Nugget #4 - Treat your development like a video game.

You probably grew up playing video games (or know plenty of people that did).

My absolute favorite game was Guitar Hero.

If you’re not familiar with Guitar Hero it’s a game that simulates playing rock n roll songs. You have a plastic guitar with colored buttons at the end of the neck that you need to correspondingly press as they fall down a moving screen.

It was introduced to me by my cousin. He was playing one day while I visited. He was really good at it and made it look easy.

Something about feeling like a digital rock star had me immediately hooked. I wanted to feel cool both in the game and to my cousin.

It wasn’t easy. I was terrible.

Whereas my cousin crushed songs on Hard and Expert modes, I failed miserably at Easy mode.

Fair enough if I wanted to give up on my Guitar Hero glory. Maybe being a virtual rock star isn’t for me.

But I really had a desire to learn this thing. I can’t tell you specifically what it was but I had something to prove.

I committed.

Once I bought the game for myself I’d play for hours everyday. It was summertime so I had all the time in the world.

I’d play song after song over and over again until I mastered it on Easy. I beat every song.

Then I bumped up to Medium. This was a challenge. It had more buttons and the screen moved faster. Same thing though, I played and played and played until I mastered every song on Medium.

All of this took a few weeks at a time. By this point I was seeing the fruits of my labor. I felt pretty confident in my ability to learn this game.

Despite still having a long way to go with Hard and Expert modes I was getting better everyday.

As you may imagine I did eventually get really good at Expert mode within a couple months. I was extraordinarily committed. For a while I was putting Vasoline on the buttons so my fingers could slide faster. Oh it was for real.

What does Guitar Hero have to do with sales? Nothing on the surface. But dig a bit deeper to see the premise and you find a life lesson - a nugget, if you will.

I could have never dreamed of successfully playing an Expert song when I first started. Impossible. But I could practice at the level of my skill and get better at that.

Work hard enough at my skill level, get better, then stretch myself to the next level up. Rinse and repeat until I reached a mastery at the highest level.

Sales is the exact same way. We start off not knowing much about anything. We can’t fathom mastering sales at the highest level. But we can practice where we are. We can get good at our current skill level. We can stretch ourselves as we improve.

You can’t get good at asking for a meeting before you’re good at opening up a call. When you master the level of opening, you earn the right to progress to the level of closing.

Every time we advance a level in our career we’re greeted by a new challenge. A bigger, harder, more important challenge. Problem is it’s not always obvious what the challenge is. To get meta, isolating your challenges may be the challenge in and of itself.

You measure your progression by the size of your challenges. Remember that when you’re feeling overwhelmed with your current situation. You have earned the right to face this difficult challenge.

There is a saying, “God doesn’t give his soliders battles they can’t win.” Whether or not you’re religious we can find the wisdom in that cliche. You are where you are because of how you’ve faced and mastered previous challenges.

You can do hard things. You’ve done it before. You’ll do it more.

The premise is you have to be present in the level you’re currently playing, overcome the challenge before you advance to the next level. Your progress in the game cannot be preceded by your ability to beat the level you are in.

The immediate problem you’re facing right now now is the “boss” of whatever level you’re on. Beat your “boss” and move on to the next level.

Next post will dig deeper into how sales is really just a constant personal development game.