An excerpt from Joe’s Latest book, Extraordinary Results for Life, now available here
THE PATH TO AN UN-ORDINARY JOURNEY BEGINS…
Self-awareness is the first step in becoming un-ordinary. When you can embrace a sense of humility, work to dissolve or minimize your ego, and push yourself outside of your comfort zones, you will then be able to visualize and pursue opportunities to not just be un-ordinary, but to live an extraordinary life! Whether you choose to be an extraordinary leader or just want to achieve extraordinary results in life, the pathway is the same—inward!
And that is what this book is all about!
If you choose to live an extraordinary life, you will discover an everchanging, continual process of striving to step beyond your comfort zone in a multitude of areas as you move through life’s various stages.
We live in an instantaneous “can’t wait, must have it now” culture that tells you this product, app, relationship, television show, vaccine, or government program is going to cure all of your woes and make you happy. We have been conditioned to search for and expect that a single book, event, guru, person, relationship, or YouTube Video will be the magic potion that will instantaneously transform your average, everyday ordinary life into an extraordinary one.
The idea that external factors are your path to nirvana is being pressed into your neuropaths through the constant bombardment of ads. This is why they speak of ads in the number of impressions. The emergence of clickbait and personalized ads in social media has infiltrated every nook, space, and cranny of your tired, over-stimulated brain. You cannot even put gas in your car without being hounded that all you need to be satisfied is a greasy rotisserie hot-dog that has been rolling around in circles on a grill for twelve hours, a Coke, and a smile. Add in binge-watching Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime along with the catastrophic reporting of even a half-inch of snow, and you will understand the uphill battle to un-ordinary yourself from a culture that breeds conformity. Your ability to disconnect, unhook, and disengage from being ordinary is a never-ending, ongoing process that begins the second you are conceived and ends the second you take your last breath.
A PROCESS, NOT A DESTINATION
The truth is that leading and living an extraordinary life doesn’t happen overnight. Consider, for example, lottery winners who are now poor and unhappy. Or read the memoirs of broken Hollywood actors whose lives behind the facades and the fame were filled with various forms of addiction, escapism, and misery.
Living an extraordinary life doesn’t happen instantaneously, and neither is it a place where you arrive.
My life has been a process of constantly unfolding over time. When I was ready, the teacher appeared, the event that transformed me (albeit painful) occurred, and I moved a bit closer to living the life I wanted. I find, as with most things, that the simpler the idea, the more truth it holds. If you are an unhappy, dissatisfied person at home and in life, you will be an unhappy, dissatisfied person in the workplace. Unhappy people wreak havoc in the workplace because they are unwilling to accept 100 percent of the responsibility for the results they are creating in their lives.
Why? Because they don’t or won’t possess the level of self-awareness required to take ownership of their issues. Instead, they deflect and project their problems, inadequacies, and overall unhappiness onto everyone
around them. All this happens because deep down within themselves, they are unhappy. They just don’t or won’t own it.
The fact that most people spend a minimum of 25 percent of their time at work, interacting with more people than they do at home, creates an incredible opportunity to transform the workplace into their very own giant 3D IMAX screen. Here, they can project their garbage on a whole lot more people, issues, and circumstances. In fact, right now, you are probably thinking of the many folks at work who spin endlessly in a circle of toxic gossip, complaining, and misery. Of course, if the work screen isn’t big enough to hold their discontentment, they can project their junk onto the government, churches, other countries, races, and religions. One’s discontentment and/or fear is at the core of every type of “ism”—racism, sexism, fascism, etc.
We all experience unhappy people every single day. Whether it is at home with our immediate and extended families, our friends, at church, on social media, in the news, and everywhere we go, they are there. In the workplace, this discontentment shows up in poor morale, low engagement, diminished productivity, silos, cliques, social and racial bias, turnover, absenteeism, and favoritism. The cost to the bottom-line is staggering. In life, these unhappy people show up in broken relationships, addictions, crime, the cancel culture, videotaping themselves making a disturbance on an airplane and then posting it on social media, etc.
“So, Joe, what kind of book is this?”
It is a business book, a leadership book, a partial autobiography, a drama, a love story, and a mystery. It is part fiction, part non-fiction, and based on and inspired by real-life events, although names may have been changed to protect the guilty and the innocent.
It was written for you if you are willing to look inward and lean in so far that you can never go back.
Why? Because this is how you gain focus and clarity on what you want, where you want to go, and what is preventing you from getting there.
This book is all about you discovering your path out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary for the rest of your life! The end goal is to live a life you can say without any doubt is extraordinary, so you can one day leave this world knowing you achieved more than you ever could have imagined possible!
It is an ongoing process that requires a commitment for life…your life!
Let’s begin…
You can purchase the hardcover, e-book or audio versions here!
