Do you have big dreams? For 2010?  For right now?

What you do, how far you succeed, what you achieve — they all come from what you think about. They all come from what you are thinking about RIGHT now…

And here’s the kicker……

Controlling your thoughts is the hardest part about struggling toward success. There is nothing more difficult. There is not a bigger challenge.  Frankly, nothing you do is more important.

Let’s face it.  The journey is brutal and you will likely end up bruised and battered along the way, but above all else you have to remain mentally tough. You have to stay focused on your future.

(Are you shaking your head yet?  Do you agree with me?)

Good.  Let’s get our hands dirty with this….

Let’s talk about your finances and your relationships.  These are the two biggest areas of concern for any of us.

When thing start going to sh#%!t in these two areas, it is harder to stay focused on your future.  Close to impossible.  You get sidetracked and start thinking about how to solve the most recent problem instead of spending effort and time on your destiny.

That’s usually never a good thing.

YES, you need to get distractions out-of-the-way before you start tackling your goals, but also you need to be cognizant of what you are doing – of the impact of your change in focus.

When you let personal matters — like your finances — go unchecked, you find yourself trading the right thing for the right now thing.

Isn’t the biggest influence on our decisions on ANY given day personal finances?   So if you don’t have a handle on your budget, start fixing it today. There are plenty of tools to help you solve this problem.

Try using Mint or Rudder to manage where your money goes. And while you are at it, go grab Peter Dunn‘s new book, 60 Days to Change.  Solve your bad habit of hoping everything works out and guarantee that it starts heading that direction.

Know what I am saying? Take control of your goals — your dreams of destiny — by taking real-world, tangible action to boost your success.

Don’t pretend this doesn’t apply to you either.  I know the “I’ll just sell more” excuse.  I was king of that line of thinking for way too long.  There is a better way to capture your dream.  Peter actually makes it fun.

Anything that comes between you and your goal — physical or mental — is your enemy and you must destroy it…  Take money off your brain and start focusing on deals that will help you be a bigger success…

—————————-

FULL DISCLOSURE:  Pete’s team asked me my thoughts on the book and here is what I wrote on the back cover of his book:

“You can’t change the world while fighting with the bank to forgive your 17 overdraft fees. To get extreme results, you have to take control of your personal finances. Pete breaks it all down with wit and wisdom into a 60-day mission of personal financial domination. In between chuckles, you’ll be kicking yourself that you didn’t read this earlier.”

Lips blue and hands shaking beyond human control, Carl Brashear struggled to find the next step up the side of the metal ladder to the wooden pier.  As he made it to the top of the landing, he staggered to a wooden bench to sit down.  His legs were no longer strong enough to hold him beneath the weight of a 200 pound brass diving suit.  No one had survived this long.  No one yet.

For the past 9 hours, he had searched the floor of the ocean for the couplings, brackets, and screws he needed to complete his task.  Against supernatural odds and direct opposition from the world around him, he had found deep within himself the power to continue.  Years later when asked why he fought so hard, he simple stated: “I ain’t going to let nobody steal my dream”…

In 2000, Cuba Gooding Jr. starred in the telling of Carl’s story.  It ranks right up there with Rudy as one of the most inspirational movies of all time, Men of Honor…

Which got me thinking about a personal quality that is often overlooked by those who want to be high performers — honor….

Honor can be a confusing concept.  I think of it less as a “knight and fair maiden fairytale” and more of the quite resolve that guides what we do.  It’s our own code of conduct.  The rules we set for ourself and how we do business…

Changing the world demands a code.  Without it you get lost in the noise of the critics and lose out to the temptations to chose shortcuts and the easy way out.

Here’s the harsh reality of our lives:

Most of us will quit too early…  Give up too soon!

We let our critics wear us down to the point that we convince ourselves that changing the world is no longer important.  We get tired of the friction of being different and acting different and decide that maybe the cause isn’t that important.  We start taking failure too personally and start living petty lives derailing others.

We let others steal our dreams and our souls.

And here’s another harsh reality:

It’s our fault we lost our way… We let this happen.

We gave in to the pressure.  We stopped fighting when things for too tough.  We traded acceptance for belief.

And now we need to change it.  We can recharge our honor system; invest back into our code.

So let’s do that….

(It starts with patience…)

Soren Kierkegaard, a danish philosopher said it best: “Patience is necessary… you cannot reap immediately where you have sown.”

You can’t build your honor system overnight.  You can’t.  There is something about living by a code that requires you getting a thorough beating.  An untested code is nothing.  You have to be tested (and many times over).

But the good things about honor is that you alone are the master of your destiny.  You control your responses to those around you — the critics, the fans, the rest of the world.

SO:

1. Be honorable to you – You are all you have in the world and as soon as you lose your sense of “you”, it all stops making sense pretty quickly.  Don’t lie to yourself.  If you put in 40% effort and failed then admit it and put in more effort next time.  If you try to convince yourself that 40% was really 100%, then you just trimmed your peak performance in a huge way.  The effects get worse and worse and eventually you will find yourself sweating just to contribute 10% of your old self.  Decide to be unapologetically honest with yourself and you will find that even when you screw up, you perform at consistently higher levels than you did in the past.
2. Be honorable to your dream – It’s hard to stand up when you keep getting pushed back down.  But the dream (your dream) is the most powerful force you know.  People live and people die.  Bad things happen and good luck too.  You can’t always control your immediate circumstances.  But you can always control your attitude.  That’s important.  Bad things can turn right around into amazingly good things almost overnight.  It’s hard but you have to remember your dream.  You can’t lose that part of you when it looks like the world is fighting against you
3. Be honorable to your core values – Don’t do bad things to other people.  I don’t know how to say it any other way.  It’s amazing how karma comes around at the worst possible time to take it’s “pound of flesh”.  If you make it a habit to take advantage of other people, you can expect that you will get your ass kicked eventually.  Let’s hope it’s not at the time when you are taking down the biggest sale of your life.  Earn karma points by giving help to others without asking for anything.  Just do it to be a delight.  When you do take an uppercut, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people wanting to help.
4. Be honorable to your peers – Admit when you make a mistake and apologize.  Nothing tests your code like having to admit that you were a idiot.  It happens.  What doesn’t happen a lot of the time is us letting go of our egos.  And that sucks.  You can’t be better — operate consistently as a high-performer, when you don’t take responsibility for your actions (even unintended outcomes)…  Own up.  Move on.  Don’t hold out on apologizing because you think your peers haven’t noticed that you screwed up.  Guess what?  Now, they not only think you’re an idiot but an as$%hole at the same time.
5. Be honorable to your critics – It’s OK to go down after you take an upper cut.  Let’s face it — you weren’t expecting it in the first place.  Right?  You thought everyone wanted to play nice and instead you find yourself flat on your back trying to clear your head so you can get back in the fight.  Take your time standing up (take the full 10 seconds), but when you get back up, don’t throw low blows.  Critics operate under one basic premise — trying to convince the rest of the world that everything you do is motivated by the “mania of an ax murderer” (or something close to that).  Nothing you do will be right.  So just know that and move on.  Don’t let it affect your code.  And whatever you do, don’t really do something legitimately spiteful on purpose.  That just feeds the addiction your critics already have.

Friends come and go and circumstance change every few seconds but you have to live with yourself longer than anyone.  Be cool with yourself.  Live with honor.  Sell without limits…

My roots in understanding the concept of honor came from my dad, who just turned 61 on Monday.  Everyone who knows him knows what I am talking about.  He set a high standard…

I remember one snow day where all of us kids had the day off because the schools were closed.  Pebbled ice covered the road about 2 inches with another 6-7 inches of powder snow on top of that.  I expected my dad to be home with us as most of the federal offices were on leave because of the weather.  Instead, he took 5 hours to make the drive into the office at the NSA.  I don’t really know what needed to get done that day, but my dad make the trek because it was important to him.  It’s the small things that define our code.  It’s the things that we are remembered for in years to come.

I was in a conversation with a close friend last week about some serious matters when I just stopped everything I was talking about and simply summed it up by noting:

“You know? This is the hardest sale of my life”…

Have you ever been there? Are you there right now?

It’s a pretty incredible opportunity to really know that what you are engaged in RIGHT now is the fight of your life.

• Understanding that nothing else you have ever done before compares to the challenge you are facing right now…
• Realizing that when you walk away victorious from this challenge you will have won the biggest battle of your life…

It’s a do or die set-up.

A time when the fork in the road is a choice of harder or hardest. There is nothing easy about this — just a painful uphill struggle.

So what do you do if you find yourself in this opportunity? How do you handle the hardest sale of your life?

1. You hold nothing back in your personal effort — The fight of your life demands the fight of your life.  You really have to lay it all on the line: mind, body, and soul.   And if there is anything else you have to offer, you need to put that in the game as well.   All!  Everything!  Every ounce of effort goes to winning this cause.  (And by the way, don’t confuse “almost” with “all”. One gets you close to the deal. The other is what helps you close the deal.)
2. You don’t stop your analysis until you find real meaning — Things are never as they seem.  Winners today can end up the real losers tomorrow.  You have to keep digging into the “facts” of the case until you get the answers that no one else has.  Here’s a DEW favorite: “remember that it’s always what it’s not – at least the first few times around”.  That means that the standard answers you are getting from your prospect about timeline and budget are the exact opposite from the actual words that you are hearing.
3. You are patient with results and refuse to over-react – Most sales people are their own worst enemy once they sense that they might not be winning the hardest deal of their life. They transform into irrational, paranoid super-sulky panhandlers asking for the prospect’s loose change. They stop thinking like the savvy business ninjas that got them into the game in the first place. You need to remember to be patient with the process. Put in place the “24 Hour Rule” ( i.e. No communication to the client for a full day after you sense bad news from a prospect.)  Use that time to find an alternative strategy that shows your care of the client rather than a hand-out attempt to beg for their attention.
4. You ask for non-judgmental advice from a guru – A guru doesn’t need to be a world-famous author or the biggest hotshot in your industry.  Sometimes that guy is the manager who has been doing this for three decades and has seen a million different deals come and go.  Sometimes that guru is just an article written on a blog or your favorite selling magazine.  The key is that the advice has to be non-judgmental.  You are where you are and asking someone (at this point) how you could have done it “better” is a huge waste of your time and a real “downer”.  Talk about “next steps” from “right here”.  Ask for advice and you will likely get some solutions you would not have considered all on your own.
5. You take time for physically tasking exercise – There is  nothing that compares to kicking ass in the business world like kicking ass in the gym.  It clears your mind and prepares your body for stressful situations.  The world-famous Mayo Clinic calls exercise “Meditation in Motion” and that seems to have been my experience running on the open road.   You need to be physically and mentally prepared for a potential beating and nothing helps you navigate the madness of your schedule like a regular session of body building.  Take 30 minutes and push yourself hard.  You’ll find new confidence returning just when you need it most.
6. You consider the advantages of the “outrageous” — Sometimes you need to break out the “clown suit” and go for broke — I am joking 99.5% here. While you don’t want to be silly, there is some solid reasoning to asking the hard questions you were afraid to ask during the sales competition — like “we didn’t really have a chance did we?” or “we sure seemed to miss the mark with you guys, didn’t we?” or “I’m embarrassed that we were so so self-centered we didn’t think more about the value we should have been providing to you.”  When you get the answers to these questions, you might find yourself with some solid “behind the scenes” information to propose a winning counter-solution.  You have nothing to lose, so go for it…
7. You reverse roles with your buyer and justify “you” – Think about how you appear to your prospect.  Are you a whiner? A bully? A loudmouth? A hot-shot?  A miserable time-wasting, arrogant asshole?  Who are you from the buyer’s perspective?  Consider that….   You can call yourself the superhero of value propositions, but if your prospect doesn’t get it, then you have failed – miserably.  Think about the words you are using.  How would you react if they were being “played” to you?  Reverse your roles and see how you look from the other side of the table…
8. You manage personal distractions by eliminating them first – You can’t execute a masterful strategy while you have nagging side issues beating you between the temples.  Conventional sales books have all made the case for running after distractions after you do your core mission.  I totally disagree.  That’s a horrible process.  It doesn’t work.  Distractions are a part of life.  You have to manage these issues FIRST, before they threaten your ability to perform at high levels.  Don’t half-ass the hardest sale of your life by focusing part of our attention on something else.  Get the nasty stuff off your plate – or at least partly solved – and then go kick ass.
9. You don’t ask if dropping your price will close the deal — At this point (in the middle of the hardest sale of your life) you are way past grovelling for a rock-bottom price negotiation vantage point. Don’t do it.  Double the value analysis of your offering.  Triple your support offering. But do not cut your price.  Customers want the best offer — not necessary the lowest price.  By providing the most VALUE (i.e. explained benefit to the buyer) you become the best offer.  And here is a question for you: Does a price drop really ever increase your odds of winning the deal?  Doesn’t it just make you more frustrated?  So don’t do it.  Force yourself to demonstrate value instead.
10. You close the hardest sale of your life — You face down your demons, put in the effort, and at the end of the day you take a commission to the bank.  You close the deal because you want it the most.  Because you are willing to ask for help.   You wait patiently through the chaos, the client demands, and personal fears.  You close the deal.

That’s what you do.

You close the hardest sale of your life.

And why? Because that’s all there is to do.  That’s why you are in the game — to fight, to win…

I certainly don’t want to gloss over this idea. There’s more to this idea and it’s not for everyone.  It’s certainly one of those topics that is easier to talk about than to actually do.

That’s because deep down some of you think that winning is for someone else.  That you aren’t the one who can win.

But you are mistaken.  You are a winner.  You were born that way.  You can do it. You can win big.  You can close the hardest sale of your life.

Call me, I’ll help you.

]]> http://danwaldschmidt.com/2009/12/edgyconversations/the-hardest-sale-of-your-life/feed 13 http://danwaldschmidt.com/2009/11/edgyconversations/in-search-of-stellar http://danwaldschmidt.com/2009/11/edgyconversations/in-search-of-stellar#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:53:48 +0000 Dan Waldschmidt http://thedewview.wordpress.com/?p=1329

Many thanks to the dozens of you who have sent me kind messages over the last two weeks asking where The DEW View! had gone. 

Nowhere.

I just didn’t have anything shockingly inspiring to share.

I really do want to change the world not waste your time.

ALSO… this blog is getting a massive upgrade.  I am working on some new content at danielwaldschmidt.com for you along with my friends at Channel V Media that I am SO excited to share with you.  That should be coming to you at the beginning of the year.  It’s really going to be VERY cool.  I will finally have a platform to offer you so much more content…

Everything that I am working on falls in the general category of high performance.  It’s a curious thought.  How can you consistently perform at amazingly high levels?

……….How can I do that?

………………..How can you do that?

…………………………How can you hold you employees to that standard?

These questions are on my mind these days.  Frankly, I think it’s on a lot of your minds too — if your emails and calls are an indication of what you are thinking about these days.

Being amazing, awesome, stellar — whatever you call it — really comes down to three attributes that any of us can have.  It’s not a hard formula to understand.  Is is however a painfully hard act to live…

Here is what defines “stellar”:

1. Desire — You have to want to be better.  This is where it all starts.  Without desire, you will quickly fall off the mark of consistent high performance.  It happens all time — well intentioned, passionate people giving up way too soon.  Their will is broken.  Their passion is quelled.  WHY?  They give up because they forget how bad they really want to be successful.  You need desire now more than ever.  With the gloom of global economic negativity in our face every day, desiring more for yourself is a must.
2. Dedication — You have to focus your time on being a high performer.  You can’t just simply want to be amazing and it magically happen.  You’re life isn’t a David Blaine performance, it’s a battle — for your time and attention.  Daily activity toward your goal is the only way to be a consistent high performer.  Small things add up to big things over time.  They do.  With the dedication toward accomplishing small goals, you will find yourself doing huge things over time.
3. Discipline — You have to train yourself to endure the bad stuff that happens along the way.  Despite the best plans and the most altruistic of ambitions, people and circumstances will rain all over your parade.  They will discourage you.  Many times they will deliberately try to hurt you.  You have to be ready to take a punch, get knocked out, and then stand back up and keep fighting — time after time after time.  No matter what happens, you have to have the discipline to reach deep within your soul and fight on.

Success is not usually an intellectual challenge.  It’s a mental challenge.  Desire, dedication, and discipline are not taught in the classroom.  They are a harsh reality of life.  You can be stellar.  You can find excellence.  You can be amazing…

How are you searching for stellar?

—————

By the way, if you missed the “Edgy Conversations” webinar I presented for Top Sales Expert International last week, click here to check out what 740 other people clicked on to see.  The video is about 60 minutes long and got some tremendous reviews from those who saw it live.  As a side note, there were a handful of the hundreds who saw this that thought I was a complete moron — so you know it has to be “spicy”…

Two stories.

One central theme.

It all started on Friday with a call from my friend, Jill Stelfox…

The Bad Movie

Between a mix of tears and laughing she told me how she had been working to secure a vendor to tape video footage of one of her clients.  Her client is a financial planner who is on MSNBC as a leading source of “money talk” and so she wanted to get a copy of all his appearances to add to his website.  (Sounds like a good plan to me…) So she reached out to several different vendors who quoted her prices between $125 to $150 per tape clip.  One vendor though struck a different tone.  He offered to provide the service at $85 per clip – provided she bought 25 up-front – and even suggested he send her a sample of her client on video.

Pleased, Jill provided more information, and a short bit later the vendor sent over the video.  After looking at the tape Jill called the vendor with a serious problem — the audio and video were synced horribly like a bad Chinese Kung Fu movie.  Jill’s client was talking and his lips were moving “out of timing” with the audio.  The video quality itself was “super spotty”.  Still — this was a FREE sample.  Maybe there was a good explanation (or not).

The vendor listened as Jill spoke and then professionally admitted that there was a problem.  He then went on to note that he “knew there was a problem and that was why he was asking for 25 up-front purchases – so he could upgrade his equipment”… (all true, I promise).  He then went on tell Jill that “he was broke and needed the money to do more work for other prospects.”

It took little time for Jill to hang up the phone in disbelief and end a shockingly bizarre buying experience.

Stolen Shoes

Saturday evening Sara and I were “first person” to our own outrageous buying experience.  It went a little something like this:

There is an children’s arcade/amusement center called Frankie’s Fun Park about 10 minutes from our house in Greenville that my two boys (Bryce and Dustin) love for me to take them.  I just went there a few weeks ago when Sara was out-of-town and found the scene morbidly un-engaging.  Employees were frowning and yawning –  like we customers were a chore that they were forced to take care of.   Needless to say, I took the boys home without spending any more money.  I also took the 15.4 seconds necessary to “tweet” to the world about my poor experience.  And then told the boys that we would never be heading back there again…

But, alas, the allure of winning tickets and climbing through indoor jungle gyms was too much for the boys to accept.  They wanted to return and I wanted to make that happen for them.  Besides, Bryce had won almost 2,000 tickets that he had not cashed in for prizes yet.  And so we made our way back into the den of sweaty over-caffeinated kid-dom.

The boys headed straight for the “jungle gym”.  Shoes off and stowed in cubby.  Borrowed socks on.  Fun everywhere with mom and dad cheering on the mayhem (I wish they made one of those for adults…).  It was when the boys got out that the problem began.  Dustin (my 2 year old) had his bright yellow crocs stolen out of his cubby — cubby that his mom and I were standing 5 feet away from the entire night.  Sure — someone might have accidentally picked up the bright yellow crocs by accident (hardly….) — but it was the way the employees handled it that made this a story.

Of course I mentioned this to the 17- year old staff member in that kids area who took a few seconds away from texting to look at me with one eye raised.  ”Steal your kids shoe?” she repeated back to me incredulously — like I was making the entire story up for.  Further outraged, I moved on to the front of the establishment to look for management.  Maybe someone old enough to have a car payment would care about my son’s bright yellow crocs.  Sadly I was mistaken.

When I reached the front desk the manager came hustling out to meet me, chattering in half-tones into an ear piece about some food cleanup.  Without any eye contact, he briefly stopped to tell me that he had “everyone looking for my shoe and that he was sure no one had stolen my sons’s bright yellow crocs.”  To which I kindly refrained from sucker punching him in his face and left with Sara and the boys.  I came to spend money and was left shoeless and insulted.  Another horrible customer experience at an establishment that should be completely focused on user satisfaction.

What’s the point?

It’s simply this.

It’s all about the EXPERIENCE your customers are having!  You can’t explosively grow your revenue when you are pissing off the people who have the revenue to help you grow.  You invest in them FIRST so that they will invest in you FOREVER.

And remember – It’s not about their trial period

…………………………or your proof-of-concept expectations

………………………………….or the support ROI you are factoring

…………………………………………..or “who is right” when a prospect complains.

It’s about how a prospect FEELS while interacting with you.  Michael Ports (what a great author…) made the observation that: “Long after people forget what you said or did, [customers] will remember how you made them feel.”

It’s feelings that we need to change.  Not facts!

By the way, that means that logic or facts have nothing to do with this discussion.  At the heart of this is the concept of “relationships” — which happen to be completely illogical.  You can’t build a spreadsheet around a customer experience strategy or “doing the right thing” (which is why so many companies just hire more schmucky sales dudes to find more prospects rather than get religious about creating an outrageous experience for their “community”).

You can’t even explain how you are going to make more money doing this.  But it works.  It’s the stuff of legends.

• It’s the pricing and staffing economics that make Southwest Airlines the only profitable airline in the US and the most enjoyable (non-luxury) traveling experience….
• It’s what takes the idea of outrageous customer fulfillment and ten years of consistent performance to build a billion dollar online site like Zappos…
• It’s the detailed online client “do-it-yourself” tools that catapult a small franchise like Washington  Mutual into a leading insurance powerhouse…
• It’s the efficiency of client  purchases and delivery that propel Amazon.com to be the leader in online purchases…
• It’s the foundation of an ACE Hardware franchise that continues to “delight” even while getting smashed by larger Home Depot and Lowe’s franchises…

It’s easy to call this “too intangible for action” and just add more dollars to the CRM budget next year.  This takes guts. And faith.  And obsessing about the details of everything you do and every word you train your people to say.  It is a religion.

But “strangely”, when you invest in your customer’s experience, you emerge as the alpha-standard.  You don’t just improve mediocrity.  You set the standard for the new “impossible”.  You are invincible!

Your ability to achieve explosive revenue growth is directly proportional to your obsession with providing an outrageous customer experience.  Suck at one and you’re guaranteed to suck at the other… (DEWism)

High-performers in the world of “deal making” share the universal quality of self-assessment. It’s an internal process of strategically measuring the inputs and outputs of a process or idea (or just “what went down…”) and deciding if it could be done better.  And that’s all good.  It’s more than good — it’s necessary.

But it’s probably not good enough to make you an ALL-STAR (the stuff of legends)

You work better when you work with gut instinct.  At this stage in your deal process, you generally know what NOT to do (which is 2/3 of the learning process) and WHERE you need to head.  But to be the best, you have to be extraordinary — and that requires a different, new, or abstractly innovative idea.  Everything that your boss won’t probably agree with…. because it’s not safe.

But there’s actually science to prove that you do make better decisions from gut instinct rather than thinking too much.

“Whether evaluating abstract objects (Chinese ideograms) or actual consumer items (paintings, apartments, and jellybeans), people who deliberated on their preferences were less consistent than those who made non-deliberative judgments,” write authors Loran F. Nordgren (Northwestern University) and Ap Dijksterhuis (Radboud University, The Netherlands).”

And check this out.  The science gets even more compelling.  After 5 different independent studies, the authors found that “the more complex the decision, the less useful deliberation became.”

That means that less “thought-manship” and more gut instinct is the key to outrageous deal success.

P.S.  Ever wonder why outrageous success is so hard to predict (i.e. there’s no formula)?  It’s because you’re thinking too hard about it.  As you move with gut instinct you see enough of the distance to move around obstacles to get to the finish line.  And, like running at the North Pole, you don’t really need to look over your shoulder because your competition is slim…. (and that’s where I like to play)

Understanding “why” is a frustrating part of life and more specifically your sales negotiations. You can work your ass off, do a lot of things right, and still not get a deal done.

It’s a punch in the gut!

I have had deal-makers get transferred, get sick, get laid off, get fired, get demoted, get married, get retired, get bored and a million other bad and “unplanned” things that kill a deal.

It’s always tough to handle — especially since it almost always unforeseen.

The danger is that you lose motivation trying to dissect something that is too random to really be valuable.  There is nothing there.  Life sucks!  Move on!

Don’t stop to assess, plan, re-strategize, over-think or anything else labeled “the logical” next step.  The truth is that you are punch-drunk — like Rocky in the 11th round.  You can’t trust your logic or your emotions.  What you do next has to be something that is practiced and un-emotional:

1. Keep your head up — You can’t “suck wind” and get energized with your chin tucked in…
2. Keep your hands up — You still need to “protect your chin” with your other prospects…
3. Keep your legs up — You need to push farther and faster now that that you are “behind”…
4. Keep your eyes up — You need to believe in your vision now more than ever…

You can take a gut punch and hit the mat or keep moving…

Sorry.  Can I just get that off my chest?  (of course I can, I write this thing)  :-)

Isn’t media by nature social?

• a VHS tape when passed hand-to-hand is now social media….
• a letter when delivered at the hand of the postman is suddenly social media….

Google wisdom says that media is: “the storage and transmission tools used to store and deliver information or data”.  Sounds pretty social to me.  How about you?

What do you think?

I know that we need to put a label on this interactive world we call life.  Why can’t we just call it a conversation.  Why can’t I have a conversation with you in a lot of different ways where Facebook, LinkedIn, BrightKite, Twitter, and WordPress are all channels to keep us talking — not labeled platforms.

Aren’t you tired of the labels?  Of the nonsense around how important this idea of social media is?

Why can’t we just talk and see where we fit together…  Maybe I am losing my mind, but it seems like having meaningful conversations makes the most sense.

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By the way, check out this incredible discusion by Fred Wilson at #140Conf about Twitter and the monetization of social media:

I get asked all the time to take a look at a business plan or review a sales process (which I usually find intriguing).  There is something about a new idea with plenty of potential that gets me pumped up.

Not every investor is worth “getting in bed with” just because they have a bankroll.

I ran into this presentation poking fun at VC investors a few weeks ago and wanted to share.  It is pretty humorous how many of these are right on…

Here is what a VC would never say to you:  :-)

Here is something else they wouldn’t say:

1. Investors have to believe in you executing (not your product magically becoming the next Google).
2. Investors are too busy  to hold your hand every day and make sure you meet all the other people in their portfolio.
3. Investors expect you to have the answers not to have to answer the same questions every meeting…

Just be informed!

Like your mom used to tell you, “Don’t believe everything you don’t hear…”

That’s me by the way (the topic and scary pic)…

Some of my recent blog posts seem to have touched a raw nerve in the business world.  Besides the stupid comments I deleted from this blog about how stupid I am and ego-maniacal (I might actually be that one), I got a whole series of personal attacks (i.e. threats) that made me pause for a moment and reconsider…

And then I thought: WHO CARES!!!!

Can I share a little secret with you?  A huge part of long-term high-performance is understanding who you are….

Seriously.  Let me share my own personal story with you:

Concepts like discipline, hard work, goal mastery, and passion were drilled into me from an early age.  I was raised by Christian parents who were very moral people (still are) who set the bar very high for performance and personal endeavor.  I was trained in the musical arts (piano and trombone) and in public speaking.  I started my first business before I was a teenager.  I had no access to television for 18 years of my life.  In fact our house was not even wired for cable — my dad told the builder to skip it altogether.  During the summers, I had to read books for at least 2 hours per day and during school “season” I was fined if my bed was not made, shoes lined up in the closet, or (God forbid) I left the window open.  Silly or not, I was trained to be efficient and effective.

I also picked up some bad habits.  I worked so hard to be “perfect” that I spent a lot of “Dan PR” time trying to make sure everyone around me was happy with me.  Was I wearing the right thing to go the right place to see and do the right things……..  It became an internal guessing games of “am I doing everything right”.  That trickled over into my college choices, my business habits, and my selling style.  I was out to prove everything to anyone within earshot, eyeshot, or “texting range”.

And then I hit a few rough patches…  And all the critics that I was working so hard to please were no where around to help me.  They were happy to throw their mental “sucker punch” and run.  Everyone I was trying so hard to please was pleased that I was failing.  I was pushed myself to “be better” and they were providing enough criticism to feed my addiction.

It took a great coach, a great wife, therapy, and lot of experience for me to come to grips with me being me.  And guess what?  I am more successful than ever — in every sense, style, and shape of the word…  Lesson learned!

When you try to be who you are not, you waste enormous energy being someone that who is not effective.  I may be wrong.  I may be stupid.  I probably am half as bright as you are.  But I am cool with that.  Being me is pretty surreal…

But I also have a secret that you should know: Long after you give up, sit down, and throw in the towel, I will be achieving excellence because the “me” that was trained to be effective and efficient  is a warrior — and warriors conquer.

Do not apologize for greatness, achieve it.

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P.S.  I had the best parents a child could ever ask for.  Thanks Mom and Dad for being rockstars!