The Secret to Top Performance

Steven Palmer of Ivory Homes in Salt Lake City sent me a great quote from C.S. Lewis. I is one of those quotes that makes you stop and taste it for a while. It is also powerfully convicting: you’ve been warned!

“All of us have the valiancy within us to rise to the moment. Few of us are willing to tackle the mundane.”

Let me tell you why that struck me so thoroughly. I specialize in helping sales professionals to maximize their performance, and that means a large part of my calling is related to skill development.

Skill. Proficiency. Aptitude. All of these descriptions speak to the idea of perfecting a craft. Like an expert carpenter or a virtuoso pianist, great sales performance is about mastering skill. And like the carpenter or the pianist, it means hours upon countless hours of skill development in the form of practice.

The problem is obvious. The diligent practice I speak of is not particularly exciting. It’s neither sexy nor dramatic. In fact, it can be quite mundane.

Enter the C.S. Lewis quote above. It seems to me that our ability to master a skill runs hand-in-hand with our ability to diligently pursue otherwise mundane tasks, knowing that practice makes for mastery, and that there is no other way to attain perfection.

I’m wondering how this speaks to you. Is it challenging? Do you agree with the premise? Do you have work to do on the matter?

Maybe it is the mundane activities that go the farthest in our desire to change someone’s world…