Erik Van Slyke

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Will Smith

I believe in the power of New Year’s resolutions.

New Year’s resolutions represent our desire to be better than we are, to grow, and to improve.  They represent our dreams, our hopes, and our aspirations.

No matter whether they are big goals like changing our life or career direction, or more focused objectives, like losing 5 pounds, New Year’s resolutions represent our desire to create change.  And just like all great change management, they require the ability to create a clear vision of the future and the desire to set out on a path to achieve it.  They require stretching beyond a comfort zone and dedicating ourselves, or our organizations, to continuous improvement.

So, for those of you who, like me, engage in the annual, if not ongoing process of creating personal and organizational change, I offer the above video as inspiration.

Will Smith shares his personal insights and suggests that greatness is much easier to achieve than it seems.  He talks about well-known, enduring, and yet often overlooked principles such as focus, hard work, dedication and above all, belief.  He shares his conviction that we have a spiritual responsibility to make everything we come into contact with better.

I especially like his example of spending 18 months with his brother rebuilding the wall on the front of his father’s business.  “You don’t set out to build a wall,” Smith states.  “You say I’m going to lay this brick as perfectly as a brick can be laid. And you do that every single day and soon you have a wall.”

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins states, “Good is the enemy of great.  And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.”

Maybe if we thought a bit more like Will Smith and made the pursuit of one-brick-at-a-time greatness our spiritual responsibility, change would not be so hard to achieve.

Here’s to a great 2010!