Chapter 1

BE A GOOD COPY-CAT

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and
Walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, German Philosopher)

It’s the most basic of our natural instincts; It’s also one of our unrecognized strengths, all of us are born with it; surprisingly most of us don’t use it to good effect.

Have you ever wondered how we all tend to learn all the things we do in our lives from the early days of our childhood…?

Have you observed how we learn to speak those first words we utter, the poems we recite, the songs we sing, the books we read, the cycles we ride, the food we eat, the cloths we wear…?

You are right, we grow up learning from our parents, siblings, teachers, friends, coaches, favorite film stars, sports persons and many more …by just COPYING them!

We copy many things...some consciously and other things unconsciously…all through our lives. In fact there are very few things that we do in our lives without learning from some one else consciously or otherwise.

Many books have been written on doing things differently to succeed in life and I do tend to agree with the idea. One must not trudge just the beaten path but instead go ahead write your own success story.

It sounds good, it sounds cool and most of us like to hear such things, mainly because it sounds good, it sounds different, doesn’t it?

But, do you think that you can learn new things, implement new ideas and do everything differently without mastering the basics of a system?

Believe me; its’ really tough, I tried doing things my way, on joining a particular industry in the front line of sales, many years back. The first six months were simply terrible. I could not even get close to quota, simply put, I was struggling, and just because I refused to follow a way of working that actually worked.

I had heard, read and lived on this line, ‘Do your own thing, your own way and stand out’
I did stand out though, but for all the wrong reasons. But than as a last option to save my career that just refused to take off, I decided to go by the book, and it worked, and I learned many new things.

Can you drive in a Formula1 race at speeds exceeding 200 miles an hour without learning and practicing for many weeks and months, even years, to drive at say a 100 miles an hour and before that at 50 miles an hour ?

Imagine the time, energy and money you stand to waste if you keep trying different ideas and different untested, unverified working methods in place of the existing ways of doing certain jobs that have produced great results.

Don’t you think it would be better to learn the things you are not good at or the things not known to you from an expert in place of wasting precious time on trying to figure it out by yourself?

The point I want to make here is that once you are a master of the basics of the business, the profession or trade you are in, then and only then are you well equipped to do every experiment you want to do, with possibly greater success!

Just for a moment imagine that you are an insurance sale person trying to sell one of your insurance plans.

It is widely known that purchasing life insurance is a personal matter and most people buy as per their specific needs. And you are attempting to sell the products only through mass presentations with sophisticated multimedia presentations, in a bid to do things differently and get the best possible results.

Believe me the person with comparatively less product knowledge and selling skills who meets his prospects at their homes and presents them his products individually will end up being more productive than you.

To be a good copy cat, a good learner you do not have to do anything exceptional. You just need to be eager to learn; open-minded, attentive, slightly inquisitive and with a positive frame of mind.

Be open to the ideas successful people or trained people share with you on various occasions like training sessions, team meetings etc, be attentive to the way these people implement their ideas, be inquisitive and ask the right questions to understand fully the thought process behind the action and be positive so that you may have no mental blocks to implement the idea for your own benefit and success in which ever way you feel.

For just a moment try to imagine that you would have had to learn everything you know and do today, on your own; imagine… the blunders, the waste of time and the frustration you would then face, now; it will be easy for you to comprehend the importance of learning from some one who already knows, and this holds good in any in any walk of life be it business, a sales career or sports…

Most good organizations that depend on in house sales teams have proper, proven sales procedures and many industries too have a set process for sales generation, a simple example is the life insurance industry or the direct selling industry across the globe.

When selling becomes a procedure, it ceases to be a problem as a proven system is replicated with minor alterations as per the needs of the situation.

If it’s not a procedure, it will always be a problem. All the sales people who implement the Copy-Cat method usually end up doing the right things and getting the best sales figures.

Ask yourself these questions and use the answers to your benefit.

a) How do I learn things?

b) Am I wasting too much of my sales hours on trying to do things differently when I could have saved on that time by using a tested method and generated more productive work/ closed more sales?

c) What are the things I am trying to discover, which I can learn from someone else and move ahead with greater speed?

d) How can I adapt /modify/ implement a certain existing idea to give me better results and the feeling of having done things differently?

e) What are the principles of my trade that I can copy from some one successful in my organization or industry and zoom ahead?

f) What are the processes and procedures that have given results and are proven over time?

Once you have answered these simple questions just go ahead and copy your way to success!

Looking forward to your comments.

Coming soon Chapter 2..