You can’t work on winning. You have to work on everything else.
How do you win? How do you win at business? How do you win a championship? How do you win a contract? I’ve heard these questions a lot. Here’s my answer.
Winning takes care of itself. It’s not something you can actually work on. You can’t set out with a goal being “to get better at winning.”
You can’t work on yourself or your business or your freelancing with the goal being “to win.”
How To Win At Winning
Here’s why. You don’t have any control over that. No control at all. You can pretend you do, you can pretend that visualising stuff works but it’s not going to get you there.
What you have to do is focus on improving every single area of what you do, every element of your game, so that you’re operating at your highest possible level.
What you have to do is apply higher standards to your work, from the content you write to your sales emails to the way you speak to customers to the way you get dressed before a meeting.
You have to work on improving every part of what you do and getting it to the best possible level, and do it divorced from the whole concept of winning. Improve because you know that your work deserves your best and you know that you’re capable of operating at your best.
If you can do all that — if you can lift your game in every way, if you can work constantly and consistently to improve yourself and meet better standards for what you do and how you do it — winning will take care of itself.
[This post by Jon Westenberg first appeared on Medium and has been reproduced with permission.]
