There’s this guy I know, Todd Brison who is Tim Denning’s partner. Todd writes a lot about writing. Yeah that sounds redundant but Todd is great at writing about writing. I’ve bought several of his courses. Todd recently wrote about guru’s and failure and had a great point. Everyone wants to teach you all the tricks to success so you won’t fail…but that’s just not realistic. Here’s Todd’s take…

Modern Technology stripped a preposterous* amount of failure out of life.

One example:

When you go on a road trip, you have almost zero chance of failure.

I use GPS to drive to Florida.

I have never failed to reach Florida.

But I don’t know HOW to get to Florida.

This is because I have never felt the pain of FAILING to reach Florida. I have never paid the cost in time or gas or a cranky, beach-eager family. I’ve never accidentally driven to West Virginia†.

This ignorance is harmless. Makes going to the beach easier.

But when we want to do more complicated things than drive to Florida — things that might (God forbid!) have more than one path — we become paralyzed.

Thus, the rise of gurus and the subsequent rise of guru fanbois.

Guru: “I can show you a failure-free route to greatness! ”

Fanois: “Yes… please… worthy leader…”

Preposterous.

My advice for today.

(Which is probably not in my best interest as a marketer/semi-guru myself)

Go fail.

And learn from that failure.

Then, you won’t need gurus.

In fact, you won’t need anyone.

You’ll be free to make your own choices.

No fanboi-ing necessary.

Todd is absolutely right! I am also a semi-guru myself on all things about sales careers. Guess what? A lot of what I learned and share was via mistakes! Mistakes I made over my career. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes…it’s how you learn. If you did something right, maybe you just got lucky.

I was never one for perfection…that just seems insane. For one, the effort to get to 100%…that last few percentage points to get to the 100% could be used to get to 75% on some other initiatives. So as Todd said, “Go fail.” Your life and career will thank you.

Happy Selling!

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Bill Becker Career Consultant

Bill Becker spent 35+ years in marketing and technology sales. Focusing on non-traditional revenue streams, he opened new markets and developed multiple programs to land multi-million dollar clients. He first started evangelizing about sales careers after spearheading the retraining of workers affected by the 9/11 layoffs.

When not promoting sales careers, Bill writes and performs comedy and advocates for permanent solutions to homelessness. You can learn about those efforts at - https://connectthedots.cc/