I CAN’T SIT STILL. YOU SHOULDN’T EITHER.
When I announced in my November 26th posting my wife, Chris, has accepted a management position with the Mayo Clinic, and that I will be following her to Rochester, Minnesota, as soon as our house in South Milwaukee sells, a lot of people were amazed. “Why,” one commentator emailed, “would you upset the apple cart this late in your life and move to another state? We always considered you Wisconsin’s Construction Material Evangelist.”
Truth is, I have always had a hard time sitting still. Especially as a child, I drove my parents, sitters, siblings, teachers, and classmates crazy with my fidgeting.
Though I tended, as a youth, to embrace an engaging competitive spirit – Chris still won’t play Monopoly with me – I never won a game of “who-can-sit-still-the longest.” Indeed, I never made it past Round 1.
Polite people called me “Kinetic.” More honest people suggested I was “Hyper.” In hindsight, many now wonder if I suffered from Attention Deficit Hyper-activity Disorder (ADHD).
Although I am certainly much calmer today than I was in the 1960s, I’m told I still have my moments of hyper-activity. One such moment surfaced this past Tuesday. As I was getting the house ready for its first showing, the snow continued falling. It took longer than I anticipated to clean the house, and I shifted to hyper-drive to finish the vacuuming and dusting and snow removal before the Realtor and potential buyer arrived.
As I scurried to straighten up my home office, I came across an article I had clipped and saved from an August, 1999, issue of the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. Written by Jeffrey Gitomer, a best-selling business author and owner/president of TrainOne, Inc., the article suggested hyper-activity is a good thing.
The gist of the article was that although there is no sure-fire strategy for success, there is a proven strategy for failure: “Just sit there.”
Failure Principles
Gitomer defined the goal of failure as “Whatever it takes to get by” and shared failure principals, including:
- Be satisfied … with what you have, who you are, and the status quo. Gitomer believes the best killer of human potential is one’s Comfort Zone.
- Think of yourself as Number One … ignore others, take customers for granted, squeeze employees, vendors, and suppliers.
- Stop taking risks … stand pat, embrace the past, and follow the easy route.
- Concentrate on your competition instead of your customers … worry about their strengths instead of improving your company. An interesting byproduct of this action is you will lose customers so fast, your competition will name you “Salesperson of the Year.”
- Be inflexible … provide “one-size-fits-all” sales and customer service.
- Set a ceiling on you and your company’s potential … place artificial limits on quality and service, resisting all temptation to exceed the limits, should opportunities arise, and embracing “this is good enough” as your company credo.
My sitting still would certainly have made life easier for my parents, teachers, and sitters. But as Gitomer demonstrates, standing pat is a death wish for any business.
As you enter the last weeks of 2007, force yourself out of your Comfort Zone, take risks, be flexible, listen to your customers, trust your intuition, and embrace opportunities to break through artificial quality and service ceilings. These actions are the only way to survive, thrive, and prosper in the hyper-economy of today’s business environment.
I still can’t sit still – the pull of new opportunities is so much more attractive than just getting by. I can’t wait to join Chris in our Rochester adventure.
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