Never Give Up

I was recently watching the Australian Open Tennis and one player gained my attention.

Her name is Jie Zheng and she was playing Maria Kirilenko. In several points, Maria would hit the ball down one side of the court, Jie would sprint across, just reach it in time to hit back. Maria would then hit the ball quickly to the other side of the court to which Jie would respond and sprint to make a return. After this happened four or five times, one got the feeling that Maria was going to easily win the point.

In fact, the opposite happened. Jie ended up winning the point, even when things seemed hopeless. And she did this frequently.

And what I began to notice was most of the top tennis players all had this ability.

It was inspirational stuff.

With a BIG message.

Keep persisting.

The problem is, most people give in - and way too soon.

They fail to chase that hard ball telling themselves "it's way too hard", "I'll will never make it" or "I'll conserve my energy for the next point".

Problem is, the next point often brings the same result.

Where do you give up?

Is it chasing that elusive interview?

Making that next phone call?

In your relationships?

Making that important sale after a string of "No's"?

When you do give in, what's your self talk?

Do you try and convince yourself you are doing the right thing by coming up with excuses? "It's too hard", "They're probably busy and won't want to talk to me", "My partner's not interested" and "They won't buy anyway".

Change Your Mindset

How important is it for you to win that point, to achieve your goal?

The more important it is, the more effort you will put into it.

Second, persistence pays off.

Research shows that, in sales, you have to ask for the order at least 5 times before receiving an affirmative to buy.

Let me give you a personal example.

At the start of my sales days, I was keen to get the company's products into a major outlet in Albury. The manager constantly told me that he was happy with my opposition's products and I was wasting my time even calling.

Whenever I was in Albury I continued to call on this manager and inform him of new products and ways our products could help his clients.

After 17 months, I still hadn't made a sale.

In the 18th month, he called me a ‘persistent little b---r' and said he was happy to put a small quantity of our product on the shelf to "see how it goes".

Within five months, he was one of my biggest distributors.

If something is important to you, find a way to make it work.

Like Thomas Edison who experimented with over 1,000 different filaments for light bulbs before he found one that worked effectively. That's over 1,000 different experiments. When interviewed by a paper, the interviewer asked why he hadn't given up when he had over 500 failures. Obviously, it wasn't going to work.

Thomas reportedly replied "Every one that doesn't work brings me closer to the one that will".

How many experiments would you have been prepared to do to get the light bulb to work?

Where have you persisted and it's paid off? Let me know below in the comments.