The final chapter

I came away from Mike Harris’s session on creating a perfect pitch last week with a copy of his book Find Your Lightbulb. I find that reading books by people who have achieved amazing things is a good way of keeping up motivation levels when you’re working from home and not in day-to-day touch with likeminded people.

And Mike has created a couple of billion pound businesses as well as making innovations in all the industries he’s been involved with, so what he has to say to a home worker is pretty motivating. As Daniel Priestley says, when Mike makes a suggestion about your business, you don’t say ‘Yeah, but…’ and list all the reasons you think you can’t do it. Not if you have any sense anyway.

What Mike says at the beginning of the book is that he was inspired by Tommy Docherty, the manager of Chelsea Football Club, who in the 60s took the team out to celebrate being promoted – before they had actually achieved promotion and when things were looking bleak.

Mike’s team had just a year to launch Firstdirect, the first telephone bank, from scratch, a feat that seemed impossible. So he wrote down what he wanted the bank to look like and what it would achieve – the final chapter in the process of creating it. And then, like Tommy Docherty, he took his team out to celebrate, and guess what…the bank was launched on budget, on time.

We already have a bottle of champagne waiting to celebrate our anniversary this weekend, and I think it could be a good opportunity to celebrate Work from Home Wisdom’s final chapter at the same time.

What would your final chapter say? Mike suggests you make goals that are well beyond what seems attainable at present.