Any Given Sunday

The Super Bowl is 4 days old, so this is my last chance to give a football analogy.

There's an old Chinese saying about football that goes like this:

"Any Given Sunday."

It basically means that there are many things out of a team's control, and anything can happen on any given Sunday.

In the movie by the same name, Al Pacino delivers the powerful "inches" speech. In it he tells his men that the entire game of football, moving up and down that 100 yard gridiron, comes down to fighting over any given inch.

Football, he says, "a game of inches."

Network marketing, and life itself, is like that too.

There is a lot of things beyond our control.

• Who happens to be on our prospecting list today
• Who happens to come within our "3 foot" zone
• What decisions our company happens to make
• Whether technology happens to cooperate with us today

But that which is in our control ... we fight for. Every inch of it.

• We work and rework every line in our emails and on our web site.
• Our plan says to call 5 prospects today, but we call 6 instead.
• The magazine says our ad will cost $$500, but we negotiate them down to $450.
• We make 5 follow-up calls when our competition only makes 4.

At one time early in my networking career my goal was to make phone calls for 2 hours every night after work.

Whenever I reached a live prospect, I would be on the phone with them for 15 to 20 minutes. So if it was 5 or 10 minutes before the end of my 2 hours, and I was off the phone, I would just quit reasoning that there wasn't enough time to make another call and be finished before my 2 hour limit was up.

I'd been doing this for months, and not making much money.

Then I read that the difference between success and failure was actually a very little bit of effort. That quite often those working hard, but not succeeding were very close to success and just needed to add an extra 5 or 10%.

So I decided to make one small change. Instead of STOPPING at the end of 2 hours, I would DIAL my last CALL at the end of 2 hours. That normally gave me just one extra call per day.

But that one single extra call per day was the extra "inch" I needed to begin seeing my checks go up, and up, and up!