But I think it’s important to look at the fuller context of this speech which I’ll show with some select quotations and my own comments as they relate to personal development.  Roosevelt addressed an educated French audience and his topic was about the kind of citizenship that makes a republic strong.

“In the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average women, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional cries which call for heroic virtues.”

Roosevelt knew he was addressing an audience of privileged listeners, and he warns them against an aloof attitude or being out of touch with the concerns of common people.  This is a danger for our “talking head” pundits on tv, but even more so for our CEO’s and leaders of organizations.

“A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities – all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness.”

Next comes the famous quote about the man in the arena:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Beyond this inspirational passage is another part of the speech that never gets quoted, yet I believe it holds the key to the kind of character that Roosevelt praises.  For me, it is the center of gravity of the speech, and it speaks to the personal development and mastery that are necessary for good leadership.  It really paints a picture of what it takes to develop top talent.

“There is need of a sound body, and even more of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character – the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self restraint, self mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution – these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside.”

Roosevelt goes on to emphasize the need of a strong moral sense, the inner compass that must guide the true leader:

“Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are merely used for that man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly.”

Finally, to keep all of this grounded and practical, Roosevelt reminds us that:

“The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize.  Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized.”

What do you think about the qualities Roosevelt praises and how practical it is to develop top talent?

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The full text of the speech is at http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

If you want more of the back-story to this quote, you can find it here

This speech, along with his earlier one on “The Strenuous Life”, are some of Roosevelt’s most memorable words.  (Full text of the Strenuous Life speech can be found here).

I watched a lot of the games and was inspired and energized by the displays of dedication, hard work and concentration.

Training and preparation are the obvious ticket to get a participant to the games.  Some trained harder than others.  But on gameday itself, in the hour of competition, at the exact minute and second when fractions count, that’s when the small things become really big.  Leaning too far this direction, and the favored front-runner takes a fall.  A moment of hesitation on the short track and you don’t get to pass the person in front of you and qualify for the medal round.  It was clear that the mental game is a really big part of top performance.

What inspires so many is the all-out effort and dedication that these athletes show.  For those of us in the working world, how often do we push up against limitations and our own desire to stop, to move on to something else instead of taking the time to get it right?  Developing top talent isn’t done in days, or through a short training program.  It requires dedication, investment, going the second and the third mile, revising and honing performance, review and feedback, great coaching and a coachable spirit.

I’m glad we have the Olympics to show us these things.   There are too few places dedicated to producing top talent, champions and world-record results.  It’s time to bring the Olympic spirit, ethos and training regimen inside of more organizations.

January’s resolutions are long gone–time to get moving on what you’re really committed to.  I’m still hearing from people who are writing their own version of what the year ahead looks like using my free workbook “The Year Ahead 2010″.  You can get a copy for yourself and start  moving yourself, then watch out–the world will move too.

We start a new year and it’s a great opportunity to do some personal strategic planning.  Well-run companies and organizations take time annually to plan strategically for the future and to set their course of action.  Why not give yourself the same advantage?

I wrote a guidebook to help in the process of personal strategic planning that is available for the asking.  Send an email or request it from me directly and post a comment about how you’re using it.

I was also intrigued by an article last month in the Wall Street Journal about marathoners and the impact on personal fitness.  If you have run a marathon, my congratulations to you.  If you’re a serial marathoner like the optometrist I met on the plane last month between Boise and Denver, you’ve got my respect.  For those who have run a marathon (and those who never will) and who struggle now to stay fit, read on.

How do you stay fit?  Through practice and regularity.  You continue exercising, eating healthy, and finding enjoyable and emotionally satisfying ways to keep doing both.  For one-time marathoners, they train for the event, alter their lifestyle in the short-term to run the marathon, but after the peak event, they return to their previous routine and habits.

I have found the best way for me to stay fit and keep exercising and eating healthy is to use variety and a nudge of motivation/accountability.  I track my exercise routine in a small spiral-bound memo pad.  I time my exercise and try to improve on my previous performance, even by a few seconds, or a few repetitions, or a few pounds of weight.  I practice a martial art in which I help teach others to practice techniques,  which lets me see how well I have really learned the art.   I also measure progress there as well by testing for belts/ranks.  In eating, I keep track of how much energy I have and what foods affect me in a good way or a bad way.  Of course I weigh myself and check body fat percentage.  These different actions don’t take up a lot of time nor do I center my life around them.  I simply see them as necessary for keeping my body and physical health in good condition.  I also consider physical conditioning to be a key necessity to staying mentally sharp and on top of my game.

Top talent keeps working hard and practicing while measuring progress toward a worthy goal.  If fitness is one of your personal battles, I encourage you to get yourself back on the path to improved health and well-being.

Top performers focus attention on their habits of thought.  They already know and have learned well the actions and skills needed for good performance.  They focus instead on what makes the difference between good, solid performance and top performance.  In short, the difference is the mental game.

James Allen wrote a short book in 1902 titled “As a Man Thinketh”.  His main point is that we choose our thoughts, and our habits of thought show up in our circumstances.  Interview top performers and poor performers and you will see this demonstrated vividly.

An article yesterday in the Wall Street Journal on the neurobiology of cognition suggests that each person has a neuron (or cluster of neurons) that fire in recognition and response to specific stimuli.  Researches found that, yes, you actually have a neuron that responds specifically to Homer Simpson, the fictional cartoon character (or you don’t, as the case may be).

As intriguing as this discovery is, the real point that has practical usefulness is that by thinking of certain things repeatedly, by training ourselves in certain habits of thought, we can grown neurons that respond specifically to that stimulus.  Create a goal, then repeat it to yourself, focus on it enough, and you will have neurons firing anytime you encounter something that your brain recognizes as bringing you closer to that goal.  This is one of the keys to developing the mindset (and results) of a top performer.

Today, I posed a challenging question to myself:  What is the most important, greatest impact, longest lasting activity or objective I could get involved with right now?

I wrestled with this question for over half an hour and came up with three answers.  The third answer had seven sub-parts to it.  Asking myself questions like this allow me to go deep, to inquire into my real motivations, to examine what is truly important to me.

Leaders who want to develop top talent need to examine themselves periodically and be in touch with their deeper drives, motives, touchstones.  I find that when I do this for myself, I’m in turn more likely to take other people further and deeper in developing themselves.

Grab a journal and pose a challenging question or set of questions to yourself and then wrestle with the answers for a while.  It will do you good and it will help you grow as a leader too.  Then commit to do this on a periodic basis to keep your authenticity and integrity honed to a sharper edge.  It makes all the difference when the going gets tough.

New discoveries in brain science seem to greet us almost every day.  How the mind and brain work is a fascinating field that just gets more interesting with each new discovery. 

We’re learning about different types of memory, the different regions of the brain where they are stored or accessed, how we process information both consciously and subconsciously, and how personality differences are reflected in distinct brain functions.

Some people seem born or endowed with special gifts or talents.  For them, applying their talents in a way that contributes is what makes them into top talent.  Can top talent be developed through sheer diligence in the absence of a special endowment?  It appears so.  Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers looked at research done on outstanding people and concluded that anyone could become an expert in anything by practicing for 10,000 hours.  What some would brand “obsession” may actually be one of the paths to learning something so well that you truly own it with a high level of mastery.

Everyone’s brain has an “executive function” that helps us to plan, organize and prioritize our actions.  Part of prioritizing is being able to shift our attention from one item to another or to keep from getting distracted or acting out habitual responses that would be counter-productive.  It appears that those people who we would call “top talent” are better able to exercise this executive function.  One interesting correlation to this is that bilingual or multilingual people seem to have more highly developed executive functioning in their brains.  They can monitor languages and keep them separate (part of the executive function), and they are better able to switch their attention when it’s necessary to learn something new.  I have witnessed this firsthand, first as a child in South America being exposed to Spanish, and as an adult in Asia learning Chinese.  Language learning seems to be one clear path to developing the executive function of the brain.

How do people arrive at the solution to knotty, complex problems without an obvious solution?  It seems very difficult to engineer or stage one of those “Eureka!” moments that leads to a breakthrough insight.  New research by Joydeep Bhattacharya and Bhavin Sheth makes the case that a person has to be in a particular state for insights to occur.  The processing of complex problems seems to occur most efficiently at a subconscious level, and Drs. Bhattacharya and Sheth showed that a flurry of subconscious brain activity often telegraphed a breakthrough even before a person became consciously aware of their breakthrough insights in a “light-bulb moment.”   The talent of solving complex or intractable problems seems to lie with those who stay with the problem and can fruitfully turn it over to their subconscious processing to arrive at a productive answer.

For some practical insights, look at the following resource:

John Medina has a great book out called Brain Rules.  I recommend you get a copy.  The free DVD that comes with the hardcover book is humorous and helps you really get the principles (he has 12 of them, some seem obvious, but others are really insightful).

What qualifies as a “strategic” meeting?  When we are talking about or deciding on a substantive direction or outcome.  When we are discussing our own identity.  When the stakes are very high, either for us personally or for the organization.  All of these fit my definition of strategy. 

I was in a strategy meeting back in January a few months ago.  I remember a series of strategy meetings I chaired during a series of months over fifteen years ago.   I have learned to identify strategy in meetings even when I expected the predominant focus to be on operational or tactical issues.  That’s really an important point.  Ask yourself:  what is the purpose of this meeting?  Are we dealing mostly with strategy or with tactics?

Patrick Lencioni has written a powerful book about meetings called Death by Meeting.  I highly recommend it.  It applies more generally to different kinds of meetings, but it warrants a close reading anyway.  Lencioni says instead of avoiding conflict, we should seek out the right kind of conflict in meetings that matter.  He distinguishes between destructive interpersonal conflict where people are focused on personal hurts, sensitivities or hidden agendas and healthy, constructive ideological conflict where we disagree over assumptions or approaches and we discuss these openly. 

Dan Bobinski shares three key questions you can ask to keep things on track in a strategy meeting:  1. What results do we want from this action?  2. What must we do to achieve those results?  3. What knowledge, skills, or attitudes must we have/acquire to do those things?

Here’s a tip for you to consider about the next meeting you are part of:  Look for whether there is a connection to something you care deeply about.  Ask more questions about “what” is the aim or objective until it is clear to everyone before allowing the conversation to steer toward questions of “how” to get to the desired end goal.  If you find that you really don’t belong at this meeting, as soon as possible create a way to delegate, disengage or dismiss yourself from the meeting and choose to focus on something that is a higher priority for you and the organizaiton.