Goji, Failure and Baseball…
So, this weekend I had the opportunity to spend two days pitching Goji to 20,000 Persians. I got everything from excited yesses (about 6 of them) to near violent encounters (about 2 of them) and everything in between (mostly no’s).
Now, I’m the guy who hates pitching, hates hearing no’s, hates trying to sell someone. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said that trying to pitch arguably the tightest people group on the planet was something I was going to have fun doing. Sheesh! I figure, I pitched 3 or 4 times the amount of people in two days that I’ve pitched in my entire Freelife life… With about a 4.6% success rate. Ick. I had about a 40% success rate before…
Still, after about 6 hours, I found that I could pitch an obvious “no” and just “practice” on them. I knew that the guy was a no. Didn’t matter. I was going to practice my pitch, and I did… and some people became definite maybes. After 14 hours of it, I didn’t care if I got a no. I just kept sharing. I quickly realized that my survival mechanism (that way I get when I’m confronted) is a terrible way of trying to get someone to say Yes. This survival mechanism sounds like “I have to sell them! Get to the pitch!” Dumb. Getting related to them was not present in my speaking at all. By the second day, I found that getting related was the best way to create an opening for them to say “yes.” It also was a lot more fun. And selling Goji should always be fun.
So, what did I learn from all this? Loads. Last year I started taking on the idea that “Failure is my wealth.” What do I mean by that? Well, it might be possible that it is impossible to achieve true success without a good deal of failure. How much failure? Well, consider baseball. If you are a god-like baseball player, at the end of the season you have roughly a .300 batting average. That means that you’ve been thrown out, flied out, or struck out 7 out of 10 times. That’s a lot of not being on base. Still, we’d call that guy a god.
Most heads of sales for large corporations would expect their top sales people to do around 20% successful closings. Why? Simple. If you’ve got a sales guy that is doing 90%, it means that he’s playing it safe. He’s only going to safe prospects. He’s not playing a big game. If someone is getting 80% no’s, then they’re playing to win, as opposed to playing to “not lose.” Playing to not lose means that you’re afraid to lose, so you go to the “sure things.” So, you end up with a 90% success rate. That seems great on paper, but in reality, it sucks. Playing to win means that you’re going to lose. Get used to it. If you can lose well, then you can win…period.
What do we do then? Transform what we say that failure is. So, if you HAVE to fail 80% of the time to have true success, then you’ve got some work to do! Failure is your wealth! No failure? No success. Period. So, get excited about failure, because really, failure is a success…most people don’t have the courage to even try. You do. You’ve got the results. Congratulations!
Let’s celebrate our failures! They’re really successes! Besides, when we fail, then we can grow and get the support we need to be better. Perfectionism isn’t the answer. Excellence is. Excellence is defined as continually doing better every time. Perfectionism is defined as focusing on what’s wrong in order to get it “perfect.” In the end, your excellence will be far more perfect than your perfectionism can ever be.
So fail. Fail a lot. Celebrate the failures. They’re your wealth… and have some Goji Juice…
Your ever happy, horray-for-you upline,
Mark Edward Lewis
