预计阅读本页时间：-
Element Four: Pursue Your Passion (Persistence)
Many years ago, when I first started my consulting firm, a friend of mine, Elaine, who worked for a large company, suggested I speak with her colleague Colin, who might be in a position to hire Bregman Partners.
广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元
So I called Colin, mentioned Elaine, and asked to meet with him. “I’m very busy,” Colin told me. “Let’s just talk on the phone.”
But I knew the phone wouldn’t cut it. “How about lunch?” I asked him. “Or a drink after work? Or maybe just fifteen minutes in person somewhere?”
Colin finally agreed to a short lunch. Then he canceled. We rescheduled. He canceled again. We rescheduled again. He canceled again. It was clear that he didn’t want to meet with me. I almost gave up.
Here’s what I realized, though: If I could avoid reacting to my feelings of frustration or hurt, then the cost to me of rescheduling the meeting was a two-minute phone call with Colin’s secretary. And the upside was potentially enormous.
So I kept rescheduling until, one day, several months later, Colin didn’t cancel and we had lunch. It was very quick, of course, but long enough for me to ask him to let me submit a proposal. A couple of weeks after I sent it to him, he left me a short message explaining that I had missed the mark but he’d keep me in mind. Right.
I felt affronted. All that work I put in and all I got in return was a voice mail? Again, I almost walked away.
But instead, I called and asked for another lunch to understand what I misunderstood. He declined but suggested I speak with his colleague Lily, who was in a different department and might have a need for my services.
So I set up a meeting with Lily. Who canceled. As I prepared to reschedule, I noticed something unexpected: I started to enjoy the process of trying to get in, the challenge of making the sale. It became a game to me, and my goal was to keep playing until, at some point, I’d say the right thing to the right person and get my foot in the door. I was, surprisingly, having fun.
And I was getting good at it. Scheduling. Rescheduling. Finding a way to keep the conversation going. You’d think it wouldn’t be something hard or useful to become good at, but you’d be wrong on both counts.
Most of our jobs hinge on repetition. That’s how we become good at anything. The problem is that we give up too soon because anything we do repetitively becomes boring.
Unless, that is, we have a peculiar taste for the task; unless it captures our interest. For some reason that maybe we don’t even understand—and we don’t have to—we enjoy it.
That’s how I learned how to do a handstand. It always seemed completely out of reach for me. But then someone told me they learned as an adult. So I figured I could learn, too. It took six months, but now I can, somewhat reliably, stand on my hands.
Which has led me to believe that anyone can do anything. As long as three conditions exist:
You want to achieve it.
You believe you can achieve it.
You enjoy trying to achieve it.
We often think we need only the first two, but it’s the third condition that’s most important. The trying is the day-to-day reality. And trying to achieve something is very different from achieving it. It’s the opposite, actually. It’s not achieving it.
If you want to be a great marketer, you need to spend years being a clumsy one. Want to be a great manager? Then you’d better enjoy being a poor one long enough to become a good one. Because that practice is what it’s going to take to eventually become a great one.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses research done at the Berlin Academy of Music. Researchers divided violin students into three categories: the stars, the good performers, and the ones who would become teachers but not performers. It turns out that the number one predictor of which category a violinist fell into was the number of hours of practice.
The future teachers had practiced four thousand hours in their lifetime. The good performers, eight thousand hours. And those who were categorized as stars? Every single one of them had practiced at least ten thousand hours.
And here’s the compelling part: There wasn’t a single violinist who had practiced ten thousand hours who wasn’t a star. In other words, ten thousand hours of practice guaranteed you’d be a star violinist. According to Gladwell, ten thousand hours of practice is the magic number to become the best at anything.
Which is why you’d better enjoy trying to achieve your goals. Because you’ll never spend ten thousand hours doing anything you don’t enjoy. And if you don’t enjoy the trying part, you’ll never do it long enough to reach your goal.
Eventually, after five or six canceled meetings, Lily and I met for lunch. Which, as it turned out, was perfect timing. When we finally met, she had a real need, which hadn’t existed when we’d first started scheduling a meeting.
By this time, I was familiar to her and the company even though I had never done any work for them. I had been around for months and they trusted me because I followed through on every commitment I made to them.
That year, I signed a large contract with Lily’s company. Twelve years later, they’re still a big client of Bregman Partners. And they still cancel lots of meetings.
To home in on your passion, think about what you love doing—what’s important enough to you that you’re willing to persist over the year, even when it feels like you’re not succeeding at it.
