Best of the Maxwell Leadership Podcast 2024

Mark Cole:
Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays, everyone. Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Podcast. I’m Mark Cole and as always, it’s an honor to connect with each of you every year. Our team loves to do something just a little extra special for you during the Christmas season. So this year we’ve gathered some of your favorite lessons from John Maxwell on the podcast in 2024, and we’ve put them together and brought them here just for you. As we revisit these timeless principles, I encourage you to reflect on this past year. Take a moment, recognize the growth you’ve experienced and the lessons you’ve embraced.

Mark Cole:
We’d love to hear how this podcast has supported your journey. So leave us a comment. Give us a review. Let us celebrate your progress together. On behalf of our entire podcast team, thank you for allowing us to be a part of your leadership journey in 2024. We cannot wait to step into a new year of growth and a new year of impact with you. To watch this episode on YouTube or to download the bonus resource, head over to maxwellpodcast.com/BestOf2024 so here he is, our friend, your friend, John C. Maxwell.

John Maxwell:
Let’s talk about the 10 secrets to success and what successful people know and do. This is how you get to your dreams right here. Number one, how you think is everything. How you think is everything. Always be positive. Think success, not failure, and beware of a negative environment. Investors Business Daily realize if you’re going to be successful, you’re going to reach your dream. Probably the first thing you have to do is work on your own thinking how you think.

John Maxwell:
They said you’re going to have to think positive. You’re going to have to think success, not failure. Now ask yourself, is most of my thinking positive or is it negative? Is most of my thinking success oriented.

John Maxwell:
Or is it failure oriented?

John Maxwell:
What kind of an environment am I around not only in the working place, but what kind of environment I’m around when I’m out of the working place? Is it a negative or is it a positive environment? Bob Rotella, who’s a sports psychologist, said, I tell people that if you don’t want to get into positive thinking, that’s okay. Just eliminate all the negative thoughts from your mind and whatever is left will be fine. So under the 10 secrets to success that successful people know and do, number one is how you think is everything. Number two. Number two, decide upon your true dreams and goals and write down your specific goals and develop a plan to reach them. Tom Hopkins says that goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement Perhaps you’ve read the book Live youe Dreams by Les Brown. In that book, Live youe Dreams, Les suggests four questions that you need to ask yourself to boost your self approval. And the four questions are, what are your gifts? In other words, what do you do? Well, if you have good health, acknowledge it.

John Maxwell:
Be thankful. If your family and your friends love you. Okay, what are your gifts? Okay, you do those. First, number two, what are the five things that you like about yourself? Okay, so what you do is you sit down and say, okay, here are some things I do that I like about myself. He’s talking about lifting your and boosting your self approval and image. Number three, what people make you feel special when you’re around them? What people will lift you up and you know, you just know that if you get around them, you’re gonna be encouraged, you’re gonna be strengthened by them. And the fourth question that Les has in his book Live your Dreams is what moment of personal triumph do you remember? In other words, he said, take some time and think about what are moments of your personal triumph. What were some things that you did that when you did them, you look back and say, boy, that was an important time in life.

John Maxwell:
Let me give you something that I have found to be helpful to me, that might be helpful to you. Let’s at least give it a shot. Okay, here’s what I would encourage you to do. Sit down with a legal pad and, and write down. And I think 10 is a good number. It’s not a magic number. I just think it’s a good number. Sit down and write down 10 things that in your lifetime when you did these or accomplished these things, you felt real good about yourself, in other words.

John Maxwell:
And some of them may be very significant to you, some of them may be almost frivolous to you, but I would encourage you go back and pull out of your life. I did this, by the way. I did this as I was preparing this lesson. And I was very amazed at some of the things that I thought about that I hadn’t thought about for a long time. Things that all of a sudden I thought, wow, this is why I today have a good self image. I thought of the fact that when I was a sophomore in high school, I became captain of the basketball team. And I remember thinking, wow, I’m pretty young to be a captain of the team. I thought about the time when I was in fifth grade that I was elected by my classmates to.

John Maxwell:
We were studying how the court system worked. And so our fifth grade teacher said that we would elect a judge. And I was elected judge of the fifth grade class. And I remember, I thought, wow, I like being judge of this class. You know, I like going out on the playground and being bought off with pretzels. But anyway, what I want to encourage you to do is I want to encourage you to go back and just 10, I think, is a good number. Go back through your life and say, how did I feel at that moment? Now, here’s what makes that significant. It not only tells you a lot about your self image and your journey, but here’s the question that I would really have you to look at after you list those 10 things.

John Maxwell:
How many of those things happened a long time ago and how many of those things happened recently? What I have found is that if several of these things happened a long time ago, that gave you the foundation for a good self image. But if some of those things happened recently, that has given you a lot of motivational fuel for whatever you’re doing in your life. And it’s not either or truthfully, hopefully you have a balance of both. You have that which is foundational and you have that which is what I call motivational. But just look at your life, and out of that, you kind of decide who you are, how you feel about yourself, what are your dreams, what are your goals? Okay. Okay. The third secret to success. For those who not only dared to have a dream, but then made that dream become a reality in their own life, Success secret number three, Take action.

John Maxwell:
Goals are nothing without action. Don’t be afraid to get started now. Just do it. And I have some great quotes. Dreams don’t work unless you do. It is only our deeds that reveal who we are. Chesterton said, I don’t believe in faith that falls on men however they act. But I do believe in faith that falls on them unless they act.

John Maxwell:
Paul Bear Bryant, the great coach at Alabama for many, many years, had a sign in his locker room that said, cause something to happen. In other words, he understood the value of action. If you’re gonna realize your dream, remember, the secret of your dreams is what you do today, not what you do tomorrow. It’s not where you’re gonna go, it’s where you are. Take action. Number four, in realizing your dream and these success principles these successful people know and do in their life, number four is never stop learning. Never stop learning. You may have to go back to school, you may have to read some books.

John Maxwell:
You got to get some training. You got to go acquire skills, but never stop learning. Shula and Blanchard in That wonderful book they did together said, learning is defined as a change in behavior. You haven’t learned a thing until you can take action and until you can use it. And there are two ways that you and I learn. We learn either through experience, in other words, learning by our own mistakes and we’ve done that, or through wisdom, which is learning through the mistakes of others. And it’s more fun to learn through the mistakes of others, isn’t it? Huh? But we do both. And Bruce Springsteen said, a time comes when you need to stop waiting for the man you want to become and start being the man you want to be.

John Maxwell:
Number five. The fifth principle of success, to realize your dreams is to be persistent and work hard. We have to realize that success is a marathon, not a sprint, and that we’re never to give up. I love what William Gladstone said. If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock. Or Doby Gillis. Only old people remember Doby Gillis show. I won’t do a poll here because it’s going to embarrass me.

John Maxwell:
Because I remember Dobie Gillis. He said, I don’t have anything against work. I just figure, why deprive somebody who really loves it, huh? Now famous people’s 90% sweat. Plato wrote the first sentence of his famous Republic nine different ways before he was satisfied. Cicero practiced speaking before friends every day for 30 years to perfect his elocution. Noah Webster labored 36 years writing his dictionary, crossing the Atlantic twice together. Material. Milton rose at 4am every day in order to have enough hours for paradise lost.

John Maxwell:
Gibbons spent 26 years on his decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And Bryan rewrote one of his poetic masterpieces 99 times before publication and became a classic. These are just examples of hard work and persistence. Bob Ireland’s a great example. Bob Ireland crossed the finish line on Thursday, November 6, 1986 at the New York City’s Marathon. It was 19,413th. He was the final finisher, the first person to run a marathon with his arms instead of his legs. Bob was a 40 year old Californian whose leg was blown off in Vietnam 17 years before.

John Maxwell:
In 1986, he recorded the slowest time in Marathon’s history. 4 days, 2 hours and 48 minutes 17 seconds. When he asked why he ran the race, he gave these three reasons. To show he was a born again Christian. To test his conditioning and to promote physical fitness to others. And then he said, success is not based on where you start, it’s where you finished. And I finished. Persistence, hard work.

John Maxwell:
I can is more important than iq. The path from ordinary to the extraordinary is continual improvement. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to daily choose to improve. Many people realize that I am continually in a personal growth plan. I have been since 1973. And many years ago, I heard a wonderful lesson on growth. I have some wonderful friends in the Kansas City area, Vern and Charlene Armitage. Vern and Charlene are terrific people.

John Maxwell:
What Charlene taught was this. Life’s goals are reached by setting annual goals. And annual goals are reached by setting daily goals. And daily goals are reached by doing things which may be uncomfortable at first but eventually will become habits. And habits are powerful things. Habits turn actions into attitudes and attitudes into lifestyles. So for many years now, I’ve set an intellectual goal, I’ve set a physical goal, I’ve set a spiritual goal, and I’ve set a relational goal. Now, that’s simple, isn’t it? But it’s a wonderful model.

John Maxwell:
It may not be the model that you want to use, but the question I’m asking you is, are you improving every day? Have you made the decision and have you developed a discipline in which every day you say, I’m improving, I’m improving physically, I’m improving hopefully mentally, I’m hopefully improving relationally. What’s your gauge? How do you keep growing? How do you keep improving? So let me give you some improvement insights. Number one, don’t be afraid to admit you were wrong. And the reason that you and I should not be afraid to admit that we were wrong is it proves you’re wiser today than you were yesterday. Isn’t that great? Huh? Boy, if you never admit you’re wrong, you’re saying, I’m not growing, I’m not wiser. So don’t be afraid. Just admit you’re wrong. Number two, you will never change your life until you change something that you do daily.

John Maxwell:
I love that statement. I could camp there for the next 20 minutes. Because you cannot change your life until you change something daily. The change in your life is determined about the change that you make today. Again, the secret of your success and my success is discovered in our daily agenda. Number three, you cannot manage what you cannot measure. So what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to identify the areas that growth is essential to your success, and you have to be able to measure them. Just a simple example.

John Maxwell:
But, you know, we come up to New Year’s, New Year’s resolutions. Somebody will Say something like, I’m going to read more this year than I read last year. Okay, that’s wonderful, but it’s not the way to do it. If you really want to improve, don’t say you’re going to read more next year than you did this year. Say, every day I’m going to read two chapters of a book this year. Now you see what I’ve done. I’ve got your intentions measured now. And every day you gauge your intentions by did I read two chapters in a book? Or did I read one chapter? Or did I read two books a month? Or did I read one book a month? Okay.

John Maxwell:
In other words, take your intentions and take your goals and make them measurable. Number four, set realistic expectations for your improvement in. McGregor says, I work on the same principle as people who train horses. You start with low fences, easily achieve goals and you work up. It is important in management never to ask people to try to accomplish goals they can’t accept. What can you tackle in a day? Because whatever you tackle today, you need to tackle tomorrow and the next day. So you gotta get it down there because that’s where the compounding always comes in. Number five, Continual change is essential for continual improvement.

John Maxwell:
They go together. One of the great paradoxes of success, the things. Oh, this is true. The things which got you there are seldom the things which keep you there.

John Maxwell:
Wow.

John Maxwell:
Continual change is essential for continual improvement. Number six. Motivation gets you started. Habits keep you going. Number seven, another improvement, insight. We overestimate what we can do in a month and we underestimate what we can do in a year. That’s just true. We are infatuated with big and fast.

John Maxwell:
Boy, if I can just get there quicker, you know, if you got a shortcut, how big is it going to be? Big and fast. Number eight, focus. William James, noted psychologist, said, if you would be rich, you will be rich. And if you would be good, you will be good. And if you would be learned, you will be learned. But wish for one thing exclusively and don’t at the same time wish for a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly. Focus is what he say. I love this statement.

John Maxwell:
I said one time my goal was to retire when I reached 40. I have been partly successful. I reached 40. Lily Tomlin One time said, I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific. Another improvement, insight. Number nine. Number nine, spend 80% of your time working on your strengths. And you’ve heard me in conferences say before, people don’t pay for average.

John Maxwell:
Gotta work on your strengths. Gotta Stay where your gifts and your abilities are. If you work on something that is a weakness, I can promise you it’s just not gonna get very good. It just really isn’t. From a 1 to a 10, if you’re a 3, you may work hard and get up to 4, you may be able to get up to 5, but you’re still average. You work on your strengths. Spend 80% of your time working on your strengths. Now, I’m talking about skills, by the way.

John Maxwell:
I’m talking about skills. There are two weak areas that will hurt you and that you must work on. One is self discipline, which is what we’re really talking about in this lesson. And number two is attitude. You see, if you have all the skills and strengths of the world, but you lack self discipline or you have a bad attitude, you will literally sabotage yourself. Insight number 10 is what I am doing today getting me closer to my goal tomorrow.

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John Maxwell:
And I was in my 20s when I heard Zig Ziglar walk across that stage in that good old Southern draw of his and say, if you’ll help other people get what they want, you’ll get everything in life that you want. You see, that was a life changing day for me because up to that stage as a young leader, I was getting everybody to help me get what I wanted, get on my train, buy into my vision. That day I said, oops, I’ve been doing it wrong.

John Maxwell:
Instead of trying to get people interested.

John Maxwell:
In me, I’m going to become interested in them and trying to get people to help me. I’m going to help them. And I found that Zig was right, because Zig was basically introducing that day when he said, if you’ll help other people get what they want, you’ll get.

John Maxwell:
Everything you need and want in your life.

John Maxwell:
He was teaching Servant leadership.

John Maxwell:
And I’m going to give you some.

John Maxwell:
Guidelines for serving people that I have myself. Number one, I don’t rely on my position or title. In other words, I don’t use my position or title to tell people they ought to serve me that, you know, I’m over you. You know, I’m the founder of this company. You know what, I’m the head here, so I never use that. In fact, every day I work hard to earn the respect of others. Every day. I don’t rely on what I’ve done in the past.

John Maxwell:
I don’t rely on my past successes. I don’t rely on my position. I just don’t allow that to make me feel that people should serve me instead of me serving them. Number two, I choose to believe in people and their potential. And because I choose to believe in people and their potential, the more that I believe in them, the more I want to serve them.

John Maxwell:
One of the things you’re going to.

John Maxwell:
Find is there’s a relationship between how much you serve a person and how much you believe in that person. Number three, I try to see things from the perspective of others. That’s why I constantly ask questions. Because I found out that knowing how other people think helps me to serve those people in a better way.

John Maxwell:
Four.

John Maxwell:
I work to create an environment of encouragement. I think encouragement is oxygen for the soul. And I think people thrive good in an encouraging, uplifting environment and culture. And number five, I measure my success by how much I add value to others. In fact, the success of others becomes my success.

John Maxwell:
And so let me just connect that.

John Maxwell:
With you that are listening to my teaching today. I evaluate how successful I am today in my teaching and sharing by how much this will help you improve your life.

John Maxwell:
In other words, if you see me.

John Maxwell:
A year from now and say, boy, John, that day I sat with you, you taught me some principles that just helped me become a better leader, better person, a better person in my family, better person in my community, better person in my company. Then I’m going to feel that I was very successful. Your success is my success. Now, that hasn’t always been true. I, for many years, was a ladder climber. I was successful and I was producing and I was doing great things and it was really working out really well for me. But I made a switch about 15 years ago and I became instead of a ladder climber, I became a ladder builder. And what I do now is I build ladders for other people to be successful.

John Maxwell:
And I’m very happy with that because I don’t mean this unkindly or I certainly don’t want to mean it in a wrong spirited way or an arrogant way. I’ve been very successful and what I found is there’s something more exciting than my personal success and that is helping other people be successful.

John Maxwell:
Followers. Math is addition and leaders. Math is multiplication. When we start working with followers, we add. When we start working with leaders, we multiply. In the earlier part of my life, I poured myself into people to get followers. Then one day it occurred to me that if I would work as hard to develop leaders, those leaders could go out and always influence followers. So that if I would work on leaders, leaders would find not only other leaders, but they would find other followers.

John Maxwell:
So let’s talk today about how do you develop people? Let’s say that you get them on your team. You pick somebody with potential. What are you going to do with them when you bring them on your team? Value process more than events. Now, what I have found is most people, they value events more than process. And the reason why is events are fun. Events is where you bring people together. Events are where there’s a lot of inspiration. Now what I find is people, they get carried away with the events.

John Maxwell:
Nothing wrong with events. By the way. Here’s the way this works for your notes. Events are good for decisions. Process is good for development. I am not here teaching you either or on this. It’s both ends. Does that make sense? You bring people to events, they make decisions.

John Maxwell:
But after they make decisions, what are we going to do with it? That’s where the development comes in. You see, again, we overestimate what we can do in a day. We underestimate what we can do in a year. We’ve got to look at ourselves and say, okay, what do I see this person becoming six months, a year, a year and a half down the road? Now, here’s another one of the laws in my book called the Law of Process. The Law of Process is very simple. The Law of Process says leaders develop daily, not in a day. You’ve never seen a leader develop in a day. You’ve never seen a leader become a leader at an event.

John Maxwell:
You, you don’t become a leader at an event. Now you may go to an event where you have within you a passion stirred up to become a leader. So then how do you develop leaders? You don’t develop leaders with a microwave. You develop leaders with a crock pot. You crockpot your leaders. I didn’t say crackpot. Although there’s a little bit of that going on, too. You crock pot leaders, they’ve got to simmer.

John Maxwell:
They’ve got to be seasoned. They have to marinate. It takes time. You can grow weeds in just a few days, but if you grow an oak tree, it takes years. Please appreciate the process. When I pastored in San Diego, my whole commitment was to raise up leaders. So if you would have been privileged at any time to come to that church, you would have seen a church of thousands of people, but you would have seen a church literally with hundreds of leaders. We’d have 3,500, 3,600 people on average Sunday come to that church in attendance.

John Maxwell:
But we had over 700 leaders, 20% of the people in that congregation. Now, and when I say leaders, let me explain to you what I mean by leaders. It took us four years to develop a leader. The first year, I put them on what I call my farm team. For me, the farm team, you know, where I’m talking about how you size up a person’s potential. I had to get them around me. So what I would do is when we’d spot somebody that looked like they might be an Eaglet, we would say, hey, why don’t you come and join me for a year and be on my prayer team? And I would take them away, and I would take them to a retreat, and I’d talk to them about the things of my heart and what I wanted to see happen in that congregation. I would watch for those that would migrate to me.

John Maxwell:
I would watch for those who would begin to have the same dream and the. The same heart and the same feel for things that I had. And after having them on my farm team for a year, if I thought that they had that kind of potential, I’d say, now I want you to come on my board for three years. At the end of the third year, you go off the board. And so on. The first year, I would teach them the basics of leadership. The second year, we would practice the basics of leadership. The third year, I would have them pass on the basics of leadership to someone else that was an eaglet in the congregation.

John Maxwell:
And by the end of the fourth year, the third year, being on the board after three years of leadership training, in the last session we had together before they went off, and I always brought a third on and a third off every year, a third of new board members, third off. That’s how I kept training all the time. And at the end of their third year, the last thing we did before we said goodbye to the one third that had. Now, for Four years been trained as a leader is. We asked them, okay, now that you’re going off the board, what will be your leadership responsibility? They would tell us what they’re going to do as far as a leadership responsibility. They would tell us who they were going to bring on the board to replace them. In fact, when we began to develop them in one on one training, before I ever sat down and said I’m going to pour my life into you, we always asked a question. What the question was, before I tell you I’m going to pour my life into you, you have to answer this question.

John Maxwell:
When I’m done pouring my life into you, will you find somebody to pour your life into? And if they said they would not find someone else? We never trained them. We didn’t want any training, any development to go to a dead end street. And then we would spot these potential leaders. And as I was raising up good leaders around me, I had them start training and start teaching other leaders. Now you’ve got to understand this system. If you came down to Atlanta, Georgia and you came down and saw what we had in this organization, now you gotta understand we only have about 120 employees, but you ought to see that place. All 120 are on a growth plan. They get together every month and we teach a growth lesson.

John Maxwell:
And then we get into small groups and we talk about how we’re going to apply that growth to their life. And then I have people that have been very good leaders over the years. They now mentor one on one and in groups of two and three other groups. And then I have the Dan Rylands and the Tim Elmores that specifically take seven at a time per year through leadership development. Now the reason I’ve got an incredible passion for this because I know what happens once you really commit to developing leaders. A little bit earlier, Skip was talking in the introductions about that I was always growing and I thought to myself, oh, I wish, I wish I had my small suitcase down here. Because if I’d have my small suitcase down here, if you went into the back flap of that suitcase, you would find five portable books. These are these quote books that you can get.

John Maxwell:
I’ve got several of my own, but you’ve seen them in Hallmark, just quote books, you’d find five of them. Do you know what I’ll do tomorrow morning when I get on that plane at 5:30, I’ve got to go to Detroit and then I go from Detroit to Atlanta. I’ll take those five quote books and I’ll go through every one of them and I’ll mark the good quotes and I’ll pull them out of the portable, throw the rest of the book away. By the time the wheels of that plane Touch Atlanta at 9:05 tomorrow morning, I will have pulled out of those five books anywhere from 100 to 140 outstanding quotes that I will have already marked and I’ll put it in Linda’s folder. And by 10:30 tomorrow morning in my own home office on the credenza behind me in the place that I have Linda’s pile of stuff, I’ll put those 120 to 140 quotes. In the next couple days they’ll all be filed category wise. I do it every day. You keep learning.

John Maxwell:
You keep growing. You take what you learn and you pass it on. You see when you discover the joy of learning and then you discover the joy of sharing what you’ve learned and then you discover the joy of helping the person that you share what you learn, turn around and share what you shared with them, with someone else that they have just learned. All of a sudden you develop this awesome synergy, this high morale in your organization until people can hardly wait to be around you because they know that you’ve got something fresh and new and different that’s going to help them in their life. Think about it, folks. Think about it. Are there not some people? You haven’t seen them for 20 years, but if you saw them tomorrow, they would have nothing new to say. You would just say, you know, they’re still in the same place, singing the same song.

John Maxwell:
We don’t want to be that kind of people. If we’re going to develop people, we have to understand the value of the process.

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