Conrey is for Closers

Everyone loves to root against the successful people and teams. For every fan of the NY Yankees, there are 2 or 3 more who hate them.

Business people have been taught to fight for their life everyday. Often this leads to people quasi-violently defending their ideas, their passions, their actions. The social internet revolution has allowed attacks to come from any direction at anytime now. It is not a viable strategy to defend yourself from each attack you receive. You don’t have time for that.

The worst part are the people who fight with you to get their own notoriety. They’re picking a fight with a bigger entity to get attention to themselves. People love to root for the little guy, the underdog, and if someone can get themselves into that role – they’ll gain as much from losing a fight as winning.

What this means for you is that if you find it necessary to defend yourself from an attack – or start an attack – be the underdog in the fight. Don’t be the big guy, the established champion, the bully. If you are then you are only legitimizing the attack from below.

Carlos Miceli: …Passion is overrated….

Yes that’s a bit out of context, but the line alone is something that I never thought I would ever see/hear. Carlos had started the conversation by saying that he didn’t get the love that Gary Vaynerchuck and Chris Brogan get from the masses. My response, as I was sitting at Gary V’s book signing, was that his passion shone through. Carlos clarified a bit later:

@conrey What I’m saying is that originality and cleverness is more important. Passion matters, but like I told @tdhurst: I get it by now.

Carlos speaks more on this here in a Chat with Tyler Hurst.

I agree completely, to steal a metaphor from Derek, passion is like rocket fuel, if you load up without pointing the rocket in the right direction (content, cleverness, originality), then you’re just going to be launched somewhere you don’t want to go.

So yes, Passion by itself is overrated. Passion + direction and delivery however is an unmatchable force.

Tonight I participated in a conversation with noted twitter opinion giver Tyler Hurst during Gary Vaynerchuck’s book signing for Crush It:

I can point to two early seminars in my sales career that really inspired me and I would attribute a good bit of my success to them. The first was a training trip to Traver Technologies that was part of our GM’s training program during my first year selling cars. The second was a Grant Cardone speaking engagement in Scottsdale about 6 months later. Traver opened my eyes to the power of appointment based selling and taking control of my own destiny when it comes to sales instead of waiting for people to just show up and offer to buy. Grant Cardone is a well known sales speaker – especially amongst car guys – and two of the salesmen that I worked with listened exclusively to his training materials and methods. A half day after the seminar I was sold and bought in completely – especially the part about always giving the client 100% of what you have.

Now to Tyler’s point, there were probably 400 people in the Cardone seminar with me, and based on the sales figures I saw from the other 15 or so salesmen from my dealership that went, maybe 10-15% of the attendees really took it to heart and bought in the way I did. So yes, the seminar alone didn’t make them successful. But I definitely would still say that I benefited from attending. I was inspired by the content, enlightened by the information, and thought of things afterwards in a new light.

This is where the success part comes in though – I acted on these things. 85%-90% of the people didn’t. Anyone can listen to someone speak for an hour or two. Just like any other educational opportunity, you have to put in the effort to really benefit from it. Don’t waste the time going to a training seminar or motivational speaker if you don’t intend to put forth the effort to actually act on the things you learn.