The 5S Rule II

Alex James, June 01, 2020

The 5S rule is a game changer for anyone who wants to transform their lives. Living life on your own terms requires a set of bold strategic goals and clear actionable plans to bring those goals to fruition. Everyone can literally re-write their stories. The world and your life is a blank slate, you can design it as you wish. However, wishes alone are not sufficient to achieve greatness. While it is true that greatness lies in every man, it has to be cultivated and harnessed to manifest itself. A sculptor may only make fine objects out of logs of materials with first a mental picture of the object he wants to eke out; then he has to do the hard work of sculpting. Having the mental image is the easy part. Putting in the hours required to produce the image is the difficult part. Unfortunately, this is where the winners are separated from the losers.

In introducing the 5S rule for attaining massive financial success, I listed 5 dimensions of mastery needed to achieve any desired level of success. The introductory piece dealt with the first rule in detail. This piece will focus on the second rule. Over five articles, the 5 rules will be treated. The rules are; self-confidence, self-employment, sales-competence, savings, and systems-thinking. As a recap, without confidence in your ability to achieve limitless success, then you have failed even before getting started. Innate skills and abilities are overrated. The high flyers in every field in the world today are not the most talented. There are many people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder that are probably equally or better talented. The losers may play the “they got lucky” card. However, one thing you cannot take away from people with massive success is that they are a bunch of self-confident people. The other thing is that they know how to sell.

The Rule of Selling

Some things are mentally difficult. Other things are physically exerting. There exist also other varieties that are emotionally demanding and call for a higher than normal amount of emotional intelligence because they involve dealing with the most complex of species - humans. The physically exerting stuff has a huge number of candidates because no mental or emotional work is involved. Any wonder why the lowest paid people in any organization do the highest amount of physical work but the least amount of emotional and mental work? Assembly line workers in a factory who exert a lot of physical energy to produce the output of the factory do not earn anywhere close to the senior executives who “sit in front of a computer, make phone calls and attend endless meetings” as such workers tend to gossip. To them, hard work meaning heavy lifting. 

What the line workers do not understand is that the marketplace does not define compensation as a function of the level of physical demands required to accomplish a task. Rather, compensation has a direct relationship with value. As it stands, value is created by solving problems through imagination, creativity and original thinking. Most of what the line workers do are defined, repeatable tasks. Their work is written step by step in a manual and anyone can be brought in to do it with very little or no training. In other words, they can be easily replaced without much cost to the company. For the senior executives, they have no map to follow. There are no rulebooks or step by step guides on how to get their work done. Instead, they do a lot of heavy metal lifting to solve revenue problems, growth problems, profitability problems, new market problems, competition problems. See the difference?

How does all these sermonizing about physical, mental and emotionally demanding work relate to the rule of selling? Simply put, selling belongs to the mental and emotional variety which explains why people who are masters of sales earn significantly higher than those who are not, other things being equal. Selling is not something you do behind a desk. It involves human to human interaction. You may use technology tools that do not have to physically get you in front of a human, but you are nonetheless still dealing with a human with complex needs, fears and motivation. Without emotional intelligence, it will be difficult to sell.

Salespeople without products

The very idea of selling turns so many people off. Some even find it denigrating and think of it as something reserved for people who cannot find proper work. Selling is not about knocking on doors with a fax machine. It is a way of life. Selling is about understanding human psychology and emotions, and appealing to those emotions. It is about effective communication and successfully buying acceptance for your ideas. The high flyers previously mentioned are people who are proficient in getting people to buy their ideas, not products. This requires mental work. You need to first come up with the idea. You need to anticipate how this idea will be advantageous to those you need to sell it to. Each person has emotional barriers designed to guard against burglars and marauders. Your job as a master salesperson is to find a way to circumvent those moats, not with coercion, but with reasoning and persuasion.

You can begin to see how difficult the work of selling is, that is why it turns people off, just like mathematics and science. But the people who dare to take it on and gain mastery on those areas, become celebrities and geniuses. They usually end up with larger account balances and higher net worths. More importantly, they brim with self-confidence which empowers them to do more. It then becomes an amazing cycle of excellence, productivity, high performance and higher income. The idea of selling as used here is about selling yourself. This concept can be applied to every area of your life. It makes no difference whether you are trying to get a job, get a raise, get a promotion, start a company, sell your products, or even get a partner. Your ability to sell yourself and what you have to offer as the best thing since sliced bread will place the world at your feet.

The difficulty of selling and persistence

If the ability to sell is so critical to success, why do so very few people do it? Why don’t more people hop on the train and ride to wealthyland? It is hard work. It takes a high degree of mental and emotional energy to accomplish. It involves a high amount of rejection and “no-saying.” Generally, people do not like being told no. They would rather not ask a beautiful girl for a date than to ask and risk the embarrassment of being turned down. Someone with a sales ability plays the odds. They know that sometimes all it takes it to just ask. They also know that at other times it requires asking multiple times. Lastly, they realize as well that you cannot endlessly bang on a dead horse. They have the emotional savvy to decipher when a horse is dead and stop beating. Not every request turns into a date. Some will and others won’t. If it doesn’t so what? There are a limitless supply of other beautiful ladies so they don’t duck at the chance of asking for a date due to the fear of being turned down.

The irony is that if you do not go for it, you will never know what is possible. The high achievers went for their dreams and it became a reality. Sometimes, even many times they face setbacks and disappointments. It is not the setbacks and failures that make people wind up broke and unsuccessful. It is accepting defeat. Many times people take the outcome of their actions too personally. An upcoming actor gets rejected in a couple of auditions and he thinks his chances of ever making it big in the movie industry is over. What the aspiring actor does not factor is that Morgan Freeman made his big break when he was 50 years old and got his pilot license at age 65. Giving in or giving up is not on the manifesto of anyone who wants to become successful. Just like a master salesman, when you get rejected in an audition, go back to the drawing board, sharpen your skills, and try again. You increase your chances of success by the number of attempts. You too can be a success story like the light bulb if you keep on selling yourself and ideas.