You don’t know this but Joe Kelner is your competition. Well, to be fair, Joe is just graduating from high school—but four years from now he’ll be competing for your job.
And lest you think all Gen-Y’ers are slackers, Joe will surprise you.
Here’s the story.
Joe is our media intern at Caskey. He started when he was 16 and takes care of all of our video shooting, editing and some podcast work. No one knows his way around the Mac like Joe. No one can edit video quicker than Joe.
But last week, a big thing happened to him. With his partner, Erin Meyer, he won the national DECA competition in Anaheim. DECA is a society of high school marketing students. (If you own a company, go right now to your phone and call your local high school and create an intern position as soon as you can for a DECA student. They rock.)
If you were to meet Joe, you’d say he’s a typical HS student—a little sloppy in dress—a little too laid back for some—and not a big “detail” person—grades OK, but not great.
But he makes up for all that in substance. He created a marketing plan for Thrifty Car Rental that blew people away.
Joe is testament to my belief that we all have enormous potential that sits inside us waiting for the right time to erupt. For most, it never comes. For others, it comes so rarely that we actually forget how it feels to be “at the top of our game.”
In our leadership practice, we call that Alignment—when the job at hand is totally aligned with your interests and skills. For Joe, it was when his interest in business aligned with a marketing contest.
High Powered But Seldom Taxed.
I conclude we’re all like a high-powered race horse that jogs around the track most of our life—never really taxing our system to bring out our best performance. Like a huge engine that merely idles all day—never really doing what it could do.
But sometimes, we are called upon to rev the engine—to get all horses moving—and that’s when we’re at our best. When the demand arises, we rise with it.
Bob Knight said [paraphrasing]: “Our competition is not the other team. It is ourselves. The other team is simply our partner in this effort to bring out our best. So play up.”
So the Joe lesson here is: Find something that jazzes you—that juices you—that you lost track of time doing—that you want to come back and tinker with—not because you want to be the best in the world at something—but because it nourishes your soul.
Find that thing and do it all the time.
Congratulations Joe. Good luck at Xavier next year!
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