All successful sales professionals, or professionals for that matter, have one thing in common, and that is discipline. I heard the following: “Discipline is the ability to do what you have to do when you have to do it, whether you like to do it or not.”
That reminds me of when I used to be in direct sales — my target audience were homeowners. The day before the week starts, equivalent to a Saturday here, is Sunday in North America, and I’d want to make phone calls between 6:00 to 9:00 PM. If I didn’t make the phone calls, if I decided to spend the time with my friends at the movies, goofing off, I missed that window and I didn’t have appointments on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday.
Yet if I did it then, I built that discipline to do what I had to do, and later on things became a lot better.
Understanding Delayed Gratification
The simple concept that helps discipline is understanding what’s called delayed gratification. A lot of times people want what is pleasurable right now, and we refuse to wait, to pay the price to get the pleasure a bit later on. And a lot of times when we wait, we enjoy things more.
The Marshmallow Experiment
I’ll share a simple study done, I believe, by Harvard’s school of psychology, where they did the marshmallow experiment. Children under five were given one marshmallow and told: “If you wait 20 minutes before eating the marshmallow, I’ll give you two or three marshmallows later.” The child had to wait 15 or 20 minutes. When the researchers came back, they found that some children had already swallowed the marshmallow, while others didn’t and got that reward.
As they followed these children in life, they found that those who were able to delay gratification were more successful. They were achieving more, they were helping more people, they had made an impact on their communities. Those who were not able to delay gratification, in some occasions, got in trouble with the law — they wanted things now, and they wanted to get them by force.
Delayed gratification is your ability to be disciplined internally, to do what you have to do when you have to do it, so that you can get what you want.
So maybe the question for you today: what must you wait on doing until later, or what must you do first, second, and third, so that you get the results you’re after?
Until next time, sell more, sell faster, and profitably.
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