A few weeks back a friend of mine and I were chatting on Facebook and somehow we got onto the topic of self-development. He went ahead and ordered my book and since he seemed so interested I said I’d send him over a few CDs for him to borrow.
Thankfully he is busy working his way through them and loving every minute of it but I must admit that I wasn’t sure he’d bother listening to them.
Sadly, experience has shown me that even when you share a good idea with your friends not everyone will run with it.
Why? That is the great mystery of life.
I have talked about this before on this blog but I think it bears repeating because it applies in so many areas of our lives.
First let’s talk business. I’ve run my own school for close to 11 years now and it’s still going strong. It wasn’t always easy but I kept at it.
Over that time I have had a variety of people walk through my doors and despite their dreams, their ability, their passion – some decided to join, some didn’t.
I used to get all bent out of shape when I gave an incredible trial lesson and then never heard from them again.
I thought that maybe I needed more work so I worked hard to refine my skills only to have the same thing happen again at a later date.
So I worked harder, and still the same thing happened.
What gives?
Then one day I got it. My job is to simply give them the best lesson I possibly can, and then the ball’s in their court.
If they don’t sign up on the spot and decide to take a few days to think it over there could be any number of reasons why they might not come back.
Here are a few that I have found:
- Got cold feet
- Decided another school was a better fit
- Found a school closer to home
- Lost their job
- Family issue
- Friend talked them out of it
The key point is we must do our very best to present our product or service to the customer. If we have honestly done everything we possibly could have and they still didn’t buy then we have just run into another of those “won’ts.”
The same applies for love. I once heard a great story about a man who was searching for the woman of his dreams only to come up short time and time again. For twenty years he looked and then finally he met her. She was everything he wanted in a woman. Intelligent, attractive, funny, caring, sincere, hardworking, he went right down his list and checked them all off. There was only one problem. She, too, was looking for the perfect man, and he wasn’t it.
Don’t wait for perfection, rarely do we find it. Instead, we make it.
What I mean is that waiting for perfection only ends in frustration. Instead we find somebody we like and then either change our expectations of what we want or help them to become everything we believe they are capable of.
There will be some people that will find you attractive, some will find you nothing special. Some will find you intelligent, some will find you arrogant. Some will find you hilarious, some won’t get you. Some will say yes, some will say no.
And that’s about the big and small of it. We are all different and like different things.
I, for one, am relieved when I think about this because life would be so dull, not to mention hard, if we all liked the same things. Variety truly is the spice of life.
My good friend often makes fun of my taste in movies, TV and movies. But that’s what I like.
Call me crazy but I don’t like ketchup either. Nor peanut butter, coffee or beer.
Why? I don’t know why, I just know I don’t.
In a nutshell, if someone doesn’t like your idea just say the magic word, “NEXT!”
Last I checked there were some 7 billion people on this planet…and I’m sure if you kept asking, you’d find a lot of yeses.
Colonel Sanders, founder of KFC, understood this principle when he spent two years asking hundreds of restaurants to buy into his fried chicken idea at the age of 65.
You know the rest of the story.
Don’t let one of those “won’ts” paralyze you.
Thank them for their time and the opportunity to test out your sales skills then move on to your next prospect whether it is another potential customer, girlfriend, business partner, or investor.
Life rewards those who go after what they want, I’ve seen it time and time again.
iSucceed: secrets for the average joe and jane, my first book, might not appeal to everyone. I know that.
But that didn’t discourage me from writing it because I’ve always believed that if you set out to do good things, good things happen.
I wholeheartedly believe in the concept – SWSWSWSW – that I learnt from Jack Canfield’s book, “The Success Principles.”
Some will, some won’t, so what, someone’s waiting.
So get out there and find that person.
Then another.
And another.
Adrian Shepherd
Thanks for this. Awesome! Scott