After their initial meeting (2 days), Peter Drucker asked one thing of Jim Collins. Change your question from how to be successful to how to be useful.
“But I do have a request. That you change your question a little bit. It seems to me you spend a lot of time trying — worrying about if you’re going to survive. Well, you’ll probably survive. And you spend too much time thinking about if you’ll be successful. It’s the wrong question. The question is, “how to be useful?” And that was the last thing he said that day. He just got out of the car, and closed the door, and walked away.
Listen to Jim Collins tell the story on the Tim Ferris Podcast. Starts around 1hour 38minutes in.
Don’t know how cool my kids are going to think Ashton Kutcher is after I keep reminding them what he said about hard work. But this is a great message.
For me, over the last 5 years… Seth Godin has been my Zig Ziglar. He hasn’t taught me how to sell, but how to over come the fear and or resistance of what it takes to be or try to be great.
From this interview…
No for now
The people you are calling on….
do not owe you a meeting,
they do not owe you an answer,
they do not owe you one minute of their time.
Crafting a perfect pitch letter to get their attention? Not a lot of faith in that approach
Rejection from people that care about you isn’t a bad thing
It is a message
not a message message of giving up,
but a message that you just told them a story that didn’t resonate (I like that word) with them that today.
They are saying…
do not bother me tomorrow with the same story,
you will not be able to badger me into doing business with you
but what you could do is
tell me a different story
about a different problem
on a different day….
because if you treated me ethically the first time, why wouldn’t I want to listen to you a second time.
AND… don’t try and get best customer first. Get them last!! start with the ones that are more likely to listen to the story carefully.
Because in the end, the best customers just want to know that all the other people have already said yes.
zig ziglar…
…do not become a wandering generality… instead figure out how to be a meaningful specific.
From the Wiener read… Jiro Ono, the 86-year old master sushi chef and subject of the highly acclaimed documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi has been preparing sushi for over 70 years; Seinfeld has been a stand-up comic for over 35 years. Both are widely considered to be among the best in the world at what they do, and yet listening to them, one comes away with the impression they will never be satisfied. They are constantly practicing, honing their work, and seeking to improve.
As Jiro describes it: “All I want to do is make better sushi. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb to reach the top but no one knows where the top is.”
From the Seinfeld read…..
“Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”
and on Ichiro Suzuki, the lean Yankees outfielder… “This is the guy I relate to more than any athlete,” Seinfeld said. “His precision, incredible precision. Look at his body type — he’s made the most of what he has. He’s the hardest guy to get out. He’s fast. And he’s old.”
