The one habit every top performer has

The question that came in was simple: how important are training and drilling, really? Here is my answer. You have to get people drilling, drilling, drilling until they are monsters, and then never stop. Never, never stop. Look at the greats. They drill and practice all the time.

I will tell you something about myself. I just turned 68, and I still study the material on how human beings interact with each other. What makes a person tick? I wanted the conversation to go left, so what caused it to go right? I am still asking those questions every single day, after all these years.

Because the moment you stop asking is the moment you start sliding backwards. Let me show you what I mean with two of my favorite examples.

Scales every morning

There was a country western star in America named Charlie Daniels. A fiddle player, world famous, the man behind The Devil Went Down to Georgia. A true musician and a world class performer.

Somebody asked him, so Charlie, tell me how your day starts. And he said, well, I sit down with my violin, and for the first forty five minutes to an hour, I just do my scales. The most basic drill there is, and he ran it every morning of his life. I sat there thinking, this guy is a world class performer, and he still starts every day with the fundamentals.

A thousand shots after the game

Michael Jordan is one of my favorite athletes in the world, and probably one of the greatest of all time in basketball. The story I love about him is what he did after the game was over.

He would go back out, exhausted, and put up a thousand shots at the basket. After decades of being a world class performer, he still practiced like that. This is how the best of the best get made and stay made: through practice, through drilling, through learning how to perform better and get better at your game.

The day you start to die

If you think you have got it and nothing more can be taught to you, that is the day you start to die. If you cannot be taught anything, you are missing the whole point. You have to keep finding out how you can actually get better, because a skill you stop feeding does not hold still. It decreases.

And here is the other reason: the environment keeps changing. In sports, new players come in with skills you never had, because they figured something out. How do you defend against them? In music, you get new sounds, new instruments, new electronics. Everything around you is moving, and you need to learn how to embrace it and work with it.

That comes through drilling. Drilling, practice, drilling, practice. They are the same thing. There is no difference.

Drill until it is a reflex

Here is what this looks like on my own floor. The first half hour of every day is drill, drill, drill. Some of the people in that room are already pretty good, and that is exactly why I can raise the intensity on them. I will come in and play the impossible customer. Belligerent, insulting, trying to rip their heart out of their chest, and I expect them to get through it anyway. The whole idea is simple: do not figure it out on a live call with a real customer. Do it in a training environment and get good at it there.

Because here is what is real to me. You are in a sales conversation, the customer pushes back, and all you can manage is uh, uh. You lost the sale right there. But if you are drilled, if you have practiced, the moment they push, your mouth opens up and beautiful stuff comes out. It happened to me plenty of times coming up in selling. The customer would throw X at me and Y would come out of my mouth before I ever thought about it, and I would stand there going, wow, that was good. Stimulus, response. A reflex.

That is where drilling takes you: to the point where the whole thing is a reflex. Do that and you move into a whole other league. That is how you raise your income and how you get your sales department moving. Whether you are the rep, the sales manager, or the owner of the company, you have to get people drilling until they are monsters. And never stop. Never, never stop. Look at the greats. They drill and practice all the time.