Losing When You Should Have Won
April 9th, 2015 // 12:35 pm @ Scott Manning
Of course we’ve all been there. Your favorite team…your daily life. We run out of clock before we come out on top. And no matter who you are rooting for, take the NCAA action that just concluded, it never feels great no matter how far you make it UNLESS you’re the team left standing, that’s the crux of it.
Why does this happen?
You dominate all season, all throughout the game and it comes down to the final minutes and you get beat.
Hint: “final minutes” There in lies the problem.
Winning in business is not going to happen when you KEEP IT CLOSE. You have to win big. It’s the only way.
Close calls, “good games” are only good for the fans and watching on TV. When it comes to being champions it’s about dominating.
When I work with Dentists they always talk about roller coaster months or even days, ups and downs, and not having predictable, reliable, consistent performance in their practice.
Entrepreneurs have this same thing happen when they get excited about something or launch new lead generation, then get busy or distracted and move on to something else instead of staying focused on feeding the machine.
This is why systems, structure, forced discipline are critical for your long term success, because you can’t afford to keep it close, there are no buzzer beaters in business.
My grandfather who happens to be turning 90 on this very day always says, CLOSE counts in horseshoes and hand grenades…not a pretty picture now is it.
If you think about the great sports teams, the dynasties, they win again and again not by barely getting by, but by blowing out their competitors.
You can only get lucky once in a while. Skills, deliberate strategy, planned success and most importantly above all else demanding control over yourself, your performance, your outcomes, your team AND your customers is the only way to orchestrate and have certainty with your results.
I challenge you to look at your business, your customer sales and marketing process, your management and leadership over your team and you tell me exactly what are you doing to WIN BIG; to ensure you are scoring enough points to win.
It doesn’t have to be in terms of money, but it can be, not sure what else you judge your own personal accountability and life’s sacrifice on. It could be time, lifestyle, balance, whatever.
The point is quite simple, if you run out of hours or days or weeks or months, ever, then you aren’t managing the game, you are relying on having the ball at the last second hoping for a miracle or for someone else to mess up.
I have always preferred and found peace of mind (and success) in knowing that I was in control of the verdict and playing with a cushion.
This requires you to do five very important things:
1 – know what a victory looks like, describe success, calculate and measure what you will consider a Win
2 – reverse engineer your gameplan, work backwards to know what benchmarks must be hit to stay on track to Win
3 – arm your team to support you, know their role, and ensure their follow-through, the best teams rely on each other while focusing on their individual responsibilities
4 – know your customer and your competition (friends and enemies), if someone else is talking to them, you ought to know how to achieve obvious differentiation
5 – have systems in place to make all this happen so it’s not just up to you and definitely not up to chance
I’ll leave you with the most important lesson from March Madness, nothing guarantees your victory, ever, you must always be playing to win and no lead is safe… minute by minute focus matters – you aren’t going to win because others don’t do well, you will only win because you have a dominating performance.
Besides, close calls equal stress, and stress clouds vision, cloudy vision leads to bad decisions and it’s a never ending cycle of burnout and stagnation – dominate and command the victory you want in your life and business and never sit on you heels and think you are safe.
Oh, and one more thing, Officials never get blamed for Blowouts.
Category : Blog
