Micheal Savoie

I attended the final home game of the Crystal River Pirates vs. the Lecanto Panthers at my daughters’ High School this evening.  In a game that saw the Crystal River defense play roughly 16 to 20 plays the whole game, the Crystal River offense made good use of their time with the ball.  The final score of 43 – 0 correctly showed which team was there to play.

I love a good football game, and I had a blast watching these kids giving it their all.  I could easily see some of these players playing in college a few years from now.  The whole football environment is one that creates a sense of teamwork and work ethic.  The victories are the reward for their hard work, and the losses are ways to reveal weaknesses to be overcome with more training or assistance from teammates.

In business, you can see the people who understand this environment.  They are the ones who continue to do what needs to be done, test out a new strategy, overcome obstacles by becoming better themselves or by enlisting the help of teammates who are stronger in a different area.

If you are the member of multiple email lists, you know what I mean.  You see the various joint ventures that bring in $100,000 for one launch day, the partnerships that take the strengths of two or three people and develop into a force more powerful than each individual part combined.

In the game, there were some amazingly well executed running plays that looked identical except for who was actually carrying the ball.  Sometimes  the runnning back had it, other times the quarterback faked it to the running back and ran in the opposite direction and in another the fullback ended up with the ball and both the quarterback and running back split off in different directions to totally confuse the defense.

Extremely well designed plays made mincemeat of the Panthers defense.  And on the few occasions that the Pirates had to punt, the special teams took advantage of mistakes made by the receiving team to get the ball deep in Panther territory twice.  This, of course, kept the momentum solidly on the Pirates’ side of the field, which allowed them to score repeatedly.

How can we help shift the momentum in our businesses?  By doing certain things so well that we can create momentum through carefully orchestrated victories.  If you are a magnificent writer of sales copy, but you do not relate well with email lists, then use your skills to create small victories that you can build upon by first writing a killer sales page for getting people to sign up for your list.

Use this victory to design a sales letter for affiliate programs you are promoting.  Build on each of these victories with successive victories to overcome the weaknesses that trouble your business strategy.  After all, if you are afraid to start because you know that you aren’t good at one aspect of your business, you are failing before you even start.

Build on your strengths.  Become very good at one thing, then use that one thing to make a name for yourself.  Mine is writing.  I stink at many aspects of business, but I am not afraid to write.  I allowed some of my weaknesses (like fear of rejection, distaste for the phone) to overshadow my abilities ( writing, personality, ability to understand people, perception) and I failed for a long time.

I had grown some businesses a few times and allowed them to shrivel up and die because of the perceived size of my weaknesses.  Think about that.  How can a weakness be stronger than a strength?

When you allow it to defeat you.

I am sure Lecanto had many strengths in that football game last night.  They were overshadowed by their weaknesses, by their fears, by the perception that  they could not overcome their weaknesses.  Yet they had many opportunities where they could have done just that.  But in hindsight, we can all see where we could have done better.  The winners are those who accept the constructive advice of our mentors.

That is why football teams have coaches. A coach is someone who will tell you what you are doing wrong and recommend corrective actions that you can take to better yourself.

The Pirates have only won two games this season.  And both of them were against Lecanto.  If anyone should have been feeling like it was a foregone conclusion that they were going to lose, it should have been the Pirates.  After taking a beating against so many teams, they could have admitted that they were not capable of winning.

Someone believed in those players.  Someone instilled in them a sense that they had what it took to get better at what they did best, and then do it on the field with their teammates.  The coaches’ mission to assemble the correct mix of specialized players was accomplished when the kickoff was muffed and a Pirate player was there first to grab the ball.

What are you good at?  Where do you excel?  Don’t worry about where you suck.  Get better at the things you are good at.  The rest will follow, or, you can hire someone who excels at what you do not!

Don’t worry about  the money to pay for the help.  As you excel at the things that come easy for you, the money will come, because people will want to rent out your talents, or trade you their talents for yours.  Your goal should always be to improve your strengths.  Make them better, become the best.

Victory is worth the hard work.

The feeling you get following a hard fought victory is worth all the struggles you have faced to get there.