Chet Holmes is said to be “America’s greatest sales and marketing executive”. At every company he has worked for he consistently achieves breakthrough results again and again. What’s even more impressive is that this has always been achieved with basically zero additional funding, capital, or people. His secret is simple: Gain Mastery. Chet always picks one thing, and does it better than anything else, and does it better than anyone else. His key message is to forget about being a scatterbrain and chasing 50 different ideas because, unsurprisingly, that doesn’t work.
If you had an option of doing 4000 activities 12 times, or 12 activities 4000 times, which would you pick? Chet always chooses 12 activities 4000 times. In every company he goes into, he notices that people are doing loads of things a few times, and they end up mediocre at everything. What he does is almost brutal: he goes in, diving into the sales organisation and completely turning it around by asking the question, “How are we going to become masters at sales?”. He then identifies typically the 12 things which drive performance and becomes world class at doing these.
Timothy Ferriss in his book, the 4 Hour Workweek, also figured this out. How do you get to a state of mastery? It’s by intensely doing something over a short amount of time very frequently. He won the World championship in Tango dancing at 4 months, which is amazing considering that some people spend their whole life learning and practicing and don’t get close to that. It’s about the intensity of experience.
My own observations very much mirror this. Those companies managing to deliver sustained high growth are those which have identified the ’12 things’ or their ‘core DNA’ that drive their success. Each of these areas receive continuous focus and are mastered.
So my questions for you this week:
- What are you ’12 things’ that drive your success?
- Have you mastered these?
- What do you need to stop doing to create the time you need to achieve mastery?
