We hate to be misunderstood. Better yet, we can’t stand over-hearing (in someone else’s casual conversation) that our motives or intention suck.

How many times have you been in a conversation with a bunch of people when you thought you heard your name spaced too close to an insult or some other negative nonsense?

Maybe a little something like this:

Crowd: That Dan guy….  <faded mumbles>…  what a moron!  I would never do something like that…..  idiot…. you’re telling me…  what a loser!

You: Hey, you guys talk’n to me?

Better yet (what you really want to say): “You guys talking about me?”

You’ve been there, haven’t you?  I know I have.

And for a guy who trained for an Ultimate Fighting competition, it can be hard to bite your lip and leave the area before it becomes the scene of a crime (that would be a bad intention).

Here’s the kicker:

Usually it’s our fault people challenge our intention….

Oh, sure, I know that really we can’t help what other people think or do.  We all get that.

What most of us still don’t understand is the idea of rephrasing our discussions around clearly stating our intention.

Get what I am saying?

Instead of explaining the 6 things that we are going to do; and then justifying the 19 sub-reasons why doing those things is the best way to accomplish our goal, many times it simply easier to state our intention.

Follow me?

Replace “I am going to…..” with “I intend to……”

Now don’t start throwing things at your computer screen (yet…).  You’re right.  It is a subtle shift.  It’s a small deal.  But it has strong psychological power…

People will take “pot-shots” at your actions all day long.  Frankly, it’s pretty easy to do.  Still further, you’ll find people who take what you think is a success and turn it into a “major failure”.  They’ll lambast your 1st Prize ribbon as self-serving and selfishly ego-maniacal luck.  They’ll call you all manner of sophisticated names and even use religion, race, or pedigree as a platform for mis-characterizing your activity.

If you happen to eavesdrop long enough you’ll find out that you might have even murdered the queen of England…

It’s fairly ridiculous behavior.  Right?

Here’s an observation for you:  These same people back down when you say VERY clearly what you are “intending”…

When you say “I intend to make that happen”, they say “Go to it…”.  But when you say “I am going to do that”, they say “Over my dead body”

While we are jealous and petty people at times, we find ourselves reluctant to challenge inanimate intention…  When a motive is clearly stated, we tend to accept it.  Start stating yours…

Don’t take this lightly.  Here some things to consider:

1. Be smart about the abuse you decide to take — Life is short but it certainly comes at you hard.  It’s a non-stop game of survivor.  Be careful about how much effort you place in convincing people of your point of view.  Leave the politics around tactics to someone else and state your motives right up front.  It will take a lot of guts for someone to challenge you.  Some still will.  And, maybe, you do need to be challenged.  You will find, though, that the mindless jibber-jabber fades into the background when you are clear about your intention.
2. Create your own drama to boost your productivity — Great politics is great PR.  You certainly don’t want to launch a full scale ad campaign every time you want to get something done, but it doesn’t hurt though to tell your side of the story first.  Create the narrative before people start imagining.  There is a reason we call the imagination “wild” — because it is.  Stating your intention early and often keeps all of us sane and motivated.  The more you remind people of the goals from the beginning, the less you will find yourself “challenged” as you attempt to navigate an every changing tactical landscape.
3. Make doubters look like idiots, debating themselves — Make your activities a by-product of your intention and strategical downplay your exact movements…  Let’s talk turkey here.  You don’t always know how you are exactly going to get something done.  Right?  You might have a ton of experience in a specific area, but that doesn’t mean that this challenge is exactly like all the rest.  You might want to tell us more about the destination than the journey.  Ask the doubters what tactics they would like to employ to get your goal accomplished.  One of two things will happen — your goal will get done or you will silence your critics.  Either way, I am sure you’ll be happy.

Let me show you how this works:

I intend to change the world of high-performance…

That’s my motivation.  That’s what I am “up to”.

And, no, in case you overheard the same thing I did, I’m not like “that”.  Just a guy with a different perspective trying to help you be more effective and unstoppable.

What do you intend to do?

It’s that time of year again where we take stock of our poor performance from last year and write down blissful wishes for what we want to make happen this year.

It actually a pretty worthwless activity…

From joining a new gym to going to church more to drinking less — whatever you resolve come New Years has a 78% chance of ultimately failing.  That’s almost everybody!

I didn’t make that up.  That’s what a recent international study of almost a thousand people indicated.

Just like we have been trained to do nice things for people around Christmas even though we act like inconsiderate jerks the rest of the year, so we have also trained ourselves to pause ever so briefly at the beginning of each year to wish we could do a few things differently in the coming year.

And it’s a worthless waste of time for 8 out of 10 of us.

And while I am on the subject, why are we still talking about 3-year and 5-year plans when we can’t get this yearly thing figured out?  Seems like a bunch of silly nonsense.

Seriously, are we committed to real change? Real sacrificial “it hurts like hell” change.

We don’t even apply the same level of respect to our own goals as we do the dudes we watch on ESPN.

We respect an obsessive work ethic that makes an all star like Michael Jordan sink 100 free-throws in a row before leaving practice.  We marvel at the obscene practice put in by perfectionists like Tiger Woods who practice distance putting at 3 and 10 foot intervals for hours a day.

And yet when it comes to putting in a little more effort for ourselves, we tend to be the first to come up with excuses (good ones too).  And the older we get, the more experience we gain explaining why our failure was really a good thing.

Aren’t you tired of mediocrity?  Of being an “almost all-star”?

Are you willing to do something about it?  To change?

Are you willing to:

1. Connect your goal with a larger mision in life… (turn “making more money” into “helping a small company flourish”)
2. Construct your goal into a series of smaller monthly milestones… (turn big deadlines into a series of progressive tasks)

If so, you might be ready to see breakthrough this year.  This might be the year of YOU… ALL of the 22% who accomplished their annual goals noted that these two were the two primary drivers for their success — passion and planning.

It’s amazing what you can do when you really want something more for yourself.

You might just change the world.

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”…

Sometimes life throws you a curve ball.

Things blow up…. bad.

You get beaten up in your personal life and it starts to affect your chances at closing deals.

You have opportunities that demand finesse, skill, and talent — and you feel defeated and ready to quit.

Winning is more than about a notch on the belt. It pays the bills.  Not succeeding is something you don’t want to consider….

So, what do you do?  How do you put your life back together while not missing a career beat?

1. Recognize that life dealt you a black eye.  There is no use denying the obvious.
2. Try to solve solvable life problems as soon as possible.  Let go of your ego.
3. Spend time “grinding” through the sales steps you know you need to get done.  Send emails.  Return calls.
4. Set aside a few special minutes a day to focus on your sales goals.  Focus on your dreams.
5. Write down your scattered sales strategy thoughts throughout the days.  Your mind has a lot going on so take the time to store your half-finished ideas on paper.
6. Write your daily goals on a calendar and don’t let time commitments slide.  Don’t let things that used to take 5 minutes take 30 minutes.
7. Talk to someone that you trust and get the bad stuff out of your head.  Telling yourself that you suck is not a super way to build confidence.
8. Challenge yourself in a favorite hobby or through physical exercise.  Take time for mastery.
9. Take the first step toward your sales goal that day. Then another. Then another.  Build momentum.
10. Learn from the experience — about yourself, about how your customer might be feeling.  Build empathy.

There’s probably more to this list than the points I have included.  In fact, I am sure there is more to consider.  The point is that life happens — and it hurts.  You want the world to stop so you can heal and it won’t.  It just runs you over again.  Use these basic steps to stay “in the game” while your world works itself out.

Winning is not about removing problems that you can not control but about continuing in spite of them…

————————

And a special event for The DEW View! community.  Join me November 19th for a Masterclass about “Edgy Conversations: An Explosion of Opportunities”

Ever wonder how some sales executives land big deals with big players and you feel stuck chatting up the small guys about opportunities that will probably never happen.  Do you want to get the attention of the right people?  Do you want to see the number of opportunities you are working on explode?  Learn how to have “Edgy Conversations”.  Learn how to have conversations that matter….

I hope we can share a few minutes together…

Think through the mind of your customer… and ask yourself if you are “illogically” wooing your customer.  Are you doing what no one else will do to make them successful?  Are you working to guarantee that your customer hits a home run by working with you?

It’s not logical.  In fact, it doesn’t really make sense from a “nuts-and-bolts” perspective.

But like anything, when you swing the opposite direction, you get a better perspective.  Instead of being illogically helpful, let’s look at being illogically awful.  Let’s look at the bad emails we send and see how we can make them better.

The endless onslaught of crappy emails has accelerated.  It has gotten serious.  For some reason, crazy sales people who need to have a strong Q4 all decided that they need to mass email the world in the hopes that we will magically take an interest in their nonsensery.

There is no interest in a relationship or learning what might be important to you or me.  It’s all about their email and how they have access to an amazing service that we “can’t miss out on”.  I want to drag them into my office, throw them on the floor and let them know this simple fact that they are overlooking:

We have thoroughly enjoyed not “enjoying” your service; and if your current care of us is any indication of your future care, then we are best served to not be your customer….. ever — for the sake of our health.

It is such a horrible experience to get these emails.  It’s like a sudden nausea that has me tasting a little stomach acid in my mouth.  I feel sick but my head’s not warm.  I just don’t feel well after reading this chicanery.

I had one such illogically awful encounter earlier this month when I received the following email in my inbox…

Of course, I was more than a little surprised and then annoyed at the premise of the email. (In this case, “annoyed” is a code word for “enraged”).

1. There is no mention of my name in this entire email (I am not totally sure if she sent this to the right person…)
2. There is value statement (I can’t figure out what really sets Melissa apart as being worth my time…)
3. There is no call to action (I am kind of confused as to what logical action Melissa expects from me…)
4. There is way too much content (I immediately start skimming because it “appears long and boring…)
5. There is different color font in the email (I start wondering “why” and if there’s a special reason…)

So I emailed Melissa back.  And yes, I was in a funk.  My time had been wasted.  My intelligence had been insulted.  I was upset with myself that I had even given Melissa time in my busy day.  I was irate and so I shared my thoughts:

I just asked Melissa why being “illogically awful” was a reason why I should care. And not to be outdone or undeterred she let me know.  She wasn’t trying to woo me as a customer.  She was throwing data at me and hoping that I might be interested.

AWFUL!

A truly “illogically awful” experience.  Melissa clearly did not want me as a customer.

A lot of sales books tell you that you qualify and don’t take chances with customers — that you do exactly what Melissa did:

• That you refine your questions to only work with prospects who have money and time…. you get then give…
• That you only build a relationship once you see that your prospect has something “in it” for you…  you prioritize based on immediate perceived value…
• That you trade enough negotiable points and win a deal without taking any risks…. you never appear vulnerable or genuine…
• That you explain all your moves logically in a “I always win” matrix… you need to appear important and in control…

But let’s not belabor the illustration.  We can learn how to be “illogically helpful” by doing everything that Melissa failed to do.

1. Be personal — Start the email by calling me my name – my first name and leave off the “mister”….
2. Be brief — Keep it to 5 sentences max.  If you need to tell me more, don’t…
3. Be thorough — Tell me something you know I don’t know… and convince me you’re bad-ass…
4. Be creative — Leave me wanting to hear the rest of your idea…
5. Be different — Remove any buzzwords and industry “gibberish” that make me tune you out…
6. Be inspiring — Combine what you want from me with what I care about.  I might actually get involved…
7. Be important — Leave me good contact details so I can return your call or email and add you to my address book…
8. Be neat — Proof read your email to make sure it is grammatically “mostly correct”.  Bad punctuation is distracting…
9. Be safe — Don’t go nuclear on a random idea until we have a relationship. (i.e. politics, religion, etc…)…
10. Be vulnerable — Admit it if you want help.  If you claim to have it figured out and don’t I lose respect…
11. Be About Me — Rewrite your email if there are more I‘s and me‘s than you‘s.  You are writing to me so make it about me…

And here is the kicker: If you follow all the traditional sales rules (like Melissa did) you might never really ever lose a big deal.  You’ll never be in a position to question whether you made the right decision.  You’ll never have to take risks….

But you’ll never have the illogic to support yourself landing big deals.

]]> http://danwaldschmidt.com/2009/10/edgyconversations/illogically-help-me-be-your-customer/feed 5 http://danwaldschmidt.com/2009/09/edgyconversations/stop-shouting-at-me http://danwaldschmidt.com/2009/09/edgyconversations/stop-shouting-at-me#comments Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:17:35 +0000 Dan Waldschmidt http://thedewview.com/?p=1204

Since when did we as business people decide that having conversations was too much work?

Instead of discussion with our customers and the community we decided that SHOUTING at the world was the “latest and greatest” in sales-marketry…  That being annoying was a great replacement for providing value to the community around us.

(If you see the guy who switched the playbook let me know so I can slip him over the border into North Korea.)

I want a lifetime ban on boring HTML newsletters.  They just suck.

At least pretend to know my name.  I feel like the other side of a bad date.  Like I am being used for just another number in your “see my 10 gabillion readers” quest for encyclopedic  nonsensery.

And here is the ironic part about the craziness of your bad content:

I really want to be inspired by what you have to say to me.  I want to get a rush of adrenaline and nod my head at the end of each paragraph as you rock it out.  That’s what I want from our conversation.

Instead, you think that your fancy picture (which I have now officially deemed “Lame 2009 Clipart” or L2C for short) does a better job of telling me what you really want me to know.

Here’s another paradox:  We all hate the loud dude in the office who just won’t shut up (which is usually me).   But then we turn around become the sales people of the world who fight fearlessly for our loud and impersonal emails that just do the same thing.

We need to stop thinking about emails as sales tools and more as conversation tools.

If you wouldn’t kick down your customer’s door and start spitting sales facts in his face in person, then don’t do it with your emails.

Stop shouting….

Start sharing.

It you have been in sales long then you can appreciate when I make the observation that SALES is a fight.  It require discipline, dedication, and dogged training.  To be the best (or even get better) you have to “put in the time” in the sales gym.  You can’t get better by being a “January Gym Going”…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DALfwu5doGU]

It doesn’t work.  You will never be the dude giving the knockout punch.  You’ll find yourself gasping for breath, knocked around, and feeling like you just got sucker punched.  And the reality is just that.  You got taken (and lost the deal)…

Like a good fight, the winner knows what he is going to do before the chime of the bell.  He has a plan and he executes with a zeal of a man who is about to get his head split open if he doesn’t win.  It’s that intense.

So what do you do?

You “put in the time”!  (like a lot of life, there is no shortcut….)

You study your craft, study the big players, study some great sources (like Seth and Sandler and Shamus and SalesClub)…  and you decide that whatever happens (no matter how badly you get hurt) you will show up for training the next day…  Because that’s what winners do.

And this is your fight.  And you have come to play……

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)

Warren Buffett famously coined the term “skin in the game” in his business insight that you can “guarantee” the success of a company by requiring C-level executives to use their own money to buy stock in the particular company they are running.  Since the company’s interests and the senior leadership’s interests are the same thing, you have maximum inertia in the right direction…

That’s great for running a business, but let’s go another direction.

If you’ve played on an outdoor basketball court at all, then you know what it’s like to leave “skin in the game”.  It can be brutal.  Every dive and fall leaves a scrape, a gash, or a bruise.

The harder you play, the tougher you need to be.

So it is on the court of “changing the world”…

You should assume that you will leave skin in the game if you really believe in something:

• If you don’t have skeptics… then your idea isn’t big enough…
• If you don’t have critics…  then you are doing everything wrong…
• If you don’t have a nemesis…  then you are not changing the status quo…

If you have skin in the game, you can expect to be regularly maligned, misunderstood, hated… and most possibly SUCCESSFUL!