Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback by David Novak

cultivate that can-do spirit in yourself and in those around you. It’s crucial that this happens before you move on to the nuts and bolts of getting things done, because no one has ever accomplished big things by starting with the attitude, “We could give it a try, but it’s probably not going to happen.”
SEEING SUCCESS
    I wanted to really understand how a person has to think in order to win in any competitive arena, so after touring restaurants in Williamsburg, Virginia, I stopped in to see Bob Rotella at his house. Bob, one of the world’s leading sports psychologists and an expert on peak performance, really drove this point home: “If you think of yourself as able to do something, you probably will do it. If you think of yourself as incapable, you probably won’t.” But believing that you cansucceed is not the same thing as knowing exactly how you’re going to get there. It means having faith that you and your people will find a way. If you don’t already have the knowledge, you can find it. If you don’t already have the resources, you can get them. It means believing that you and your team have the capacity to figure things out. And if you don’t believe that, you need to spend some
time thinking about why you don’t. By fully examining why not, you’ll identify barriers to your goal.
    Are You Focused on the Positive?
Yum! Brands sponsors a young golfer named J. B. Holmes, and in 2009 I was fortunate enough to be able to watch him play in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, as part of the U.S. Ryder Cup team. It was a tough match against the Europeans, and late in the day, Holmes was faced with a pivotal sixty-eight-yard shot over a trap. To my eyes, it looked practically impossible to get the ball anywhere near the pin.
    I watched Holmes closely as he took what seemed like forever to consider his position. He opened and closed his eyes over and over again, almost as though he was in a trance, until he finally took his swing and hit the ball so it landed right next to the pin. He then made his birdie putt, which won him the pivotal match. Afterward, I asked him what he’d been thinking prior to taking the shot, and he replied, “I blocked out everything around me and thought about every good wedge shot I’d ever made. After that, I knew I was ready to hit it.”
    By contrast, early the next year, after playing a fantastic round on the final day of the Houston Open to qualify for a sudden-death playoff against Paul Casey, Holmes began the playoff on the eighteenth hole where three times he approached the ball to hit it and three times he backed away looking uncertain. When he finally hit the ball,
he hooked it into the lake. Again, after the tournament I got a chance to ask Holmes what he’d been thinking, but this time he had a very different answer: “The wind was howling and I knew I had to be careful not to hit the water.” Think water and water is probably what you’ll get.
    Do You Need to Change Your Perspective?
Bob Rotella also told me about Paul Azinger, who happened to be leaving his house as I arrived. If you follow golf, you might recall that Azinger was having one of thebest seasons of his golfing career when he was diagnosed with lymphoma, but that didn’t get in his way for long. After an eight-month battle with the disease, he made a triumphant return to the game.
    That in itself makes for a pretty good story. But it doesn’t end there. After Azinger returned to golf, he grew frustrated by how he was playing, enough so that he turned to Rotella for help.
    Rotella told me that he asked Azinger to bring over some tapes of him playing before he got sick. As they sat together and watched Azinger win tournament after tournament, Rotella turned to him and asked, “What were you thinking when you made all those shots?”
    “Gosh, Bob,” Azinger said, “I was thinking that I was the best player in the world and I was going to kick everyone’s butt.”
    “And what do you think when