When opportunity strikes

Do you remember the first time that you felt like you had just gotten kicked in the stomach by a giant horse, and then tossed head first out a window into a dumpster full of rotten garbage? I do! It was early in my career working on the employee benefits side of things, and I was in Los Angeles as a group of mine had a satellite office there with about 10 employees. Ordinarily, I would have asked someone in the area to handle it for me, but it's a nice drive down the coast from San Francisco, and I was craving empanadas from Nonna's on 3rd, a couple bloack off La Cienega. The real reason for drving down was that there was a nation wide chain with about 25,000 employees, and their head of HR said they were interested in meeting with me. So I loaded my biggest cooler into the car, intent to bring back enough empanadas to fill my freezer, and headed down the Pacific Coast Highway.

Driving around LA, I started imagining what the size of my commission checks would be, and what I cold do with all that loot. Not only could I buy the best Italian suits, I could fly to Italy to get them! Forget traveling a few hundred miles to get empanadas. I'd hire Nonna to be part of my entourage to make me empanadas on demand. And if their name wasn't actually Nonna, they'd be making too much money to bother correcting me! And my hair... my beautiful hair... I would purchase hair transplants so glorious, that people would flock from all corners of the earth just to be in the mere presence of my luxuriant locks. Foreign countries would use my image on their favorite postage stamps. Many nations would even place me on their very currency.

And then? I got an email saying that the appointment was cancelled. While they had not previously considered adding supplemental coverage outside of their group life insurance, after speaking to me and seeing the value of offering the coverage to their employees, they called their broker, who promptly arranged to put something in place. Their broker who for years had not even brought it up, and had no real capacity for structuring the roll out of a program such as this, and even less of a capacity for its ongoing administration. What they lacked in professional ability, they made up for by having a close relative on the executive board.

Looking back, I was naive to even think that I had a shot at this group. Over the ensuing years, I have become more battle-hardened. I've come to realize that no one "walks off the street" and lands some company that will generate millions in annualized sales premium. No one will ever set foot on Jupiter. No one will ever break Wayne Gretzky's record of 1,963 career assists - until they do.

Recently, I was contacted by someone who only months ago transitioned to the insurance business, leaving behind a very successful career. Not only were they successful, but they are well known throughout Oklahoma. As I'm part of their sales team, and have been in the business for a number of years, they asked if they could pick my brain. They told me about all the advice that their managers have given them. Pretty much the standard kind of thing. What kind of activity they needed to engage in, how the wheel has already been invented, and how reinventing it is just a waste of time, and it's arrogant to think we can make it better.

My advice was to take in every word they were told. Thank them for it. And when they tell you that your ideas will never work, and that a million people have already tried and failed at doing the same thing, let them know how much you appreciate them helping you avoid wasting your time.

And then, do it anyway.

History is full of predictions that at the time of predicting seemed perfectly reasonable. Cars are just a fad... I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years... Flying machines are impossible... It's not even worth the effort to attribute the source, let alone research the gramatically correct way to write multiple quotes within a single sentence! And as shockingly unpleasant as it felt to suddenly realize that my dreams of postage stamp fame would come to naught, failure is where the true glory and exhileration comes to dance.

In the history of baseball, I can't think of a swing more beautiful and efficient than that of Rod Carew. And yet, this swing failed him about 67% of the time. Yet, he failed enough to record 3,053 career hits, get selected for the Major League All-Star game 18 times, and get elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in 1991 with 90.5% of the votes cast. Meaning 8.5% of the voters failed at recognizing what I consider the unquestionable worthiness of his election. But even in this failure, those 8.5% failed enough times in their own lives and career paths to put themselves in a position where they even qualified to have a vote on Mr. Carew's candidacy, even if they used that qualification only to fail in carrying it out.

When I'm training someone, and we're getting ready to walk into a building on a cold call, I never ask them to go over their presentation with me. I never ask them how they are going to talk to the gatekeeper, nor what they plan on leaving with behind and how they are going to follow up. The goal I set for them is somewhat different. I tell them our goal is to get kicked out of the building. To not only annoy the people we talk to so much that they want nothing to do with us, but that they feel the need to call security and have us forcibly removed. To when they are feeling pressured to speed up their presentation as the person they're talking to seems like they're getting annoyed, that this is the time to slow down - way down - because that will really make them mad, and then they might even feel the need to have a trespassing order placed on us!

So my point is to fail hard, and fail often, and do the things that are sure to fail. But embrace that failure, enjoy it, and recognize that this is the fun part. Because, when you actually get a client, then you actually have to be competent and work, and what fun is that? Just ask Jeff Spicoli. He can tell you...

Last of all, know this: if you leave a chicken parm right in front of my dog, you lose a chicken parm right before your eyes. And while most failures can propel you toward your next success, you're not getting that sandwich back!