#1181: I Guess I’m Stupid

“Work smarter, not harder.”

I guess I’m stupid. (Don’t tell my grandkids I said that, evidently, “Stupid” is a curse these days.) I’ve found smarter ways to work, but I've never been able to avoid working harder.

My experience is that success requires smarter AND harder.

You see these stories all the time about overnight successes, but after closer examination, the “overnight” turns out to be a couple of decades of hard work.

Edison said, “Opportunity is often missed because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” He was a genius (you can’t be smarter than that), but he is famous for his dogged persistence.

·      I want you to use the tools. Google beats library card catalog searches. 

·      CRM’s crush drawers filled with handwritten notes on business cards.

·      AI can give me the bones of a meeting agenda or an outline for my presentation in seconds.

But understanding the information and making it digestible is my job. The CRM doesn’t work on autopilot, and the meeting and presentation won’t run themselves. There are shortcuts to help you work, but there are no shortcuts to success in anything.

Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

The best part of this philosophy, for me, is that the responsibility lies with me. I can lay claim to the successes and failures, and, upon debriefing all of them, the results are always inextricably linked to the effort I put in.

Here’s another saccharin sentiment that’s been part of too many commencement speeches.

“Find something you love and you will never work a day in your life.”

I don’t know if that applies even to major league athletes or rock stars! They still have to work at their craft, sweat the competition, practice relentlessly, manage the criticisms, and suffer the travel from venue to venue.

For the rest of us, this trope is misleading.  I love to sell!  I love coming to the end of a particularly challenging deal and achieving a good outcome for both my client and myself. But I don’t love to prospect. Prospecting is work and is 95% of a selling life.

I love to speak!  Put me on a stage with a big crowd, and I am thrilled to deliver content folks will use. But I hate setting up the tech for the show. There’s always a missing cable of some kind!) And traveling can be a bear.

I discovered things I love to do, and I worked on them every day.  The sentiment of the quote is that the work wasn’t work because I loved it.  BS it was work. It’s not like I was getting paid to stand in a stream with a flyrod in my hand.

I know a guy named Sonny.  He is 75 years old and tends bar five nights a week.  He has to.  He can’t afford the rent and groceries on social security alone.  Sonny was a guy who did what he loved. For the last five decades, Sonny played music in the park, tended bar a couple of shifts a week, slept late, and spent his nights partying with friends.  He loved it…but now he’s paying. Maybe the debauchery of his youth was worth the poverty and pain he lives in now, I’ll never know.

For me, however, it’s about goals and vision.  You’ve got to know where you want to end up and then do the things you can to get there; the work, if you will. I believe it is no problem if it is a means to an end. I may not have loved every aspect of my work, but I loved what it was doing for me.  I loved the way that work allowed me to live, and I loved where I was going with it.

I don’t need to find a thing I love to avoid work, I need to find a life I love and make work a part of living that life.

Own Your Sales Gene…