John Maxwell is one of today's premier authorities on Christian leadership. Through his best-selling books, conferences, and organization (INJOY), this former pastor is sharing practical insights and tools with thousands of leaders and potential leaders, in and out of the church. Preaching editor Michael Duduit recently visited with John to discuss his latest book, Thinking for a Change, and his thoughts on being an effective communicator.
Preaching: In your book Thinking for a Change (Warner Books), you make the statement that successful people think differently than unsuccessful people. In what way do successful people think differently?
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Maxwell: In the book I identify eleven thinking skills that successful people have. Those are the eleven ways that they think differently. For example, successful people think very realistically. Unsuccessful people don't. Unsuccessful people just think that something will happen for them or something will happen to them. It's just a matter of time. It's kind of a lottery feeling about life. Successful people look at life very realistically and say I am going to have to make some changes here or I am going to lose my family or I'm going to lose my job or my kids. Successful people have a sense of realism that unsuccessful people don't have.
That thesis — that the greatest gap between successful and unsuccessful people is how they think — really came from my father at his 50th anniversary, when he and Mom were having a big wedding anniversary in Kauai and we were with them. He's been such a positive thinker and such an encourager and I said, "Dad, did you always think like that?" And he surprised me. He said, "No, when I was a senior in high school" — he grew up in Georgetown High a little town in southern Ohio — "there were only a couple of families in our town that were successful. Only 800 people in the town. In my senior year I asked myself, 'Why are they successful and everybody else here so average and I came to the conclusion that they thought differently.'
That was the seed to that book. For the next ten years I just watched people, listened to people. And I found that there were certain ways that they thought, certain thinking skills that they possessed. I began to write them down and clarify them. That really is the heart of the book.
Successful people think big picture. Unsuccessful people are just consumed with themselves. What is going to happen to me? They are almost living moment by moment. You know what I'm saying. Never looking at life in context.
Successful people think creatively. Therefore because they're creative thinkers, what do they have? They have options. Unsuccessful people don't have options. Everything is a dead-end street. Lost their job — what will we do now? Never get out of themselves, never get out of their comfort zone, never think out of the box.