But you and I have oodles to learn from him. Why? Because here in the Your Inner CEO Community, where as a group engaged in the study of the book of the same name, your first learning task is to articulate in 10 words or less—in non-business language—your crystal clear value proposition to the world. Taking our cue from brilliant psychiatrist Alfred Adler, we call this our “Style-of-Life.” SOL for short. This is a difficult task, and we enter into it experimentally and flexibly, actually in a spirit of play, because we’re not going to get it right, right away. But get it right eventually we will if we are to discover, articulate and bring our singular gleaming essence to daily living. This is value not limited to work, but applicable across our whole existence: work, love and community.

I’m confident Tiger Woods has not sat down and followed our guidelines to construct a formal SOL, but he is a meditative sort and clearly in a groove and very much at home with himself in the world. When you realize that not one-stroke difference occurred between the two finalists in the four rounds of the recent U.S Open Golf Tournament in San Diego, and that a fifth round was necessary, and even that required a sudden death extra hole to produce him the winner, you see how Tiger makes the difficult look easy. That he does it over and over again lets you know he’s tapping into something special.

Check out this piece on Tiger by David Brooks in the New York Times this past week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/opinion/17brooks.html

The lesson is not to “Be like Tiger” any more than it was to “Be like Mike” a few years ago. It’s to look into your mirror in the morning and think “Be like me.”