Have you ever been super-excited about a dream or career choice, or a project or business idea that you knew should work, you knew you had what it takes to pull it off, and you hit the ground running, only to hit a series of obstacles weeks, months, or even years down the road and come to the realization that you have a dud on your hands and the best option is to quit, call it off, close?
That’s what happened to Grant Cardone. As he was writing his story (in Be Obsessed Or Be Average) he was worth $400 in holdings, amazing for someone who started out doing drugs - and couldn't even finish rehab for lack of funds!
Shortly we’ll look at his seven-point formula for inoculating yourself against throwing in the towel and quitting when the going gets tough but first, here is the situation he faced, in his own words;
“When I started my first business, I was out pitching a new idea that I was super jacked about – a proprietary sales training program called Information Assisted Selling. I just knew everyone was going to listen to me and want to buy my product.
“I had put together a business plan and figured that if just 10 percent of the people I pitched to bought from me, I would have a great business. I knew the idea was solid, the technology was effective, the market needed something new, and I had a good track record.
“My potential market was huge: Almost 28 million businesses in America depend on sales. After all, I thought, who doesn’t want to increase sales?
“Within twenty-four hours of setting up shop, I was ready to quit. For the next two years I wanted to quit every day. I was making cold phone calls and so many people would hang up on me, curse me out, tell me to never call them again.
“Once in a while someone would say, ‘Sure, come on by.’ Then I would get on a plane, fly to their city, and present my product. I’d also use the rest of my time in that city to follow up on some more cold calls by showing up at the same companies that had said they weren’t interested.”
He was trying to sell successful businesses and established millionaires on how to make even more money and offering to teach their salespeople how to make even more sales. Cardone had used these same techniques before himself, very successfully, as a car salesman – hence all this belief in his product.
“I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t! I wasn’t pulling in enough money to pay the bills and was going through cash fast. I was terrified, I couldn’t sleep well at night, and I was experiencing monster amounts of call reluctance. Three weeks past most people’s breaking point, I was still making hundreds of calls a day and visiting businesses in person, but no one was biting.
“No one around me had ever done what I was attempting. I had no role models to look up to – no one to show me the way. The people who loved me were encouraging me to quit. I hated losing 90 percent of the time. At my wits’ end, I seriously considered quitting – really quitting – and returning to a job doing sales for someone else.
“What I held on to was all the stories of successful people who refused to quit. Disney, Oprah, Ford, and on and on. The obsessed refuse to quit. The super successful don’t just overcome their failures – they use them as fuel to persist.
“I took inspiration from their ability to stick with their obsession in the face of failure.”
That failure word evoked a very painful stigma for Cardone. Some years back, on the weekend of his twenty-fifth birthday, he had gone to visit his mom at her place, loaded with drugs, slurring his words, his tongue swollen from barbiturates.
She was thoroughly exasperated with his drug problem so she gave him an ultimatum. “Don’t come around here anymore until you get your life together,” she said.
Terrified but determined to change, he had checked himself into a drug rehab facility a few days later, with the help of a family friend. And for four blessed weeks he was clean – and hopeful.
But then his funds run out, his insurance, and he had to be discharged – prematurely. His outlook was bleak. Very bleak, according to his counselor. The counselor gave him this parting shot:
“You’ll never make it,” he said. “You are a defective person. You have an addictive personality. You have a disease you can never recover from. You have no power or control over your disease or your life, and the chances of you never using drugs again are zilch. The most successful thing you can do with your life at this point is never use again. Focus on anything else and you will fail. Drop all your grandiose ideas of money, fame, and success.”
Those days Cardone had this big dream, no, an obsession to get rich and help a lot of people. He told anyone who would listen, even some who wouldn’t.
His counselor at the drug rehab facility apparently listened but obviously he didn’t entertain any of it.
Fortunately for Cardone, he decided on that day to start ignoring the naysayers. His counselor had given up on him, he wasn’t about to give up on himself!
Fast forward two-odd years and he’s seriously considering quitting his fabulous business idea, that Information Assisted Selling training for businesses and millionaires. Most people, according to Cardone, quit right before a miracle takes place. Here’s how his miracle happened…
“One day I was sitting at lunch by myself at a popular healthy restaurant (basically a place that served wheatgrass and bean sprouts) in a hip part of Houston. I had just returned from another city that had offered me nothing but failure.
“It was about one o’clock in the afternoon and I was taking a break from the phone. I remember it like it was yesterday: I was tired, whipped, terrified, and out of juice. I was on the verge of quitting for real, and that morning I had even told the girl I was dating, ‘I don’t know if I can do this anymore.’
“While I sat at lunch in total defeat, I thought to myself, I just need a sign. Something to tell me: Either quit or go on. And if I go on, where do I go next? I need a clear sign of what to do. I don’t even know whom I was addressing. Was I praying? Begging? Or just talking to myself? I still don’t know.
“I do know that I was in total doubt and at a very low point in my life. I was so lost that I was starting to look to horoscopes for direction and guidance that might determine my future. When you start depending on horoscopes, you know you are in trouble.
“After making my plea for a sign, I got in my car to go home. I started driving and saw that the license plate on the car in front of me was from Salt Lake City. I had never been to Salt Lake City, and I took this as a sign that I should go there and promote my next seminar.
“I know this sounds crazy, but at the moment I felt it was the sign I had asked for. In that desperate state I was in, I just needed a tiny little push to keep me in the game. Sure, it might sound woo-woo, but I was looking for anything to give me a cue about what to do next, where to go next – something to keep moving forward, because forward movement is critical to staying obsessed.
“I drove back to my little 125-square-foot office and I got on the phone and started calling businesses in Salt Lake City. I did that for the next three days. The calls were hard, as they always were, with the same types of responses:
“Not interested,” “Don’t call me back again,” “Never heard of you.” Then, finally: “Sure, come by. If I have time, I will talk to you.”
“The same day I bought my plane ticket. The following Sunday I flew into Salt Lake City. Over the next few weeks my miracle happened, and I made more money in two weeks than I had made in the past two years.
“Something clicked; I figured things out, all of a sudden, in a way that forever changed my life, my career, and my future. That trip made it possible for me to not just pay my bills but fund the rest of my career, live my purpose to help people, and become a star in the sales arena.
“I had refused to quit, and that was a good call because my miracle was just around the corner. If you refuse to quit, I don’t care what you are trying to create, you will not fail. It is just a matter of time before you figure it out.
“While I had not been successful up until that point, I was learning what did not work, so I knew what not to do until I knew just what to do. From then on, I was rocking.
“Was the license plate a miraculous sign? Of course not! It’s just that I didn’t quit when I thought I wanted to. I gave it one more try – and my best try at that. This is your ‘miracle moment.’ This moment when you think you have gone beyond every limit you have and then you go beyond them one more time.
“When you do that, everything turns around. Those who are truly obsessed are willing to persist when it no longer makes sense. Become obsessed with developing persistence as one of your power weapons and one of your great assets.
“Because your movement forward during the hardest, most soul-crushing times, the times that are filled with impossibilities, guarantees your success. When all the average people would never continue, put one foot in front of the other and refuse to back down, knowing that when you quit you just have to start over again.”
So, how do you put one foot in front of the other and refuse to back down? Here are the seven things Grant Cardone says you should do (or not do) to exercise your persistence muscle:
- Complete every task, finish everything you start, and quit walking away from unfinished projects in your professional and personal life.
- When you hit the wall, don’t focus on the obstacle. Look for creative ways to take another run at it.
- Expect others to quit; while persistence begins and ends with you.
- Be prepared for people around you to quit and try to persuade you to do the same.
- Use yesterday’s successes as fuel for persisting today. But don’t get stuck in them. Instead, stay interested in the next success and the one after that.
- Stay busy generating interest or income or learning something – doing things that help you keep going – because a rolling stone gathers no moss.
- Never settle, never be satisfied with your triumphs, and instead use them as fuel to move you further toward your full potential.
You may have to go into debt. You will have to put up with stuff that makes you feel like you are selling out. You’ll be underpaid, overworked, exhausted, and you will think that giving up is your oasis. Well, it never is.
“The obsessed keep going,” wrote Cardone in Be Obsessed or Be Average. “The difference between success and failure is staying in the game when others throw in the towel. You need the drive to see something through, all the way, no matter what. Don’t worry if you don’t have it now, because it can be developed.”
It has become acceptable for people to quit and not see their goals through, warns Cardone. And this is happening in the face of all the great stories we have about the importance of persistence, one of the great characteristics of success.
In the book, Cardone gives some examples of people who persisted longer than anyone thought reasonable:
- Walt Disney was turned down for financing 302 times. His first animation company went bankrupt.
- Stephen King’s first book, Carrie, was rejected thirty times. He even threw the manuscript in the trash.
- Oprah Winfrey was told she was unfit for television.
- Lady Gaga’s first record deal was dropped after just one month.
- Howard Schultz’s employer had no interest in his coffee idea and sold him the brand name “Starbucks.”
- Steven Spielberg was rejected from film school three times.
- Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and his first company, Traf-O-Data, went nowhere.
- And so on…
Anytime you’re thinking of quitting people around you will comfort you, and give you permission to quit, with statements such as, “It’s all right, it just didn’t work out ” or “Why don’t you find something easy, where people don’t mistreat you and value your service?” or “Just be happy with what you have.”
But, according to Grant Cardone, “You don’t need to be comforted when things don’t turn out right. Sympathy is not what you need. Comfort doesn’t pay the bills. Because… you are at your best when you’re outside your comfort zone, pushing yourself and pushing limits to make the impossible possible.”
If you’re still looking for the breakthrough that will enable you to live your dream, read Cardone’s book, Be Obsessed Or Be Average. Cardone wrote this book to ensure that people followed through and took action on the big ideas in his first book, The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success And Failure. So, you should ideally read both books!
Oh, around the time Cardone was writing Be Obsessed Or Be Average he was worth $400 million in holdings. His next dream? To have $4 billion in real estate holdings at some point in the future!
A real big dreamer and ten-times thinker/action-taker.
In closing, in a few minutes from now a business will close, a dream will die. Someone who believes all hope is gone, when in fact success was just around the corner. It could be someone you know, someone you care about. Share this post with friends; you could help prevent a lot of heartache for this person and his/her loved ones, prevent a “miss fortune”. Hit one of the share buttons below.
