How Do You Spell Success?
I cry at weddings.
Not when the bride and groom are smacking faces. I stand pretty nonchalantly at the ceremony. What really gets the tear ducts going is the buffet at the reception.
My eyes well up with tears as I watch the tuxedo clad servers bear golden platters of jumbo shrimp in zesty cocktail sauces. My nose goes into overdrive and I can almost taste the warm brie tartletts Provencal. The aroma of the basil pesto swirls around me tauntingly.
It's enough to make a grown man sniff uncontrollably, head for the cutlery and take control of the buffet table.
Yet amazingly at my friend Kathy's wedding my mind was not entirely on the food.
At the corner of my eye, I watched this reluctant sort of guy in a white suit. At first he seemed to hesitate. He stood up, then sat down, not quite sure if he should head to the buffet table or not.
Finally, he plucked up enough courage to go ahead. I watched as he found his way at the end of the line that seemed to snake around endlessly.
I looked up from my Caesar salad and watched with interest as the white suit guy fidgeted. He seemed to poke his head around and scowl at the length of the line. Maybe he thought it would be better to come back when the wait wasn't as long.
So he left the line and headed back to his table. About fifteen minutes later, I washed down my dessert with a glass of red. And the white suit guy was still surveying the line.
This white suit guy was really starting to fascinate me. It was stop, go, stop, go and yet he never got anywhere.
I decided to leave the wedding reception before I passed out from drinking way too much wine, waiting for the white suit guy to get to the buffet table. I'm sure he did. I'm not sure if there was any food by the time he got there.
So really who is this guy in a white suit?
Yes, I'm talking about you. Remember how you started on say, your website project, and then gave up halfway? How you went back to doing something else and then came back to find you had a whole lot more to do with your website? If only you'd kept at it, your project would be well under way. You'd be having seconds and thirds and smacking your way through dessert. But you haven't so much as eaten a morsel yet.
Some people call it focus. Or the lack of it. I call it the Buffet Table Syndrome. The reason why your marketing isn't racing at squillions of miles an hour is because you do the white suit buffet dance.
So how do you stop doing the buffet dance? Hang on. Hang on. That's what the article is all about. In this article you can draw immense inspiration. If you stay in the buffet line, you'll soon have your plate full of business. Interested? Yes indeedy, you are, so let's rock right into the article.
Spell success if you can. How many letters does it have? You'll say seven, right?
Wrong.
Success is spelt with sixteen letters. Sixteen? Huh? Have I totally lost it? Hang on to your guns pardner. It ain't a spell test. It's a trip back in time.
The crowds milled around aimlessly on the street..
It was August 5, 1935. If you looked out of the window, you'd want to pull the blinds right back. The panic outside was so thick you could slice it and slap it on your bread like butter.
If you had bread and butter that is.
Because if you lived back then, you'd be smack, bang in the middle of the Great Depression–a period in history that stood out for its bleakness.
Businesses everywhere hung dearly onto every penny, adamantly refusing to hire workers. Rabid fear gripped business owners who saw little or no market for their goods. This collective act of panic strangulated the workers who had no money to buy goods. Like a tornado, the economy whipped around viciously, degenerating from bad to abysmal.
Here's Orwell's account of the Depression in Britain, The Road to Wigan Pier, speaks of “…several hundred men risk(ing) their lives and several hundred women scrabbl(ing) in the mud for hours… searching eagerly for tiny chips of coal” in slagheaps so they could heat their homes. For them, this arduously-gained “free” coal was “more important almost than food.” All around them the machinery they had previously used to mine in five minutes more than they could gather in a day stood idle.
In the midst of all this chaos, stood Leo Burnett.
Spurning Madison Avenue, the capital of America's advertising world, he moved to Chicago of all places. Friends joked at his apparent naivete.
“You'll soon be selling apples on the street like every one else,” they said, echoing scenes of the Great Depression where the unemployed sold apples at 5 cents on street corners.
Me, sell apples?
“I won't sell apples. I'll give them away,” retorted Leo Burnett defiantly. He sold his house, pawned his insurance and plunged headfirst into starting up the Leo Burnett Agency.
That day onwards, his agency had a bowl of fresh apples put out that would be given to any visitor to the premises. Today, the Burnett Agency is one of the world's top agencies.
And they give away over 750,000 apples a year. Over 1600 per day. And that's not counting the squillions of dollars of business profits the agency swims in year after year.
So do you think the life of Leo Burnett spells success?
Let's ask Dr.Wayne Dyer, shall we?
Wayne Dyer was the youngest of three boys. Their dad abandoned the family. Dyer says: “My father left right after I was born. He just disappeared and he spent some time in prison. He was an alcoholic and he walked away and he never looked back. He never even made a phone call.”
He continues: “He spent years in prison and died of cirrhosis of the liver. He was basically a very abusive man in almost every way — and certainly irresponsible.”
When his father abandoned the family, his mom went to work as a candy girl for seventeen dollars a week. She was unable to support her young sons and decided to give them over to foster care until she could find a way to support them. Wayne Dyer spent the first ten years of his life in a series of foster homes and orphanages.
Eighteen, and all's well
Dyer joined the Navy at 18, and served four years then went on to Wayne State University and the University of Michigan to earn his undergraduate degree and doctorate in counseling and psychology all the while working as a stuck boy and cashier at a large supermarket chain in order to support himself.
Goodbye safe job. Hello uncertain future
In the mid-1970s, Wayne Dyer quit his job as a professor at Wayne State University to promote his new book, Your rroneous Zones. However, no major talk show would book the then unknown Dyer. Did he give up? Not on your life. He loaded his car from floor to roof with hundreds of copies of his book, and then spent a year on the road traveling from small town to small town and appearing on any radio or TV talk show that would have him.
Once on the air, Dyer would give out the number of the local bookstore and say that his book was available there. After the interview, he'd quickly drive over to that bookstore, where the manager would say, “Oh, you're Wayne Dyer? We've been getting lots of calls for your book!” Dyer would reply, “Well, I have a case in the car–would you like some?” “Oh, yes! And would you sign some while you're here?”
By the end of the year, The Tonight Show was calling him. And by the end of the 1970s, Your Erroneous Zones had become the number-one bestselling nonfiction book of the entire decade.
Why do so many fail and some succeed against all odds?
It's called ‘sticktoitiveness.'
Stick to it. Don't be the guy in the white suit. Don't keep leaving your buffet line because when you get back, the line's going to be just as long.
Your business can be a wonder, if only you stick to it. Success has been spelled wrong for too long.
This is the way to spell it – Sticktoitiveness.
And what's sticktoitiveness got to do with marketing?
Funny you should ask. Because marketing is essentially a battle for your customer's brain. If you don't get the stuff sorted out in your own head; If you don't believe you're the best in the world at what you do, how is your customer going to believe it? And how are you going to be be the best in the world if you keep
doing the buffet dance?
Sticktoitiveness.
Have it three times a day. After food preferably 🙂
