Gold Nugget Coaching

If you don’t already know it, I live in an old gold mining town in the Colorado Rockies. I talked a bit more about it in my bio. One of the things that I love about living here is that there are still old cowboys and miners around and they have great stories to tell. I bumped into one of them yesterday. Norm is an old gold miner. He started mining in the Great Depression. And he shared with me and some friends the secret of finding gold as he pulled a solid gold bar out of his pocket.

Norm started out by saying “I’ve known a lot of miners in my time and some got very rich but most walked away from the mines penniless. What made the difference is the ones that went broke were the folks that mined the gold to get rich. The ones that got rich never set out to strike it rich. They simply were driven by wanting to mine gold. They just kept at it because that was their purpose, to mine gold. They figured out what it took to get the gold out of the ground and they just did it. When no gold came out they learned from what wasn’t working and they fixed it. ”

It occurred to me as Norm was talking that what he was saying was relevant to many people today. Witness the lottery. Our modern equivalent of striking gold. On the one hand, playing the lottery is a harmless little game. I’ve even been known to buy a ticket once in a while. On the other hand, it’s the modern-day equivalent of a disempowering strike it rich mentality. By the way, do you know that to win the lottery you have to by a ticket?

Like with gold, dreaming is not enough to make it happen. You have to take action. It’s the same with having a career that motivates you, or anything else for that matter. Dreaming about it is not enough to make it happen. Sure, lightening does strike once in a while, and people do win the lottery. But if all you’re doing to change your career or your life is the equivalent of waiting to win the lottery, you’re probably going to wind up being very disappointed.

What’s the alternative? Do like the successful miners do: Take action in a committed way. Decide what you’re going after then take the actions to get you there. If you don’t know what the effective actions are, commit yourself to learning what it takes. Fortunately, in our time, committing to learning doesn’t have to be difficult. There are learning resources everywhere. Take advantage of them. And if you’re one of those people for whom “learning” is a dirty word,  get over it.

I actually had someone tell me never to use the word learning because many people have a negative reaction to the word.

He said, “It reminds them of having to work at something.” Well I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is you can accomplish almost anything you can dream of. The bad news is, you’ll probably have to learn something new to do it. That’s true whether you want to create a future that excites and energizes you or whether you want to make good investments.

My advice—learn from the successful gold miners and commit yourself to the task itself and put the “get rich quick” or the “fast and easy” type of thinking in the back seat.

If you’re wondering about Norm, he told us he’d made three million dollars gold mining. “And that was back in them days when a dollar meant somethin’.” One other thing Norm said: “Most people think the golds been tapped out. But son I’m telling you, those old miners just scratched the surface.”