Are You Lucky…

or Persistent?

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”
Stephen Leacock

We live in an “instant” world, where we expect immediate gratification all the time. Instant communications! Fast food! Immediate service! However, true success can’t be built in a flash. I don’t know who said this, but allow me to quote: “If it happened overnight, it was luck. If it took many nights to happen overnight, it was hard work.”
Anything of any worth is rarely, if ever, built in an instant. Great things take time. Great accomplishments might be realized in a moment, but they’re usually the results of years of preparation. How many hours does the great musician practice the same piece over and over again? How many times does the Olympic diver jump, attempting to pay precise attention to a million factors in a few seconds’ time? How many pounds of iron does the weightlifter actually have to lift before he/she is ready to compete? How many people do we in the selling and customer service business have to speak with before we can claim to have perfected our chosen profession?
The answer is really up to you, to me, to anyone who has chosen to compete in any facet of the world of business. How good do we want to be? Will we ever perfect our style, our delivery, our follow through? At what point in our career do we say that we’re good enough?
But saying we’re good enough is almost a cop-out — the moment we do so, and quit the effort to improve, we start to go backwards. Mother Nature doesn’t understand the concept of standing still. She is absolutely determined to make sure that we’re doing something — either growing and going forward, or going backwards and dying.
Being great, very good, or even good at what we do is tough. We have to make sure that we take the time to “smell the roses” while on our chosen journey, yet we have to be continually on the lookout for that next opportunity to be better, to be more effective. It’s crucial that we derive our satisfaction from the “doing” of our careers and look to the results of our actions as the rewards.
There’s a big difference between the two concepts, “satisfaction” and “reward.” They can be the same, but if we choose to recognize success or happiness based on results only, we’ll set ourselves up for bitter disappointment more often than not. If we choose to take our satisfaction from the process of selling “like a professional” every time, with every person, we will receive our just rewards through default.
Look at every interaction you have with any customer or caller either as an opportunity to sell or an opportunity to learn more about selling or service for that matter. Take each interaction and learn from the process. Satisfy yourself that you are getting something from everything you do. You can’t demand a sale from every caller, but you can demand from yourself that you learn something from every caller!
Things just have to go your way, sooner or later! You’ll find that Lady Luck (or Sir Luck, as the case may be) will be ready to share her charms when she happens to call. You see, she never announces herself beforehand; she prefers to let you know she’s been there after she’s gone!

Bob Abrames is a Salesologist, Author and Educator in the business of travel. You can E-mail him at bob@abrames.com or call (416) 518-1138. His Web site address is www.abrames.com.