Lessons from the Rugby World Cup
21 Oct 2007
I’m in the process of re-writing Psycho-Selling which, by the way, is going to be sub-titled How To Double Your Sales in 6 Weeks rather than the 8 weeks in the previous edition. And this week-end I was working on the Time Management section.
I also watched the Rugby World Cup Final on TV with a group of other people and I thought there were so many lessons for all of us in that game. Both teams played with commitment, determination, passion and persistence, all prerequisites for world class achievers. Yet the first thing that I noticed was how many of the spectators around me were constantly criticising the England team’s play. Comments like – ‘they’re playing the wrong game’, ‘they should be running with the ball, not kicking it forward’, ‘they’re not working fast enough in the scrum’ , ‘they’re useless on the line’ and so on. Of course none of these people were world-class rugby players themselves or they would have had a place in the team and been able to walk their talk. Neither, to the best of my knowledge, were any of them world-class coaches. And that made me wonder how often these same people might be standing on the sidelines and just criticising others in many other areas of their lives. 
The other thing that really struck me related to the fact that I was writing about time management in my book. The England, and the South African teams both had the same goal – to do everything they possibly could to win. And they both had the same 80 minutes to achieve it in. And both those teams gave it everything they had for the full 80 minutes – no holds barred.
If you have attended any of my talks, you’ll recall that one of the things I often say is that we all know a great deal more than we possibly give ourselves credit for and one of the reasons we sometimes fail is because we don’t ask ourselves the right questions. So here are three questions for you to ask yourself this week:
Have you established clear concise goals?
Have you set a deadline by which you intend to achieve them?
Are you going to play your game with commitment, determination, passion and persistence – no holds barred?