke and now I feel I have to continue it because it's too difficult to change and renumber all the episodes. Last time I was interviewing Michael Cordova who left his corporate job and started Floating Point Center just outside Reading in the UK. And he and his wife Tina have built a business that they run themselves, that they're passionate about, that they enjoy, and that is meeting the needs of their family as they expect the birth of their first child. As something that struck me particularly about Michael's story last time was how he said that he had ended up basically stalking me to the car park of the organization we both worked at at the time, The University of Reading, because he knew that what he wanted was a conversation with me. He knew that that was going to be something that was going to help them move their dream forwards. And it would be easy to blow my own trumpet. So that was all about me. It wasn't. Whoever it was that he needed to speak to isn't the point of what I want to talk about today. The point is he had identified key resources, key people, key knowledge that he needed, and he was prepared to be absolutely tenacious in chasing down those things and speaking to the people he needed to speak to in order to get closer to the resources that he needed to get his hands on. In that case he was hopeful that I could identify a source of funding for their business, or part of their business. And he was correct. He'd done his research. And that conversation that we had in that car park was the beginning of the next phase. In a way I'm very grateful that he sort of stalked me and was the person that made sure that he managed to grab five minutes of conversation with me. Because at the time, in my particular job within The Henley Business School, I was massively busy all the time. It was difficult to find any time in my diary. And there've been times in my life where I've worked out, identified an individual that I really really needed to talk to and just made sure that I was in a place where they were going to be in order to be able to have just that beginning of that conversation with them. And I think that's something that often we lose site of is how important it is to be patient, diligent, and tenacious in hunting down the people, the resources, the skills, that we need in order to get to our goal. And I know I've said this before. If the goal isn't really driving us forwards then is the goal the right goal? Is this the thing that we want it to be. The point being that tenacity, focus, and drive are all an awful lot easier when we know what it is we're trying to achieve. When we know, actually more importantly why it is we're trying to achieve it. It may well be that we haven't yet identified the exact thing that we need to change. But we know that something's got to change. We know why it's got to change. We know why our life has to be different. Because we're pig sick of coping with whatever the situation currently is. Something has got to change. In Michael's case he did everything he could do in order to have a conversation with the person that he believed could get him to the next level. I really want to encourage you today, as you are deciding that life needs to be different to work out who it is, or what it is, that you need to speak to, or get a hold of, or learn in order to move your life forwards. And to be absolutely ruthless. Maybe not ruthless, but absolutely driven about getting that conversation, about learning that skill, about finding that resource so that you can move your dream forwards. And if you're not prepared to put that effort in then either the situation that you're in isn't actually as intolerable as you've been telling people or the new life that you think you've identified isn't sufficiently attractive. If either of those things are true you are not going to make the progress you need to make. Hope you enjoyed that little escape. Those little thoughts on tenacity and drive. If you've enjoyed this or any other episodes of the podcast, please do share it with people you think might benefit from it. Please do Tweet me or Instagram. Both of those @stuartlmorris. You can email me at [email protected] and you can sign up for future episodes at the website https://greatescapepodcast.com. You can also get the podcast on all the usual platforms. iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify. And please subscribe or like, if you've enjoyed this episode and others. And share so that other people can find the podcast more easily. I'd really appreciate that. Talk to you next time. Thank you very much.

The Great Escape titles music was created by Darren Reddick