To find the keys to winning in selling and in life, Personal Selling Power has searched through countless interviews with winners in a wide variety of disciplines. One of the most surprising findings: Winners always learn from the many winners who have gone before them. The good news: You, too, can learn the secrets of winners. The not so good news: Although the lessons are easy to understand, they are hard to put into practice. Winning means work, work and more work, but also success, higher success and supersuccess.

1. Persistence

Winners don’t see obstacles as one solid, insurmountable barrier, but as a collection of small inconveniences. The Greek philosopher Plutarch once wrote, "Many things which cannot be overcome when they are together yield themselves up when taken little by little." Winners refuse to see obstacles as one solid wall. This positive outlook allows them to develop higher levels of persistence. Winners continue to see a positive outcome, long after others have given up hope.

Charles F. Kettering, a vice president of General Motors, was once quoted as saying, "Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something when sitting down."

Thomas A. Edison, the world famous inventor, developed the habit of working on several inventions at the same time. Whenever he came to a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, he didn’t give up, but moved on to another invention. While his conscious mind was focused on the second invention, he allowed his subconscious mind to continue working on the first invention.

In a fascinating conversation with a reporter, Edison explained his secrets to success: "In working out an invention, the most important quality is persistence. Nearly every man who develops a new idea works it up to a point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to get discouraged, that’s the place to get interested. Hard work and forever sticking to a thing till it’s done, are the main things an inventor needs. I can’t recall a single problem in my life, of any sort, that I ever started on that I didn’t solve, or prove that I couldn’t solve it. I never let up until I had done everything that I could think of, no matter how absurd it might seem as a means to the end I was after. Take the problem of the best material for phonograph records. We started out using wax. That was too soft. Then we tried every kind of wax with hardening substances. There was something objectionable about all of them. Then somebody said something about soap. That worked better, but it wasn’t what we wanted. I had seven men scouring India, China, Africa, everywhere for new vegetable bases for new soaps. After five years we got what we wanted, and worked out the records that are in use today."

2. Attitude

Positive attitudes precede positive results. Before we can win, we have to assume the mental attitude that it is impossible for us to fail. Losers all too often judge their efforts with pessimistic logic instead of reinforcing their efforts with optimistic hope. Pessimistic people always have a perfectly logical reason for their lack of success. Winners realize that a positive attitude is not the product of logic, but of belief. We can choose to be happy if we believe that we can be happy. We can choose to have a great day like we can choose to meet our sales goals. Abraham Lincoln once said that "Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."

While losers stay within their comfort zone and maintain the same level of performance, winners challenge themselves to exceed their own records. Their winning attitude comes from the belief that every personal record, no matter how great, is worth improving.

Bruce Jenner, the Olympic Decathlon champion, once told a reporter, "I always wanted to do better. I had a very positive mental attitude. If I ran 100 meters in 11.2, I felt sure I could do it in 11.1. If I broad jumped 21 feet, I was positive I could do 22."

As milk, our attitudes are perishable. As milk will curdle when mixed with lemon juice, our attitudes can spoil when we spend too much time with negative people. Winners make it a habit to avoid "social lemons." Gold Medalist Jenner once said, "Around Bruce Jenner you don’t ever talk about losing and you never talk about the possibility of defeat. Talk about winning and believe it will happen."

3. Effort

"To enjoy enduring success," wrote John McDonald, "we should travel a little in advance of the world." Winners know that without extra effort it is impossible to win. Roger Bannister, the first athlete to run a mile under four minutes described his historic victory saying, "In the last three hundred yards of my record run, my mind took over. It raced well ahead of my body and drew my body compelling it forward. I felt that the moment of a lifetime had come. The world seemed to stand still. With fifty yards left, my body had long since exhausted all its energy, but it went on running just the same. The last few seconds seemed never-ending. I leaped at the tape like a man taking his last spring to save himself from the chasm that threatens to engulf him. It was only then that real pain overtook me."

Winners give all of themselves and hold nothing back. They create their own opportunities through extra effort. Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca once said, "The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they’re expected to do – they always reach."

In the profession of selling, customers are more eager to buy from the salesperson who is willing to go the extra mile for them. Napoleon Hill once wrote, "You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for."

Extra effort does not always mean you have to work harder than anyone else. A video analysis of a world cup soccer game once revealed that the famous player, Pele, ran a distance during the game that was over 25% less than the distance logged by his opponent. Pele learned to conserve energy during the game and always chose the shortest possible path to attack the opposing team’s goal. This winning strategy allowed Pele to deploy extra energy for reaching higher speeds and more accurate shots. His extra effort came from working smarter, not harder.

4. Courage

Sir Winston Churchill once defined courage as "the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all the others." John F. Kennedy describes in his book, Profiles in Courage, what it means to be courageous: "To be courageous requires no exceptional qualifications, no magic formula, no special combination of time, place, and circumstance. It is an opportunity that sooner or later is presented to us all. In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follows his conscience – the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men – each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient – they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look in his own soul."

Courage is often called the best antidote to fear and anxiety.

The job of selling offers plenty of opportunity to overcome fear with courage. Many top salespeople admit that they had to overcome their fears before they could move on to greater success. No matter what the arena, there is no place for cowards in the winner’s circle. The famous football coach Vince Lombardi once told his team that courage equals mental toughness. He called it a state of mind, "character in action."

Martin Luther King saw courage as an inner force, "…an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations."

Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote about the fact that everyday courage has few witnesses: "We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out to your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout your coming when you return from your daily victory and defeat."

5. Competition

Winners realize that competition is the only way to get better, to get tougher and to taste the sweetness of victory. Football coach Don Shula once asked, "How can you prove you’re the best unless you have competition?"

While losers avoid competition, winners thrive on it. Theodore Roosevelt encouraged his fellow Americans with these stirring words: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."

Most people don’t compete simply because they think that they are not cut out to win. Avoiding competition means that you’ll never find out how good you really are. Sir Edmund Hillary, the first human to climb the tallest mountain on this planet, once reflected on what it means to compete: "You don’t have to be a fantastic hero to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals. The intense effort, the giving of everything you’ve got, is a very pleasant bonus."

Competition in selling offers its share of victories and crushing defeats. In selling, as in sports, there are competitive pressures like the ticking clock, the warning signals from the sidelines and the scoreboards displaying our market share, dollar volume and industry trends. As we survey the playing field, competition seems to be fiercer with every year. What does it really take to win over competition? Tom Watson, the championship golfer, once offered this sound advice: "Sometimes you have to lose major championships before you can win them. It’s the price you pay for maturing. The more times you can put yourself in pressure situations – the more times you compete – the better off you are. It’s a learning experience that’s worth a fortune."

Competition is like the stone that sharpens the axe. If you want to be the best you can be in selling, you will have to meet and exceed the efforts of your competition. It simply boils down to this, if you want to be the best, you must be able to beat the best.

6. Adversity

The author of America’s first self-help book, Samuel Smiles wrote, "Success grows out of struggles to overcome difficulties. If there were no difficulties, there would be no success." Winners know that when they face adversity they have two choices: to seek comfort or to seek solutions. Losers seek comfort, winners press on. B.F. Skinner, the noted psychologist, once suggested the proper way to look at managing failure: "A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying."

Often, adversity is nothing but a wake-up call for creativity. NFL quarterback Dan Fouts once commented, "The key is to concentrate your way through the bad times. I really believe that you can have some of your best games that way. You play better because you have to concentrate harder when you’re facing some adversity."

Winners are not afraid of adversity. They accept adversity and failure as part of the game. "To fail," says psychologist David Viscott, "is a natural consequence of trying. To succeed takes time and prolonged effort in the face of unfriendly odds. To think it will be any other way, no matter what you do, is to invite yourself to be hurt and to limit your enthusiasm for trying again."

When salespeople lose a sale, or when they are facing a tough problem, they can treat the adverse situation either as a test of their strength or as a testimony to their weakness. We can manage adversity by meeting it head-on, by working smarter on the next call and by developing better selling skills to avoid losing the next time. Or we have the choice to do nothing, hoping that the problem will go away.

Many times, winners will turn adversity into an opportunity. To win means to find the pearl of wisdom contained in every adverse situation. A little known story in American business history involves an insurance salesman named Lewis Waterman. Waterman once worked with a client for several weeks before he persuaded him to take out a large policy. When Waterman placed the contract on his client’s desk ready for the signature, he took a fountain pen from his pocket. As he opened it, the pen began to leak on the contract. Waterman had to go back to his office to get another policy form. By the time he returned, the customer had changed his mind. Waterman was so upset that he gave up the insurance business and then and there devoted his time to the development of a reliable fountain pen. Waterman writing instruments are today symbols of quality in the industry. Winners like Lewis Waterman trust the old saying, "Adversity is nothing but the diamond dust nature uses to polish its jewels."