How to Program Your Brain for Success

By: Geoffrey James
Topics: Marketing

Yesterday I explained why sales goals are of limited use when it comes to motivating you to sell. There was a slightly subversive message in that post, which was winning (in sales or in life) means extracting positive emotion from whatever you're doing.

I believe that's true. There plenty of people in this world who are successful, in terms of finances or career status, but are secretly miserable. We're always surprised when one of these people commits suicide or overdoses on drugs.

We shouldn't be. Somebody like Kurt Cobain or John Belushi may look like winners, but they were losers because, despite their successes, they never learned how to be happy.

Now, in a smaller way, I run into all kind of people in the working world who are successful on paper, but who are truly miserable human beings. I also run into plenty of people who look like losers to the outside world, but who are consistently happy, and therefore winners.

What's the difference? Simple. It's the rules that they use to decide what makes them happy and what makes them unhappy.

Almost everyone that I know who is miserable has rules that create a very low threshold for misery and a very high threshold for happiness.

For example, I knew a sales rep for a computer firm who became absolutely furious and frustrated every time he had to wait more than 10 seconds at a red light. While he was driving, if anybody around him did something that slowed him down (like cutting him off), he'd honk his horn and flip the bird.

As an experiment, I asked him what he really liked about his job. "Winning a big deal," he said. "That's what I live for." I asked him how often that happened. His answer: "About once or twice a year."

So here was a guy whose rules about life were:

Anything that slows me down pisses me off.
Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.

What a loser! And, by the way, nobody particularly liked being around the guy and even though he made great numbers, when it came to layoff time, he was one of the first to get the boot.

By contrast, one of the biggest winners (in life and in sales) that I know is my friend Larry Jacobs. He looks at the entire world through a lens of what's funny. The day-to-day stuff that would have driven my hard-driving colleague batty simply makes Larry laugh.

Every week Larry sends out an email describing what went on, with funny pictures, and his own commentary. Reading it is one always of the high points of my weekend. He's a winner because he extracts pleasure from almost everything in his life.

What's ironic about this is that the rules that you live by (and work by) are purely arbitrary. Chances are you simply absorbed them from your parents and friends.

One of the best and smartest things you can do is to spend an hour or so and write down your rules and decide which ones of them don't make any sense and aren't making you happy.

And if you really want to be successful, write up some new rules that make it easy to be happy and difficult to be unhappy. Try something like:

Any day I'm above ground is a good day.
I'm fine as long as I have a job to do.

Seriously, if you give attention to your rules and make sure that they create pleasure and positive emotion in your life, you'll find it much easier to achieve those goals and, more importantly, to make them worth achieving.

Even people who must face difficult jobs, like fighting wars or sacrificing themselves, are winning in this way, because there is a real pleasure in fulfilling your duty.

BTW, today is my birthday.