I was flipping through the channels Saturday night when I stumbled on the 1992 award-winning film, Glengarry Glen Ross.  It is one of those “Venus flytrap” movies that you can’t escape once you tune in.  So I fired up some Orville Redenbacher popcorn and settled in for the long haul.

Glengarry Glen Ross is a haunting and powerful story of four desperate real estate agents who mostly sell through acts of deception and intimidation (Not exactly a blueprint for building trusted relationships!).

In one classic scene, a sales “motivator”, played by an incendiary Alec Baldwin, unleashes a deluge of verbal abuse upon the sales team.  He coldly announces that the top two salespeople will get the coveted Glengarry Highlands leads.  And the next two salespeople will get fired!

The Glengarry leads are like gold to these real estate agents.  They each believe that if they were to get better prospects for sales, they would be more successful.  They were each waiting to be handed better opportunities.

But the reality is that in sales, as in life, if we want to be successful, we can’t wait around for our “big break”.  We can’t let other people or outside circumstances dictate our success.  We have to go out and create our own Glengarry leads!

We Have To Create Our Own Success

In our sales careers, it is not about our territory.  It is not about the leads we are given. It is not about the product line we sell or the division we represent.  Long term-success will not come from external factors.  It will come from our own hard work and dedication.

We have to uncover our opportunities.  We have to generate our own good luck.  We have to create the Glengarry leads that will catapult us to victory!

And the same is true in any profession or pursuit.

We can launch our business in a down market and still create a thriving enterprise.  We can inherit an “unwinnable” case and still scratch and claw for a positive outcome.  We can face a classroom of challenging students or a team of “uncoachable” athletes and still create a nurturing atmosphere and a winning team.

Our success can be influenced by outside forces, but ultimately we control our own destiny.   We control the trajectory of our success.  We can fight to overcome a negative situation and rise to the top of any profession.

We Can’t Wait Around For Opportunities

And we can fight back in our personal lives as well.  Not all of us are born with a silver spoon. Not everyone is blessed with athletic talent or an strong intellect.  Not everyone can easily make friends and fit into a social circle.  We all need a little help and empathy.

But we also need to recognize that we have the biggest impact on our own success.  We may need to work harder to overcome our lack of connections.  We may need to stay late at practice to drill down on our weaknesses.  We may need to go earlier to school to work on a particularly difficult concept.  We may need to fight through the awkwardness until we find our comfortable circle of friends.

While we all have people to lean on, nobody is going to do it for us.  It will take action.  We can’t wait around for our Glengarry leads!

There Are No Excuses

But what happens when we can’t overcome our negative environment?

We sell in a smaller territory and can’t find any prospects.  We start a business during an economic downturn and it never gets off the ground.  We have a classroom of challenging students and never break through to help.  We have a team full of discipline cases and lose every game.  We work hard in practice and still don’t get any playing time.

We are not always going to come out on top.  Sometimes, we work hard and still lose.  Sometimes we can’t overcome a disadvantage.

It’s not always going to be ideal.  But we can’t allow excuses to chip away at our own dreams.

Excuses are the death blow to resilience.  If we feel as though we are born to lose, we will lose.  If we feel as though the odds are always stacked against us, we will eventually give up the fight.

We must look internally.  While we may have been dealt a rough hand, at least some part of our failure comes from within.  That is the good news! 

We can change.  We can adapt.  We can re-tool our approach.  We can control at least some of the outcome with our effort.

Forces aren’t conspiring against us.  No matter how bad our circumstances, we have the ability to create our own positive environment.

Go Make It Happen

If we wait for someone else to hand us a lead, we might be waiting our whole lives!

What are we going to do today to take a step forward?  It doesn’t have to be life-changing.  We can keep it simple.  But it has to come from us.

The Glengarry leads won’t save us.  We must go out and create our next great opportunity!

Until next week, keep smiling!