Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

The Way to Put Obstacles Out of Sight
Here's a favorite quote from Henry Ford:

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal"

When I was fresh out of college, I took a job selling encyclopedias to make a little money before starting grad school. I was not a smashing success.

Each morning I would come into the main office and get a lot of laughs as I related my latest horror stories of the previous day's disastrous sales calls. Eventually, though, the other sales reps stopped laughing.

Eventually, they recognized that I was subconsciously starting to look for obstacles in my sales calls because I found it easier to get positive social reinforcement (laughter) for my failures than it was to improve my sales skills enough to get positive monetary reinforcement (sales).

When I lost focus on my goals, all I could see were the obstacles.

That's the lesson I see in Henry Ford's quote. And I see that situation a lot in many new business owners.

It's easy to get caught up in obstacles when you don't focus clearly on your goal. It's easy to complain about what stands in your way and believe that if it weren't for those obstacles, you'd have a clear path to your goals.

But those obstacles are like billboards alongside the road. If you focus on the road, the road will eventually take you past them. If you focus on them, you'll lose sight of the road and eventually run right off of it.

That's the way your obstacles stop you -- when you pay attention to THEM instead of the road to your destination. You can probably get sympathy from friends and family when you complain of those obstacles, but is sympathy really what you started your endeavor to achieve?

Keep focusing on your goals, not the obstacles. The obstacles are only the billboards along the way.
Jeff

Labels: inspirational quotes