Pod Insights The Quote of the Day Show | Daily Motivational Talks Dan Peña: “A Professional is Someone Who Can Do His Best Work When He Doesn't Feel Like It.” About this episode Dan Peña delivers a no-nonsense lesson on discipline, persistence, and high performance. In this intense message, he explains why successful people ignore criticism, practice relentlessly, and push through discomfort while others quit. This episode will challenge you to stop fearing success, embrace responsibility, and develop the habits that separate professionals from amateurs. Source: Dan Peña - 1993 QLA Seminar Lessons - Part OneHosted by Sean CroxtonFollow me on InstagramSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Everybody has a fear of the responsibilities and expectations that come with success. And if you don't think that, you're kidding yourself. Most people aren't successful because they're not successful or comfortable with the trappings of success. The trappings are heavy. The air is thin up here. That's why they call them blue bloods.
0:36 Speaker 01 Welcome back to the Quote of the Day Show. I am your host, Shawn Croxton, seancroxton.com. We got a brand new speaker on the show today. His name is Dan Pena. And as I've been saying this week, I have been looking for a clip to feature Dan Pena on the show for five, six, seven, eight years. It's been a minute. If you know anything about Dan, like this, this talk is the 1993 version of Dan. This is Dan Pena Lite, and I still had to do a little bit of editing to make it work, right? The 2020s version of Dan Pena is like the Andrew Dice Clay of personal development and business.
1:18 Speaker 01 If you get the reference, right? A lot of crude stories, lots of bad language. Dan keeps it very real. I actually enjoy Dan a lot. I watch a lot of Dan Pena content. If I had it my way, I would coach kind of similar to Dan because he's just a no nonsense kind of guy. I have my chat GPT kind of talk to me like Dan Pena, like it keeps it very, very real with me when we're doing our coaching sessions. And so, um, yeah, Dan is a trip, but Dan is very effective and good at what he does. He's just not for everyone. And so today, he's going to talk about the difference between a professional and an amateur. He's going to talk about how, you know, trying to live a balanced life is not realistic
2:00 Speaker 01 and how you're going to have to sacrifice. And he's also going to talk about the things we fear that are holding us back. Dan Pena is coming up.
2:11 Speaker 00 But ladies and gentlemen, it doesn't matter what they say. If you want to be a high-performance person, I can assure you that none of the high-performance people that I've ever been exposed to, and I've been exposed to a whole bunch of them, they don't care what the press says, which are another form of morons. They don't care what any of the media says unless they run for office.
2:34 Speaker 00 It just doesn't matter. And we go all through our life listening to people giving us advice that have no basis, none, zero. In fact, they have a mindless basis. You know, there's an old saying, or when I was taking computer language stuff in college many years ago, garbage in, garbage out.
2:55 Speaker 00 Almost everything categorically that you've heard heretofore is garbage.
3:01 Speaker 00 And you wonder why you've got problems or you've had difficulties growing your business.
3:08 Speaker 00 Just think for a moment, when you started your business, for those of you that are in business, or you started your career, the passion you had when you went to work. You wanted to get up in the morning. You wanted to be out there. You wanted to face the problems, the challenges, the whatevers. Now, I see people on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, yeah, I wish it was Friday.
3:30 Speaker 00 And now,
3:32 Speaker 00 it's because you've lost that passion. You've lost that lust
3:38 Speaker 00 that you had when you first met your significant other.
3:42 Speaker 00 Then it becomes this same old, same old.
3:47 Speaker 00 It's tough to keep that... Craig, how come you looked over at Mary when I said that? It's tough to keep that passion, right, Mary? It's tough to keep that passion going. But if you practice, like all these other things, and I see it over and over again, I practice in all this stuff still.
4:07 Speaker 00 And if I practice at it, God almighty, I can't begin to believe why everybody in this room can be able to, you know, think that it's important for them to practice. I assure you, the people, the higher you go up the economic scale, the more competitive it is, I can, you can bet your bottom dollar that the other guys practice. All those guys that run these big companies and have these big net worths and, I mean, they practice. Oscar Wilde, who's one of the most successful guys in the oil patch, he still practices his crap, he's very good. Tough. All of them do. You know? And just as an aside, for balanced life, we're gonna talk about in the next three days,
4:52 Speaker 00 Eric Hayden, the ice skater, he's got 36 inch thighs. Is that balanced? I mean, he won, like this. Is that balanced? He won I don't know how many gold medals, right? So you're looking for the six or eight gold medals without the 36 inch thighs. It doesn't happen. The difference between a professional and an amateur is patience and persistence. A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it. When he doesn't feel like it. It gets back to, I get paid a lot of money because I do things that make most of you uncomfortable. A professional, and this was Alastair Cook who said that, who is a famous British broadcasting
5:36 Speaker 00 guy, BBC, who made, I think, I forget how many consecutive broadcasts, and he can't, he couldn't have been well, all those 1,500 or 15,000 broadcasts. It's impossible. Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. Jim Ryan, the former world record holder in the mile. Motivation gets you started, habit keeps me going. I don't have to re-motivate myself, time after time, because perseverance is not a long race, it's many short races, one after another.
6:16 Speaker 00 When you get out of here, Saturday evening, you go back to work Monday. People and you try to instill some of the knowledge that you gained here, people are gonna say you're crazy.
6:29 Speaker 00 And that means you're making progress.
6:33 Speaker 00 If nobody says it, "What the hell happened to you? What, are you gonna go radical on us?" Then that means you didn't learn anything.
6:41 Speaker 00 And that's too bad. But I'm only gonna touch a few in the room. A few more than I've already touched.
6:53 Speaker 00 Because everybody has a fear of the responsibilities and expectations that come with success. And if you don't think that, you're kidding yourself. Most people aren't successful because they're not successful or comfortable with the trappings of success. The trappings are heavy. The air is thin up here. That's why they call them blue bloods.
7:17 Speaker 00 You can't just be a regular guy and go... I use the analogy bowling. I used to give my... I used to talk to my coal miners. I used to own quite a few coal mines.
7:27 Speaker 00 You know? Then you're just not gonna be one of the guys. If you decide that the analogy I gave, and you wanna take a night class in engineering instead of going to the bowling league on Tuesdays and Fridays.
7:38 Speaker 00 It's different for this group. Not much different. I see if you... Potential bowler, coal miners here?
7:47 Speaker 00 You can't be one of the guys. You can't do the whistle stop at 8 o'clock on Saturdays.
7:57 Speaker 00 The fear is false expectations appearing real.
8:02 Speaker 00 False expectations appearing real.
8:06 Speaker 00 That's what you're afraid of.
8:10 Speaker 00 It's like my children started a new school here up on the hill. Brolin Hills Preparatory the last couple of years. And my youngest son, who just started this year, he's in middle school. He was very much, he had a lot of anxiety about going to the school. And after the first day, he comes back and you've probably experienced this yourself with your own children, first day to school. Well, how'd you like it? Everything was great, Dad. Everything was great. You were right. Everybody liked me. My teachers weren't blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I mean, he had false expectations that appeared real to him. Because he was only 11 years old when he started this school. You know, even though I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt, there's multiples of 11 here.
8:49 Speaker 00 Yet you're still going through life, having false expectations appearing real. Does that mean you haven't grown at all? We can get into that. I'd rather not. Because if you don't like some of the things I've said heretofore, you'll absolutely loathe what I've got to say about that. And when I start pounding your parents and the doofuses you hang around with.
9:19 Speaker 01 That was Dan Pena making his debut appearance and probably his only appearance on the QOD Show. His website is danpena.co.uk. You can find today's talk on YouTube. It's called Dan Pena, 1993 QLA Seminar Lessons Part One. All right, my friend, we are going to wrap things up tomorrow with John Maxwell talking about leadership. I'm out. Peace.
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