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I believe we all have a natural desire to be significant and to be contributing members of society. Yet few of us truly feel like we are creating the rules that will allow us to succeed. One way to escape from this in today’s world is to live our lives through other people via reality TV, gurus, experts, music groups,

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Conation is one of the 1,000 most obscure English words and yet the most important business word you’ve never heard. Want to know if you’re doing well and going where you want? Filter everything through the word conation: Conation – the will to succeed that manifests itself in single-minded pursuit of a goal.

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Sitting in a hotel lobby in Martinborough, New Zealand after a bike ride, two professors from Vancouver asked me if I thought education was important for success. They hit my hot button. If, like the old saying goes, knowledge is power, then librarians would rule the world. They don’t. Something else is more correlated to success than education.

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Chapter Six in my next book, Bad Plans Carried Out Violently, is about Conation, the most important business word you’ve never heard. Its antonym is just as obscure and just as critical for you to know – velleity. Our whole community of business owners use this phrase all the time:

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Words represent powerful ideas, whether we mean for them to or not. We might as well be intentional. Zig Zigler said, “be a meaningful specific, not a wandering generality”. The words we use to represent ourselves and our businesses are much more important than we usually think.

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The Industrial Age lasted a very short 150-200-ish years in the ten thousand years of recorded human history. It brought us a lot of cool toys and a cushy life, but we’ve been afflicted with a lot of Business Diseases that came from the Industrial Age. Here’s just a few of them:

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What are you building with your business? Do you know? If not, it’s never too late to get this answer. Stop for a moment and get it, because every decision will fall from this one if you have it answered. People who try to make money rarely make very much of it. People who answer this question understand it is where significance begins.

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Our Intention – New Zealand. When we started this business four years ago we decided we wanted it to grow up and make money while we’re gone. Today we leave for New Zealand for 3 1/2 weeks while others run the business. We’ll do things like that regularly going forward. We weren’t lucky, just intentional.

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We were in Auckland when it happened. Everyone there knows someone in Christchurch and felt the impact, if only emotionally. Among the business owners there was a single thread: life is full of risk and we’ll all just have to get back on the horse as quickly as we can. I think there’s something else in this tragedy for business owners as well.

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Have you ever struggled to start the conversation about money on your sales call? If so, you’re not alone. I find that most sales people struggle to discuss money on their sales calls. This is partly due to the way you think about money. Do you believe money is scarce or plentiful? What do your parents believe about money?

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How many times have you heard advice that you already knew and said, “Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” then proceeded to move on about your day without even a second thought? Maybe it was a tip on how to close more sales or a way to build stronger, more fulfilling personal relationships or changes to your diet that could help you to lead a healthier life.

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There is new evidence from a Dominican University study that you can really, truly move yourself forward, whatever your objective, if you just follow a simple three-step process. The Dominican University study broke people into five groups:

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Going to work is a bad idea. As a business owner, you’re likely carrying a lot of baggage from the Industrial age (1800-ish to 1965-ish) that won’t fully go away for decades to come. He who makes the rules wins. You need to stop running your business on Industrial Age rules. The Industrial Age brought us two incredibly bad ideas that led to many other bad ideas:

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Do you dread the thought of talking to strangers? Hate going to industry parties? Have a fear of rejection? Let’s face it, you need to network in this economy in order to get (or keep) the perfect job; but sometimes it looks as though the social individuals (extraverts) are the only ones moving ahead.

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