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WORLD'S LEADING INTERNSHIP PROGRAM

Beth's Hard Work & Determination Speech

HARD WORK AND DETERMINATION

I want to say hello to everyone and welcome.  Some of you I know from last year, and some of you I'm just getting to know.  You will find this summer that the program at University of Dreams is equal parts hard work and good fun.  I will bet that some of you, in the last hour, were feeling tired and really didn't feel like coming tonight.  I will also bet that some of you wanted to get out into New York City, and go out and play tonight instead of being here.  Thank you for coming.  If you are one of these people, you are already practicing what we're going to talk about tonight.

Patrick spoke on Tuesday night about passion.  Vision.  Inspiration.  They are energizing topics, they feel good

Comparatively speaking, hard work and determination is not a sexy topic at all.  Think about it:  Work you fingers to the bone, keep your nose to the grindstone, blood sweat and tears.  It's really hard work to work hard. 

But it's the wild work ethic that's going to take you where you want to go.  I know you have heard the saying that success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.  Perspiration is just another word for a wild work ethic and that's what's going to take you far.

What's the difference between a 3.0 student and a 3.5 student?  It's not always the brains; often it's the WILD WORK ETHIC.  And in the end, is can definitely be a factor in your future if there is competition.  Are employers always going to chose the one with the higher GPA? Maybe not.  But what the higher GPA shows is not that this student is smarter, but that this student chose to work harder.

Let's talk a little about this WILD WORK ETHIC.  America was built on it—the work hard and you'll get ahead idea.  It's couldn't be truer in NYC which is the heartbeat of the land of opportunity.  First, it never sleeps, and you can, if you want, work around the clock.  Second, it is the Mecca for millions of immigrants over the years—the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are right out there in NY harbor.  We're going to sail past them this weekend. But NYC is a place that people from all over the world have come, worked really hard and been able to create a better life for themselves and their families.  You can't do that in a lot of other countries.  That is one of the things that makes this country great, and this city great, is the idea of upward mobility.  If you work hard, you can get ahead. 

Basically there are two taxi shifts:  5am to 5pm, and 5pm to 5am.   I always talk to the driver, I always ask them where they are from and what brought them here.  Invariably, you hear that they are here for an education or for opportunity for themselves or for their families.  And because of this, they are willing to work 12 hour shifts, driving a taxi.

Kemmons Wilson, the founder of the Holiday Inn hotel chain was quoted as saying that the secret to his success was to work hard only half a day every day.  Whether it was the first 12 hours or the last 12 hours it didn't matter, but to work half a day every day.

Last year I sold my architecture and construction consulting business, which for 15 years consumed most of my waking time and energy. We worked with architects and contractors to get them permits to build from the city of New York.

Our client list included the likes of Robert DeNiro, Robert Redford, Gianni Versace, Georgio Armani and Nino Cerruti.  Issac Mizrahi, Nicole Fahri, Ferragamo, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada.  ASPCA, Museum of Natural History, 92nd St Y, the MOMA and the Guggenheim. NY Yacht Club, Fresh Air Fund, Harlem Charter Schools, Manhattan Ensemble Theatre.  Tag Heuer, Swatch, Bang and Olufson, Victoria's Secret.  Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, Liv Tyler, Jil Sanders, Paul Tagliabue.

It was high glamour, good money, and I had a lot of power and was extremely well networked in the industry.  All of that was very seductive.  But it was also an enormous amount of hard work under high-pressure deadlines.

And that is exactly why over 15 years, my business grew from me working alone out of my house into a 1.2 million-dollar business with 15 employees and over 6700 projects.  We were reliable, and honest, and did what we said we were going to do.  We returned phone calls and had an earnest work ethic.  We made deadlines, we were polite and friendly, and our work was neat and orderly.  We created systems that could be depended on.  In an industry run by the unions and the Mafia we were a bunch of Girl Scouts.  But it made a reputation for us, and every single day for years and years I fielded cold calls from total strangers who wanted to work with us.

           1.  SEE THE BIG PICTURE:  KNOW YOUR GOALS, WORK BACKWARDS.

I wanted to tell you that I graduated cum laude from Notre Dame in the 6th class of women, with a BA in American Studies.  There were five kids in our family in six years, and since my father was a college professor and an artist, we all put ourselves through college on our own.

After graduation I worked two jobs that summer, and spent a year travelling in Asia.  I spent three months as a bar maid in a pub in Hong Kong, spent 6 weeks in China 14 months after the border opened after the cultural revolution, and then I took the Trans Siberian Railroad for six days and five nights from Beijing to Moscow and then on to Berlin.

The reason I tell you this is that I was now 22 and had two major goals in my life that I had deliberately and intentionally mapped out, committed to, and accomplished:  I had managed to put myself through college, and graduated with honors, and then spent the better part of a year travelling in Asia.

After that I moved to NYC to help open a restaurant.  I worked in the restaurant for about a year, but then—under pressure from my artist father to get a real job—I went to an employment agency and found a job working in multi media presentations for business meetings.  I was making $13,500 plus health benefits, and was the assistant to the director of animation.  I worked there for almost a year, and realized most importantly, that I was bored to tears and that there was no room for me to grow, for a promotion to becoming a producer. 

I was 24 years old and curious to see how big I could grow.  I was in my prime working years, I was chomping at the bit to work hard and get ahead.  I wanted to be tested, and be challenged and I wanted to make something of myself. 

Have you every watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade? You know those big hot air balloons that are two stories tall that they parade down the street?  A really fun thing to do the night before Thanksgiving is to go up to Central Park West near the Museum of Natural History where they pump up those balloons.  First they look like just a puddle of fabric on the ground.  There is no way to know what shape they are going to be.  Well, I felt like a hot air balloon, just a puddle of fabric  on the ground.  But I knew that hard work would pump it up and give it form, inflate it and THEN I could fly. 

It was clear to me I wouldn't be tested in this arena.  I was even more convinced because there was a culture of slackers.  Goofing off until right before the deadline, and then pulling all nighters to get it done at the last moment.  It was always a slap dash job. I knew I didn't want to be like these people.

Serendipity took the next turn, as I met friends for dinner and complained about my work situation and how I needed a new job.  One friend literally reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card.  He said "here, I interviewed for this job today, but am not interested.  Why don't you take it."

I took the card, took the job, and worked with the firm from Thanksgiving to the 4th of July.  It was an architecture and construction consulting firm called Superstructures.  We got architectural plans approved by the Department of Buildings, and then got the permit for the contractor to could build.  I loved the work.  It wasn't a matter of knowing all the answers, but knowing who had the answer you needed, who to ask the questions. I worked for them for about a year, but it was their lack of ethics that made me leave.  I'll tell you more about that later.

So I left, and in October, I started a business with a partner, a structural engineer. Almost right away, work came my way.  I knew the system, I knew the players, and since I was competent and reliable my reputation grew and more work followed. 

Our partnership split up on April Fools Day, about six months later, and suddenly, at 26 years old I was alone on my own and then the hard work really began. I was focused and knew that with hard work and discipline that I could grow the firm.  More than anything I was thrilled at the chance to finally test myself, to grow and to discover who I was by pushing at all of my limits.  I finally had a chance to find out exactly what I was made of.  I could pump up my balloon with my WILD WORK ETHIC and make something for myself.

 Another reason I want to tell you this is that one thing leads to another, and you just don't know what opportunities will knock.  It's been said that good luck happens when hard work and opportunity come together.  I had a BA in American Studies, and after a year travelling, a year in the restaurant business, and a year in media production, I fell into architecture consulting work by accident, but took the opportunity and built myself a successful business.        

2.  WORK WHEN YOU WORK—FOCUS YOUR ENERGY

When you do your homework are you instant messaging your friends, having a snack, walking around, have the TV on, or the radio on?  I used to love to study in the library.  I would work for a little while, and then go up to see who else was there, little socializing out by the copy machine.  What I know now, that I didn't really know then is that I wasn't really working.  I was sort of working.  And if I had totally focused my energy I would be much more effective at my task and done a lot sooner.

I used to tell my employees I was buying 40 hours of their time, and I wanted them to sell me 40 hours of their work.  I wanted a fair bargain.  Then I used to hear that if you could get 50 good minutes out of an employee in an hour, you were doing pretty well.  I didn't like that bargain at all!  I also know that the bigger the organization, the more you can screw around and "look busy" but not actually do any work, because you have to focus on networking and politics.  What I will tell you, is it's the ones who can focus, the ones who will give that 60-minute hour, those are the ones who will rise in the organization.

My advice to you, is to work when you're working.  Focus on your task completely.  This way you can also feel really good about setting boundaries about when you are going to work.  We all know all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a dull girl.  Part of that is because they lack balance, and have a one-track mind.  Also, think about dull, as being a knife.  If it is never sharpened elsewhere, it becomes much less effective.

If you work to exhaustion and then reward yourself, or only take a time out to rest, how will you become recharged?  Recharging is how you become a much more effective thinker, and much more effective worker when you are working. 

Although it is never 100% true, it is true more often than not.  One thing I know for sure about being an employer, is that the students who have completed a four year degree are a much different type of worker than a student who has completed a two year degree, or for that matter just high school.  There was room for both types in my organization, and I definitely needed the high school grads that had great NYC street smarts and spoke Spanish fluently.  They stood on line at the DOB and could get more done in a morning than I ever could in a day.  But what I knew is that these people always had to be directed.  They could not be expected to think for themselves. 

Four year college grads, which all of you will be, will have already endured a four year test, a four year shaping, four years of hard work and determination of juggling schedules, eight semesters of course work eight semesters of final exams.  That is no easy feat.  And it is excellent training for the work world.  My office was always under intense deadlines.  We had 150 projects in various states of approval and three full time project managers.  Clients would consistently underestimate the amount of time it would take to get a project approved and a permit issued.  It generally took two weeks in the system, unless it was a LPC in which case it took about six.  But if it was a change of use and a complicated project, it could take a minimum of three months and sometimes over a year.  Project managers generally only lasted in the office about two years.  One guy said to me right before he left, that it was like always like finals week, but never actually finishing finals.

What I came to learn is that hard work is important, but it is another thing to focus your energy over a long period of time.  That takes determination and discipline.  But with hard work and discipline you can move mountains.

1.      Hard work and Discipline are about DRIVE.  Motivating Drive to continue to apply energy to the problem, the situation, and the goal. 

2.      Huge mountain to climb, marathon to run.  Think about doing it, the goal is daunting.  It all happens that proverbial one step at a time, but you have to keep taking the steps.  It's daunting.  Don't always want to do the work, it's not always fun, its not always easy and energizing.  Commit commit commit.  Coal under pressure equals diamonds.

3.      Focus your energy.  Sometimes against your wishes, but you can see the goal, know the big picture.  Raising kids.  Don't play 6 hours of golf on the weekends.  Saturdays at T ball instead.  Vacations in Disney not Paris.  Party vs. study.

4.      Pace yourself, stick with it. Project takes 7 hours to get 1/3 of the way through. Need to budget your time/energy. Stick with it.

5.      Chip away at it. Diligent application of energy.  Memorize 1 new word a day, over 350 new words in your vocabulary.  While you are on the subway train. Constantly put yourself out there, constantly determined to make it work.

6.      Commit to putting one foot in front of the other.  Wm of Orange:  You don't need to succeed to persevere.  It's challenging, frustrating, irritating, and annoying.  It's work you don't always want to do.  You exert your efforts almost against your will.  It is a form of self-control, and self-mastery.

3.     WORK SMARTER: ATTAINING MASTERY:

Think about a guy who carries bricks up six flights of steps all day long.  I could watch that guy all day long and think "what a hard worker."  But what if there was a wheelbarrow and an elevator?  That guy would still be a hardworker, but not a very smart worker.

As the years progressed, employees were hired, work was delegated and the firm grew in size.  Technology changed the way we did business, the Building Department procedures continued to evolve, and the New York City laws were often amended.  I lived in a permanent state of flux; developing new ways of efficiently processing projects through the system at the Building Department and adapting our organization to best accomplish this end.  A problem could only be solved for the moment.  Senses were always tuned to detect a shift, and we were steadily morphing to accommodate the changes. It was all a perpetually moving target.  The company is managed differently if there are 3 people on staff, or 6, or 9 or 12.  It also depended on who the workers on staff were, how much work they could handle, what their strengths were.  It was incredibly hard work to constantly readjust to fine tune the machine.

1.       As you get into it, you get better, smarter, and more efficient at it.  But you have to put the work in to figure it out—emotionally, intuitively, and logically.  You only get better at dealing with the problem if you wrestle with it.

2.      Develop new habits.  You develop the habits and they make you what you are.  As you gain mastery, you can figure out newer and better ways to do things.  As you gain experience.  But it is only as you put in the new work, develop the "muscle."  Steven Covey seven habits of highly effective people.

3.      As you gain Mastery, it spills over into other phases of your life (budgets/ballet)

For me it was almost like having two full time jobs.  One job was acting as the president and CEO leading an organization.  The other was as the chief strategist determining efficient, creative solutions for all of the construction projects in the office, most of that were behind schedule and under intense time constraints.

Working harder doesn't always get you furthest.  There is also a need for working smarter.  For me I had to educate before I could delegate.  It meant hiring people who were smarter than I am.  Give people a task, and send them off to do it their way.  I didn't just dump the task on them; I had to check in with them on a regular basis.  Let them know what I expected and when it was expected.  

Year 2:  hired first employee and bought my apartment
Year 3:  3 employees moved to an office
Year 7: ready to see because it was consuming me
Year 8  Hired a partner
Year 10 changed the name, hired Brian
Year 13/14: 5/7 plan
Year 15:  sold

1.     MAINTAIN YOUR ETHICS:

Parts of the construction business in NYC are controlled by the Mafia.  At the time, steel, concrete and garbage are all mob controlled.  Elevators, elevators too.  Not only the elevators that serve construction sites, but also every elevator in every building in NYC.  I was from out of town.  I didn't have a cousin named Vinny.  I had no idea how to deal with these people, except to steer clear.  It was the Sopranos, ten years before they ever showed up on TV. 

And then there was the payola, the bribes so approvals and sign offs would happen quickly, and so anything incomplete or improperly done would be overlooked.  I was in the doghouse at work when I refused to take a briefcase full of 20 dollar bills and leave it in the second floor bathroom of a job site.  As part of my job I was expected to forge signatures, if by accident one was missing from a group of papers.  I was expected to find and bury documents in the public record if they were contrary to the case we were building although there was a sign on the wall:  Class E felony for tampering with city records, or removing them from the premises.  Everybody did it. 

It all made me sick to my stomach.  They were asking me to compromise all that I knew to be true and real and the way I knew from my heart to treat other people and therefore how to do business.  I really loved the industry, but I couldn't play it by their rules.  And that's what really drove me to start my own business.

You also need to be clear about your goals and make sure that they remain ethical and that you never end up with the end justifying the means.  Corporate America is a sad state of affairs right now—Enron, and Worldcom, Imclone and Martha Stewart.  What about all those unethical executives who pumped up the stock prices to inflate their own bonuses?  Or the unethical stock analysts who falsely recommended stocks to help their companies gain investment banking business or to pump up their own compensation?  The most important thing that measures your hard work and discipline is your reliability and sterling reputation, not just your compensation.

It was also one of the reasons I ended up leaving the industry and selling my business.  I found that little by little on the edges, my ethics were being eroded.  I was one of the only firms in the industry that were not corrupt, and I could often see how it was easier to manipulate a situation than deal with the full fall out of the project gone bad, as construction projects often do.  We were surrounded by a sea of corruption and bribery, and unethical behavior and I knew that I had had enough.  As Patrick mentioned on Tuesday, I was very successful, but I was not very fulfilled.

Protect and build your reputation, rather than just being fearful of the consequences if you so something and are caught.  We became reliable in the industry, and I carefully trained my employees, and cared that things were done correctly—both in house and in the field.  A reputation can take years to build and one day to wreck.  And also, you are not always tested and judged by how well you handle things when they go right, but how will you recover and stabilize a situation when it goes badly.  Things will go badly, especially in the construction business.  And we had a trustworthy and reliable reputation, and our business capabilities were spread by word of mouth.

I set up the business the way I knew how to run my life.  I did it from my heart.  They say a fish stinks from the head, but the opposite also holds true.

Hard Work is not just about your job:

Career:  both your work and your "cosmic job description."  Electrician who coaches his son's little league.  Housewife who runs a Girl Scout Troop.  Supermarket clerk who commits to the community garden.

 Physical body: 

a.      Healthy, trim toned.  For health as well as for looking good

b.      diets—losing weight or eating healthy

c.      physical training,

Team sports

d.      Dance (ballet), gymnastics, and martial arts.  Aikido 7 years of consistent training for black belt. 

e.      Music:  sight reading, improv, playing alone or with a group.  Skill acquisition as well as connecting the muse to the motor skill

f.       Craftsmanship: woodworking, cooking, calligraphy, mastery of a computer program.

Creativity, Intuition and imagination: 

a. Tapping into the source of your creativity, where the ideas come from.  Open the telephone line to your subconscious where all those idea lurk, and bring them out.

b. the arts.  Learning to draw, skill like any other.  Talents and skills.  Writing fiction, composing music, learning to paint.  Learned that it is not just about the technical aspects of the grammar and the benefits of a large vocabulary at your fingertips. 

c. Problem solving:  work, play, family, travel—daily life in general

Communication: 

a.      increasing your vocabulary. 

b.      Foreign language acquisition.

c.      Being willing to shed your masks, the safe facades we all hide behind and be willing to expose your authentic self.  Speaking from the heart. 

Relationships:  Lovers, friends, Families.  Everybody's family has interesting relationships that change over the years as people change over the years.  Commitments to raising children.  Commitments to a spouse and keeping the relationship alive over the years.  Forgiving.  Sharing.  Listening.  Anything by committee:  board of directors, PTA.

Spirituality: Daily Spiritual Practice.  Weekly community service.

Ask the students to go find someone in the room they don't know very well or at all, and to have them exchange stories of hard work.  Give them five minutes.  When they are finished, ask them to share some of the awesome stories they have heard.

Hard work is not just about results:

What's so great about hard work?  It's not just the results.  The results are important, because it's about focusing your energy and attaining your goals.  But it is also about building self-confidence and pride.  There can be great joy in attaining mastery, and pride in craftsmanship or developing talents.  But most importantly, it allows for self-determination.  You can become whatever you want in your life; you can get anything you want in your life if you apply yourself with 90% perspiration.  You are the author of your own life.

Thank you.