Preparation

"In sales, or any business effort, or career position, the person who will emerge victorious most of the time, is the person who wants it the most. The victory we call success goes to the best prepared. It appears that there are very few people who are willing to put forth the effort to get from where they are to where they want to be. Most make excuses and blame others for their own poor choices" (Jeff Gitomer)

I could not state this any clearer. It continues to amaze me how often I hear of all the obstacles to success rather than the steps necessary to succeed. It is prudent when mapping the road to success to outline the barriers; however, this is only to develop plans to circumvent these challenges. It is not to build these threats into the 300 pound gorilla hiding in the closet with the sole intent to assure our demise.

This is a very important point. If we do not have a map and a vision of success, we can not possibly move from where we are to where we want to be.

Once we have that road map, we must make the choice that we will put in the preparation time to assure success. Recently, my daughter learned a new dive. She was so excited. When the next competition came, she attempted this dive with less than stellar results. She could not believe how much harder it was to execute the dive in competition. After the meet, she was able to successfully throw the dive several times.

The next day in practice, her coach had her throw the dive 30 times. She did not like it and came home and stated that he was punishing her for missing it in the meet. She obviously missed the point. Her coach understands that the road to success is through hard work, repetition and patience. By continually working on the proper mechanics of this dive in practice, she will be able to have her mind and body take over in competition.

The difficult part of this equation is that in this continual practice of the proper mechanics, there will be numerous bad dives. Most people would call these mistakes or failures. I prefer to call them learning experiences.

More is learned from mistakes than successes and many times more opportunities come out of adversity.