Per Il Mio Buon Amico, Damiano

Adam can’t understand it. 

He works so hard. He’s gone back and taken more business courses. He’s up early and working on his plan before most of his coworkers are out of bed. He’s always the last to leave, listening to jokes about burning the midnight oil while others breeze by him on their way out.

He doesn’t engage in personal business on company time, and his family knows not to bother him during business hours. He does well and is recognized for his hard work, but Amelia got promoted. She also won the president’s award again this year, and he’s pissed and confused. He ruminates about it constantly. 

All she does is visit the branches and talk to people. It’s like her job is taking folks to dinner and events. Her social posts are a collage of her smiling and raising a drink with various groups of happy people. I am so much more deserving. I actually WORK! She glides through life like a Teflon-coated fairy sprinkling pixie dust in her wake.

  I’ve seen this situation many times. With men and women, young and old, in many different industries.

 He doesn’t see the value in the work that is charisma.  

The work that makes people feel good about themselves and their company. The work that inspires people to do their best. The work that builds loyalty and encourages people to produce at a higher level.

What he fails to understand is that the work Ameilia does is more valuable to the company than a tanker full of midnight oil. Amelia moves people to give their best.

That work, to the uninitiated, looks like play. Adam looks at Amelia with envy and confusion and wonders what she does and why she continues to advance despite her apparent lack of work.

Just because Jordan can casually make a 40-inch vertical leap, turn 360, and dunk it backward doesn’t mean that he didn’t see the entire court in front of him, the position of all the players, the scoreboard, and the 24-second clock before he leaped into the perfectly calibrated move which had been practiced for 1,000 hours. Part of mastery is making it look like nothing.

  These skills I harp on week after week are the best WORK you can do. They take forethought and practice and, a conscious effort to see what’s needed and deploy perfectly calibrated moves with ease.

Own Your Sales Gene…