Working Harder is Not Always the Answer
A friend of mine was running a landscaping business for someone, overseeing the crews and the like. Now I’m in sales, but I mention the landscaping for a reason.
It was late in August on the hottest day of the year. Must have been about two o’clock in the afternoon, not a cloud in the sky and the temperature pushing 101°. They were re-grading a section of the local golf course. Not a tree in sight. About an hour later and 300 feet away, he saw this shovel rising up out of the ground, tossing the dirt, going back down, coming back up. You could have set your watch to the rhythm.
Two hours later they decided to pack it up. It had grown even hotter. He glanced over to where he had seen the shovel earlier and right on schedule, up it came, dirt tossed, back down and back up.
He went over to see just who could keep that up. Down in this trench was a fellow about 5 feet tall and about 50 years old. Sweat was pouring off of him.
“Hard work,” he called down to the gentleman.
The man looked up, never breaking rhythm, and said with no trace of exertion, “Hell, this ain’t hard. I just make a hole from stake to stake. What was hard was knowing where to put the stakes in the first place.”
From the point of view of the fellow in the ditch, the hard work had already been done. Every shovelful after the first one was getting him one shovelful closer to success. From my friend’s point of view, what he was doing was extremely hard work. Now I ask you, whose point of view is the one that really matters?
Many folks, not just salespeople, fervently believe that if you work hard every day, success will show up at your door at some point in the future. There is nothing wrong with the right type of “hard work.”
What’s the right type? You know where to start. You know where to end. You know what you have to do to get from the starting point to the ending point. You are confident that you can do it. And you set out to do it in a steady and constant manner.
Should you do this type of “hard work,” you will find out something odd. You will perceive the work as tiring at times, but not hard at all. Others will look at what you are doing and shake their heads in astonishment. How can he/she keep that up, they will think. It’s so boring. So mind-numbing.
Remember the fellow in the ditch. He was sweating a river but absolutely confident because he knew where he was headed. While the work was tiring, he did not think it hard. His perception of the work was the only one that mattered because he was the one doing the work. It doesn’t matter at all what you or I think, because it doesn’t get the ditch dug any faster or slower.
Do this for yourself. Not for the sales manager. Not for upper management. Not for your fellow salespeople. Only for yourself. Write down where you want to end up six months from now. Write down where you are at this moment in relation to six months from now. Write down all of the things you can do to get to that spot in the future. Decide, of those things you can do, which ones you are going to do every day for the next six months. Now start doing them. Every day.
This is important. Don’t show anyone what you have written. Keep it to yourself. Why? Because the moment you do, whether you are told something good or bad, you’ll stop doing it.
Sounds easy? It is. If you don’t know where to start and where you are going to end, then all the work you do is pointless. Pointless work is always hard work.
by Karl Schaphorst, President
402-403-4334 | www.karlschaphorst.sandler.com
Sandler Training is a global training organization with over three decades of experience and proven results. Sandler provides sales and management training and consulting services for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as corporate training for Fortune 1000 companies. For more information, please contact Karl Schaphorst at (402) 403-4334 or by email at kschaphorst@sandler.com. You can also follow his blog at karlschaphorst.sandler.com