The biggest enemy of success is fear of failure. When you're too afraid of losing, you don't take the kind of risks necessary to succeed. Winners get in the habit of taking risks to make sure they achieve their objectives. But this habit can become obsessive. Compulsive winners don't just want to win on the project, they want to win on every point made at the meeting, even on deciding which place to go for lunch! The ambition to win can become a knee-jerk reaction that alienates your team, your colleagues and your family. One of the toughest things for a leader to do is to stop competing with her people. Whether you're right or more experienced isn't the point--your job as a leader is to develop your team to be great at winning. This isn't about just your anymore. Marshall Goldsmith, the leadership coach, offers a suggestion:

"My clients are mega-successful people, and the biggest challenge I face with them is that they want to win too much. If it's something important, they want to win, if it's not important, they want to win. If it's something meaningful, they want to win, if it's trivial they still want to win," recounts Goldsmith. "Now, unsuccessful people are in danger of an excessive fixation on not losing. But successful people are in danger of becoming excessively fixated on winning. Our desire to win can get us into trouble and make us forget the very mission itself. Before my clients give an order, I coach them to stop, breathe, and ask themselves one question: Is it worth it? This might sound simple, but I'm really teaching them to not win all the time."

Next time you think you need to win, take a moment and breathe: decide if it's really worth winning at this. Would it be better for one of the people you care about to feel empowered to win? Unless you prefer to live alone, or do all the work yourself, you might reconsider what winning really means.

Check out my interview with Marshall Goldsmith below:

When I sat down and talked with Ford CEO Alan Mulally about the importance of serving others, I intellectually understood what he was saying: to be a great leader, you must serve a cause greater than yourself. But when reviewing the footage I'd taken from our interview, I realized that I hadn't really felt what he was talking about.

I think the idea of service can be a difficult concept for many of us to really understand on a deep, emotional level. It's easy for such talk to take on an unrealistic, Pollyanna-like quality: sure it's a nice idea to make serving others a top priority, but how many of us really take the time to put our own interests, desires and ambitions aside to serve someone else when the opportunity arises?

Yet, the importance of considering not only the needs of others but the way in which the decisions we make affect others, is more imperative than ever before. Serving only ourselves and our own self-interests never leads anywhere positive for anybody. So much of our current Economic Crisis was caused by greed and the failure to serve people and communities--now everyone is suffering because of it.

At the same time, I don't believe the challenge many of us experience in understanding service is because of inherent selfishness--it's more about shifting our mindset.

"Especially when we're students, we get in the mode of being vessels--we're learning, we're sucking in information all the time," Alan Mulally observed. "But it's all just coming in--we also need to give back."

Even outside of the classroom, we're constantly inundated with information that we're expected to master--the latest technology, the newest theories. It's very easy to forget the need to share what we've learned and is meaningful to us with others. Perhaps we should view service as part of achieving a necessary balance for ourselves and for the world we compose.

"Everyday we should try and contribute in some way, large or small," Frances Hesselbein insists, who joined us for the interview. "Especially those of us who have been given much; we have an even greater responsibility to give."

When I'm having a very difficult time in my career or when I'm having a miserable day, I remind myself of all the friends and people I know who have things a lot worse than I do. It makes me feel like I have no problems--only choices. Norma Hotaling is one of the people I think of most in those moments.

As a teen, Norma lived in a cardboard box and was addicted to heroin before she even realized she was addicted. She spent two decades on the streets, working as a prostitute. She tried to break the cycle of addiction and failed many, many times. One night, she was cold and frightened in an alley and it struck her: "I'm here for a reason. I'm here to know this horror so that I can change it for others." Then a moment later, her inspiration collapsed. "You're just an uppity whore," she thought. Norma went into detox one last time and founded an organization called The SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation) Project, to rescue others like her from sexual exploitation and addiction.

"When somebody walks though our door at SAGE, they are trusting us on such a deep level that we're not going to hurt them," she told me emphatically. "There are so many things that they can remember but can't understand and sometimes never will. We're going to let them heal from the unspeakable, with dignity and with love."

I first heard of Norma three years ago, when she was honored by Oprah and the Drucker institute. I called to see her a second time about a year ago and shot the interview you can watch below. She was very ill, but you'd never know it. She was so incredibly full of life. What always touched me most was how courageous she was despite knowing she would be blamed and ridiculed in the many places she would reach out for support; there's no one lower on the food chain of humanity than a woman who has sold her life on the streets.

Many times we think that heroes live with the privilege of being fearless. It's comforting to think they're not like us--they're superhuman--meaning it's okay for us to hide in our insecurities and rationalizations about why we can't succeed. Now that I've met hundreds of leaders, I realize no one lives without fear. Great leaders just feel the fear and do the damn thing anyway: they have a burning ambition to make a change and the humility to know that nobody starts with all the answers. That was Norma.

I gave her a hug at the end of our interview, and when she felt the tears on my cheek, she gave me a look of surprise, and then gave me another hug I will never forget.

That interview was the last time I would ever see her. She passed away a few days before Christmas. The world lost her to pancreatic cancer, but her legacy will continue in the hands of the many people whose lives she helped heal--not because she was above them, but because she was one of them.

"People usually don't believe that just one person can make a difference," she acknowledged. "But when they feel that way, they can always look to SAGE for inspiration. They can say, 'If that Norma Hotaling, that ex-prostitute, that former homeless woman, that 21-year heroin addict, if she can not only turn her life around, but change communities, change the lives of other women, and in many cases, change the world, I can do something different for myself and my community."

If we could all do even 10% of what Norma did with what was left of her life, we'd change the world.

For more information on The SAGE Project and how you can participate in continuing Norma's legacy, visit wwww.sagesf.org.

Watch the video version of my interview with Norma below:

When Frances Hesselbein took over as CEO of the Girl Scouts of America in the 70s, the iconic organization was in the midst of a serious identity crisis:

"When I came in we were distant--not at all one great movement. We had lived through the trauma of the late 60s and early 70s and organizations weren't sure who they were anymore."

To turn things around, Hesselbein realized that all girls of America needed to be able to see themselves as potential Girl Scouts. So, the organization learned about the different value systems that compose the varied cultures of America and spoke directly to those values. The result? Racial and ethnic representation more than tripled.

"We learned that Hispanic families don't want you to speak directly to their daughters. You speak to their family," Hesselbein shares. "So we created a caption for them that read 'Girl Scouting has something of value for your daughter.' We tried to be very sensitive to these subtle but extremely important nuances. The message was always we respect you, we respect your culture."

By the time Hesselbein left the organization, The Girls Scouts of America had its highest membership in history, finally succeeding in becoming the great movement everyone had been envisioning.

"When I first came to the organization, I'd say: 'We're one great movement!' And people would look at me with mistrust," Hesselbein recalls. "But when I left, they were making plaques with that caption on the wall!"

At the end of her tenure, the father of management, Peter Drucker, called Hesselbein one of America's greatest leaders, and in 1998, she was awarded the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Watch the video version of my interview with Frances below:

Goals are the leading cause of success in America; goals are also the leading cause of depression in America. When people have high expectations and don't reach them, the research overwhelmingly shows that they are worse off than before they set their goals. The majority of depressed people have a set of ideals that are out of alignment with the reality in which they live.

Yet most don't actually even set goals, and by far the majority of goals that people set fail to be realized; or worse, they're realized and still make people miserable.

At the same time, people who set goals achieve far, far more than those who don't and make more money in both the long and the short term.

So, if both of these statements are true -- and the research clearly supports this data -- then what the heck is going on with goals? Perhaps what we need to look at is how we're measuring success.

In our research of people who had achieved lasting success, it was easy to get lost in laundry lists of tactics and choices they made that actually had little to do with why they chose the path they ended up following. Many aspiring achievers would love to know and follow Bill Gates' or Steve Jobs' roadmap. But ironically, Bill and Steve didn't have a specific destination in mind. The highly successful people we studied described their route to greatness as a serendipitous journey -- but they had not, in fact, considered the end at the beginning. Some had begun with more plans than others, but only a small fraction saw their life end up exactly as they had initially imagined.

Does this mean we should abandon all plans and goals? No! Everyone who used goals and plans insisted they were enormously effective. It would have been impossible to make real progress without them. For these successful people, life and work has been a series of plans and goals made up in the context of their situation at the moment.

Over the long term, the vision they had for their lives was more about a set of values -- a way of making choices -- than a pre-ordained roadmap. The key difference we found was that most had intuitively applied a three-step process which made all the difference between goals that were achievable and rewarding and those that were out of reach or depressing to live with.

Bad goals happen to good people when we create goals without concern for who we are or what matters to us. If we set the goal to become a math teacher and we absolutely love math, a happy ending can be expected. But if we hate math (or kids), then that goal becomes unachievable, or worse, we accomplish it, but it doesn't make us great or happy.

This is the problem with the usual pitch seen on the internet: "Double you income doing something that gives you more independence, takes less time and makes you sexier!" The promotional advertising is assuring a lifestyle as opposed to something you personally love doing.

Have you looked up the word success in the dictionary? Happiness, satisfaction, legacy, higher purpose and lasting impact are not part of the definition-- even though that's how successful people described the word in our World Success Survey. No, the dictionary instead lists money, fame, power, and of course, goals. The reason most people are miserable is because they believe they are being judged -- and they judge others -- based on money, fame and power, when in fact they want to live lives based on happiness, service, impact and other more rewarding measures. It's the definition of success that's out of alignment, not our desire to do what matters.

Here's the three step plan that makes the difference between success and misery: every person who's enjoyed long-term success has applied it in their life and work. If you're like me, this plan will make you wary because it's deceptively simple. But, when applied seriously, it will completely re-structure what you've currently got planned.

I hate that what I'm about to share with you is so damn hard to actually implement; it's much, much, much easier to set goals without forcing the truth this 3-step process demands. It's so difficult in fact, that most people don't do it at all. They may go ahead and set goals, only to find them empty or, if they're lucky, they don't end up reaching them.

The other aggravating component to this plan is that it requires that all 3 steps be followed. You might achieve short term success with any one of them, but for lasting impact and happiness, all three are necessary. You'll find that the 3 steps are described with words that you know very well, but we're asking you to approach them in a new way:

1. Purpose: Find a cause or service that matters to you and is bigger than you are. This is about being a part of something that is meaningful to you but also has great impact on others. People often think they have to choose between a Cause or a Company. That's a mistake. Lasting success comes to those who are involved with something so important they can see the cause that it serves.

2. Passion: Find something that turns you on in a very personal way-- choose which cause is right for you. There are a lot of great companies and causes, but the difference between pursuing one that will invigorate you and one that will zap you dry is to take your self-interest seriously. Don't treat your passions like trivial pursuits. This is about being selfish--in a good way! Pursue what sparks your imagination day and night for no particular reason. You can try to explain or rationalize it, but it's frankly intrinsic motivation that starts deep in your DNA. People frequently believe they have to choose either passion or purpose, but that's what weakens our resolve to make a difference. It's when we find something that we love that is also of service to others that we find success built to last. This was true of all high achievers in our survey. It's not one or the other--it's both.

3. Performance: Turn purpose and passion into action: this is about setting and achieving your goals. The problem is this should be the last step as opposed to the first step in making choices about our life and career. Bad goals happen to good people when we set goals without struggling to understand step one and step two. When the goal is in alignment with something we love doing and others love having, then it's a goal that's not only likely to be achieved, but more importantly, it's ten times more likely to help you create a life that matters (to you)!