In a business class a certain person told us the story of how he became a very successful real estate agent.
He was very young, and on his first day on the job his boss had asked him, "Do you want to sell houses?" Of course, he immediately answered that he did. The boss took him to a neighborhood and told him, "This is where I am going to leave you. I will pick you up in four hours. Go and knock door to door and ask the people if they want to sell their homes."
He left him a paper with a grid with one hundred boxes and told him that every time someone said no, he should make an X in one of the boxes. "Go and look for your first hundred NOs."
The young man could not believe it, but there was no way out of the situation.
As it turned out many did say NO, but to his surprise, many said YES - that they had just been thinking about it and they wanted to get more information. In that moment the young man realized that with every person who said NO, he got closer to the possibility of a YES.
We all have a big fear of NO, a great fear of rejection. But if we don't risk receiving a NO, we will never receive the YES.
The capacity to overcome fear is what differentiates the people that get a lot out of life from those that hardly get anything at all; the people that are successful and excel from those that stay stuck.
M.Katz, The Easiest Way
