Grant Cardone
I recently spoke to Grant Cardone, a sales trainer that was able to fill the Miami Marlins stadium using the very strategies he inspires others to use as well. Grant and I got right down to business—literally. We talked about the traps we see so many entrepreneurs fall into that eventually lead them to little success and more fatigue.
Grant shared his own origin story and he revealed he actually hated sales when he started.
“I hated it for two years because I didn’t know how to do it,” remembers Cardone. “But the economy in my town had 1 in 4 people unemployed. I couldn’t get a job and no one else was going to hire me, so I made a commitment to be good at sales. I started studying sales. Reading, learning and next thing you know, I’m good at sales. What’s crazy is the thing I hated became the gateway to the rest of my life.”
It’s the perfect example of investing in yourself.
We continued to talk about commitment and investing in yourself and I realize we uncovered the formula that seemed to be the path to personal success.
Commitment + Investing in yourself = personal success
Commitmenthen I say commitment, I mean 100% commitment. People tend to say they’re interested in something, but the path to success means really, truly committing or not at all. Grant saw having real commitment meant adding two critically valuable things: your time and money.
“I borrowed 3K from my mother for a sales program to get some knowledge and quit making excuses,” said Cardone.
Having skin the game raises the stakes to ensure progress. It allows you to claim responsibility and have humility.
“Humility always comes with not knowing, said Cardone.” If you keep asking the same questions in your 50s than in your 20s, you’re going to hate your 50s. If I don’t elevate my game, I get bored.”
Which brings us to the second part of the equation…
Investing in YourselfFor me, I feel like my benchmarks have changed. What is important has evolved and what I am capable of has evolved. I feel like vision is only vision when it is beyond our current reach, beyond what we believe we are capable of.
Grant replied that for him, it was the 10X concept. “I have never written goals down actually equivalent to my potential, they had to be beyond my capability.”
Part of the art of living is figuring out how we create a ridiculously compelling future beyond our current reach but taps into our potential while enjoying the journey along the way. We see people holding on to the past and they’re in dangerous territory of complacency. The other side of the coin is “Play To Win,” and that’s a dangerous trap because as soon as you win, you’re on to the next thing.
But the thing that successful people never stop doing is investing in themselves.
Most people succumb to the excuses of time or money.
“I hear people say they don’t have time,” said Grant, “but you never hear it from the movers and shakers.”
Putting your time and money into yourself and really committing are the differentiators between complacency and continuously moving the needle. Continuing to do both continues to bring personal success.
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