The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [4]
As a speaker who has been out there speaking for 15 years now, I’ve had the plea sure of many business owners and executives coming up to me and saying: “You know, Chet, your stuff has really helped me. But I gotta tell you, the most important lesson I learned from you was what you said about pigheaded discipline and determination.” If you apply the learning curve in this book to your business with pigheaded discipline and determination, you, too, will come up to me at a seminar one day and thank me for the fact that your business now slaughters your competitors at every turn, runs without you, and is highly profitable. In short, you will have mastered your business so that it runs like a finely tuned sales-making machine.
How do you become a master of anything? How do you help others become masters? The key lesson I’ve learned again and again, ever since I was a kid studying karate, is that mastery is not about being special or more gifted than anyone else. Mastery is a direct result of pigheaded discipline and determination. The promise of this book is that you will learn how to create mastery in your business resulting in the finest, most profitable, and best-run business you can have. You will get the tools to become a master of three crucial areas: marketing, management, and sales. Mastery in each of these areas is necessary to make your business run like a machine.
Machine Beginnings
When I was 15 years old, I tried a new method for increasing my karate skills. I had a high vaulted ceiling in my bedroom. I screwed a cowhide rope into the peak of the ceiling and attached a softball to the other end, at chest level. My intent was to kick and chop the ball and then to be able to deflect it, block it, kick it, or chop the ball again when it came bouncing back.
With my first karate chop at the ball with my hand, the ball bounced out to the edge of the rope and back fast, smacking me in the head. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought. I tried all kinds of kicks—hook kick, front kick, back kick, side kick—but again and again the ball flew to the end of the rope and then bounced back, hitting me in the head, elbow, shoulders, or chest.
I worked on this for several weeks and made very little progress. After a month, there were a couple of times when I could actually block the ball from hitting me. After three months of doing this every single day, I could hit the ball with any one of the body’s weapons—my hands, my feet, my elbows, and my knees. I could even do a spinning back kick and hit it again, then block it expertly as it flew at me from a different angle.
After six months, the ball never touched me. I could spin artfully in the air, flawlessly blocking the ball at every angle. It was amazing. I could literally catch, kick, or swat that ball with every move any time I liked and faster than I would’ve ever thought possible. My body was operating like a machine, responding to the ball as if preprogrammed to anticipate every possible move the ball could make.
Imagine my skill level when that ball would ricochet around the room with lightning speed and my reflexes were even faster. It was thrilling. I felt such power. I realized that becoming a master of karate was not about learning 4,000 moves but about doing just a handful of moves 4,000 times.