Team Alpha 375

Practice Right So You Can't Get It Wrong

Excerpted from The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Read World by Harvey Mackay

  Practice makes perfect ... not true. You have to add one word: Perfect practice makes perfect.

I wish that I had coined that phrase, but I didn't. Vince Lombardi did. Practice something time and time again and - if you don't know what you are doing - all you are really doing is perfecting an error. You have put a ceiling on how good you can become.

A golfer can go out and play eight days a week. He can practice eight days a week. And if he doesn't know what he is doing, all he is really doing is perfecting his errors - eight days a week.

I have studied the Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic languages and quite frankly, people think I am a heck of a linguist. Actually I am a lot slower learner than most of the people with whom I started my language classes. But there is one marked difference: I finished. They didn't.

In Japanese it might take 200 hours. Russian 300 hours. Mandarin, 400 hours. But eventually that breakthrough occurs.

It's kind of like a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps 100 times without a dent in it. And yet on the 101st blow the rock splits in two. It was not that blow that did it, but what followed all that had gone before. If you're not willing to practice - and practice until you get it right - you will never make the 100 blows that make the breakthrough on the 101st.

A perfect example of this was when my son, David, and I were taking Japanese lessons from the Berlitz language school in preparation for our four-week stay in Japan. At the time, he was an undergraduate student at Stanford University and right at the peak of his learning curve. I was somewhat over the hill and would not be considered a fast learner. However, it made no difference whatsoever because of my perseverance. After two weeks into the class, David was on page 75 of the text, and I was on page 30. By the end of the course, he had learned approximately 35 percent more than I had because of his speed and young brain. To overcome this, I had to spend an extra three weeks of studying to catch up with him. In the end, we both left with the same Japanese vocabulary. I just had to pay a higher price.

Look at the great athletes and musicians. There are no walk-ons at the Super Bowl or Carnegie Hall ... or in corporate boardrooms, for that matter. The level of performance in those exalted places is only partially a reflection of talent. There are two other qualities that are indispensable in making it to the top: determination and expert coaching.

Over a lifetime I've had numerous coaches to help me bring out whatever God-given talent and potential I have. I've had coaches for:

• public speaking
• writing
• ideas/creativity
• computers/social media
• foreign languages
• marathon running
• golf (including putting)
• downhill and waterskiing
• swimming
• dancing (thanks to my wife, Carol Ann
• table tennis
• bowling
• stretching
• boxing
• scuba diving
• ice skating
• basketball
• volleyball . . . and many, many others.

Whatever it is you do, you can be better at it if you just keep on learning. I certainly have not mastered the art of making envelopes, selling envelopes or developing new envelopes.

The minute I persuade myself that I have learned all there is to learn about a subject and can relax, that's the moment my competition will hand me my head and slam me into the pavement. The annals of business are filled with stories of companies which thought they had it made and could milk their enterprises as cash cows without having to bother about improving their products or services. It's amazing how fast they found their markets disappearing.

Apply this lesson to your own business. Hire people who are still learning, people who feel that learning is a lifelong process, either in the classroom, in the office or at home. Show them you want them to grow - and your business will grow too.

Right after Communism fell in the early 1990s, I made a seven-day lecture tour to Moscow. I will never, ever forget a Help Wanted sign I spotted. It translated: "Inexperience Wanted!" In short, they didn't want anyone who had been practicing bad habits. They wanted a new and fresh employee that they could train properly.

Mackay's Moral: All the world's a stage, and most of us need more rehearsals.