Here we are, in the midst of the Olympics, talking about things like inspiration, and even more importantly, failure. Deb has a post about the topic, and so does John. Lately, between the bet with John and these posts, I've been vividly reminded of my time in sales.
For a little over a year, I was a salesperson who sold things. Even though my time in sales was relatively brief, it was dense, and in the end I have a hard time remembering that it was only about a year and a half of my life. By the end of my sales gig, I had achieved the single most important, and most monetarily costly, failure of my life to-date.
The sales gig was also one of the biggest factors in making me who I am. I like who I am and I know that missing that failure would mean missing certain changes that I made in myself. But, enough with the "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Though true, it's not my point.
My point, is that among other things, I learned how important it is to make yourself try. As a sales rep, and as a manager, I had a lot of practice setting goals. The best goals to make were never "sell X amount" but rather "schedule X appointments" or "make X phone calls." Because, as soon as you start weighting your success purely on end result, you set yourself up for falling short. Once you start thinking only of what you want, instead of the work you'll have to put in to get it, your chances of achieving that goal become poorer.
Not every sales call will end in a sale. It's statistics, you can't argue with statistics. However, in the sales job, we also knew that a certain percentage of sales calls would end in a sale. It all boiled down to a numbers game. If you wanted to hit a sales goal, you had to focus on first hitting a scheduling goal, which meant hitting a phone calls goal. You had to break it down and you had to count in a certain number for sales calls that you knew would not end in sales. If you wanted X in sales, you had to do a bit of number crunching and start at the bottom. Sales weren't a matter of getting from point A to point B, but rather from point A to something like point H.
Going through all those steps meant you could get to your end goal. However, at each of those steps there was the guarantee of a certain amount of rejection. We used to talk about ratios. Every "no" equaled a certain number of "yes"es. So, if you could wrap your head around it, each "no" became almost a good thing, because it brought you that much closer to the next "yes."
It became one great game of psyching yourself out and shifting your whole mentality of how you defined success. I remember one manager I had who had absolutely embraced this approach, and applied it to more than just sales. Specifically, he got a lot of dates. Granted, he was cute and personable, etc. However, this was not why he got dates. Not even close to the reason, in fact. No, the reason he got so many dates was because he got turned down so often. He knew that, like in sales, it was all a matter of statistics. For every X women who turned him down, X would probably say yes, which meant for every few dates he wanted, he had to ask out many more women. I would even, on occasion, hear him talk about his rejections with fondness, as if they were their own kind of success.
The funny thing is, when you get right down to it, they were.
One of the best ways to succeed at something is being willing to fail. By saying this I don't mean you shouldn't put your blood, sweat, and tears into it. I'm saying that failure is the key part of success. At the end of the day, how you deal with your failures says the most about your potential for success. And, if you're dedicated enough to what you're doing, you will fail. In fact, you will fail many times. Better get used to the idea, because it's only through that failure that you really stand a change of winning.
There are very few things we get right the first time, or the first ten times, or maybe even the first hundred times.
Wanna know the real secret of highly successful people? Being too stubborn to quit, despite all the times they've failed. Or, in some cases, because of it.
Remember, the guys who get the most dates are the ones who are most often rejected.
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