Invest to be 100

I've spent two intensive days this week, and much of the last 10 days studying Sales and Account Management methodologies from The TAS Group. The content is first class and well worth it, and it reminds me how often we need to do such things - invest our time and energies in a proven, smart way to accomplish a task. Investing in ourselves.

It seems the exception rather than the rule that we ensure we're optimally tackling the job before us. "We all know how to do this, and so we don't need any training, do we ?" Or - "it's two days out of the office, I can't afford to take that time, right now." The excuses are many and varied as to why we don't make the effort to improve ourselves, to ensure we're leveraging all our experience, smarts, and capabilities, in the best of all possible fashions.

Did I know this stuff before I started to focus on it two weeks ago..? Well, yes I knew about it roughly, and I could have given it a reasonable facsimile of an effort - but I couldn't have been excellent at it. To get that final 10-15% of performance has required as much time as the original learning of the ideas - and it's only by going over it again with experts, being critiqued and guided that I'm getting sharper with it. Seth Godin recently wrote (May 20th, 2010) about the investment needed to get that 10% advantage - to be the best in a given field, and I'll admit I'm prone to agree to both his points in terms of required investment, and the worthwhileness of trying.

Excellence is a place where few of us dare ever venture, but we admire greatly - just look at the fuss made over super-athletes in the world cup frenzy, or a new baseball pitcher's first day in the big leagues lately. It's a brain-cramping situation, as clearly we think being the best is worth doing - but we're unwilling to do it ourselves. Much like dieting, we admire the end result, but it seems like too much work to make happen or maintain.

Which tells me that there's a huge opportunity for those astute enough to see it, and focused enough to pursue it. Coincidentally, those themes are the underlying thread of what I've been studying from the TAS Group...outselling & out-managing the competition. (Don't you love it when things come together like this ?)

As I seem to enjoy, let me leave you with a question - are you willing to aim for excellence, and invest in yourself to make it happen ? I'll share that it does feel pretty good. Think about it.