A dictionary is the only place that success
comes before work. Hard work is the price we
must pay for success.

—Vince Lombardi, pro football coach

My mother’s love and encouragement produced the gasoline in my engine when I worked.

I think by now you know how I feel about the importance of time from our discussion in Chapter 3. Let me expand on that since it’s so critical to success. Time wasted cannot be regained. It’s a cancelled check—worth nothing. I guard my time like it is gold. In fact, to me, it’s worth even more than gold, because you can’t buy a sack of time with a sack of gold. That’s why I don’t like distractions in my life. I know they happen. But I don’t like them. The time of my life is divided into four areas, and I don’t let anything get in the way when I’m doing any one of the four.

1. When I work, I work. Nothing interferes with my workday. That’s where I make my living. I want to be focused and left alone.

2. When I sleep, I sleep. You know I like to sleep as much as a bear. I don’t want someone interrupting my sleep at three o’clock in the morning because they have a problem. Unless it’s an emergency, that’s my time.

3. When I eat, I eat. I don’t like being bothered when I’m eating. I don’t want to concentrate on anything else. Talk to me later, not when I’m eating.

4. When I play, I play. I don’t want someone trying to get ahold of me when I’m on vacation. That time is for me and my family. Don’t call me. I’m not listening.

Those are my four policies about how I regulate my time. If you follow this approach, you’ll be amazed at how much time you’ll have for everything in your life. And that’s important to understand because life is not about one thing. Your life is about more than just your job. To live a balanced life, you must pay attention to everything that’s important to you. That’s how I do it. My approach is neat, orderly, and it works. I know exactly what I expect of myself and when—and so does everyone else. Here’s the kicker, though: when it’s time to work, I go into action mode. I get off my butt and get moving. You won’t make any footprints in the sands of time while sitting down.

Making the Most of Your Day

You’ll never go wrong if you simply follow Girard’s Rule #4: Work when you work. And I mean no cheating. Put in an honest 8–10 hour day. If I had a nickel for every hour people waste away on the job in just one day because of poor habits or lack of discipline, I’ll bet I could fill the Empire State Building from the basement to the top. In fact, coins would be flowing out of the windows like a stack of Vegas slot machines. I’d be a rich man. It’s sad, but we know it’s true because we’ve both seen people doing just that at work—nothing.

I was once told about a University of Michigan survey that revealed a disturbing statistic about time. According to their findings, in a week’s time, the average person really works only about 1½ days. That means in a month, they work a week. If you extend that out to a year, it amounts to about three months that they actually work. Three months! That means for nine months out of the year, the average person does nothing—NOTHING. Many of them actually feel they’re getting a “free” ride when in fact they’re only cheating themselves. They think the people who toe the line for everyone else are suckers. Have I got a news flash for them.

The actor W. C. Fields used to say, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Let me tell you something: people who just “show up” for work but do nothing all day are the real suckers. Their lives amount to nothing and prove the point that there are bums indoors as well as out on the street. Tell me you’re not in that crowd. If you are, your career just received a life sentence without parole. Get used to your jail cell. You’re going nowhere. You’re a BUM! Take it from Joe Girard:

People who do nothing know nothing.

If you know nothing you get nothing.

Without knowledge you will surely fail.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. The great ancient Greek philosopher Socrates had a thing or two to say about that too. One of his young devoted followers pleaded with him to share the secret of acquired knowledge. Socrates willingly consented and led the young man to a nearby river. “This is how,” Socrates stated, as he pushed the young man into the river. And then, jumping in himself, he held the young man’s head underneath the water. The young man struggled frantically to free himself, but Socrates held him tight and kept his head submerged. Finally, the young man scratched and clawed and fought with every ounce of his being. He was able to break loose and emerge from the water. Socrates then asked him, “When you were drowning, what one thing did you want most of all?” Still gasping for breath, the young man exclaimed, “I wanted air.” Socrates smiled and then wisely said, “When you want knowledge as much as you want air, then you will get it.” Truer words were never spoken.

Faking, Falling, and Failing

Even the most detailed time management planner won’t save you if you find yourself slacking off at work and not giving 100 percent. It isn’t just the losers who fall into this trap either. I’ve seen some decent salespeople get caught here. Danny, one of our young rookie salesmen, tallied up 84 prospects who promised to buy a new car or truck from him by mid-December. “I’m gonna sell more cars than Girard,” he boasted. He was so sure he was going to rewrite the record book, he took his eye off the ball and went out and spent a small fortune on Christmas gifts for his wife and three young kids in anticipation of his earnings. Sadly, he was able to close only three of the 84 prospects. He “put the cart before the horse.” Had he spent his time being more thorough and persistent with his prospects, he might have been able to close an additional 60 to 70 percent of them. Danny’s story is similar to the fate of so many other sales reps I’ve run into over the years.

They start off by working hard and making good use of their time. They have a few weeks of good results. All of a sudden they begin to believe they’re so good that things will happen automatically, that success is some kind of ticket to the easy life—an entitlement to slack off. They begin to believe that things can’t possibly go wrong now that they’ve enjoyed a taste of success.

Now watch what happens here. They ease up on their effort. They get cocky, and then they get lazy. They’re on the way down—FALLING down to the reality that they’re not for real after all. They’re FAKES. And all fakes have something waiting around the corner for them—FAILURE. Failure is always lurking in the “alleys of life,” watching and waiting for the right moment when it’s least expected to spring out of nowhere and mug people like that.

Let me tell you something: people who enjoy success too quickly can often be doomed to failure if they forget what got them there and where they came from. That’s why I always keep that picture of me shining shoes as a nine-year-old kid on the wall in my office. I never want to forget where I came from. It kept me in line and prevented me from thinking I was a hotshot.

How many professional athletes and Hollywood actors and actresses and singers do we know who have fallen victim to “stardom” in their careers? There’s too many to count. The media gets to them and props them up as “larger than life” figures. Worst of all, they begin to believe it. Suddenly they’re “special.” They think they don’t have to live by everybody else’s rules.

Here’s what’s really happening. The imposters of success—glitz and glamour—have them by the throat, and they don’t even know it. They have no clue as to what to do or how to handle the spotlight. Suddenly they forget where they came from. All that hard work to get launched and climb the mountain goes down the drain with inflated egos, drugs, alcohol, bad marriages, and eventually financial ruin. The dream becomes their worst nightmare. Many a professional athlete’s career or image has been spoiled or tarnished by activities off the playing field: O. J. Simpson, John Daly, Tiger Woods, Mike Tyson, Pete Rose, Mickey Mantle, and Barry Bonds, just to name a few. Sadly, some lives are even tragically cut short on their meteoric rise to fame and fortune: Whitney Houston, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Hank Williams, Janis Joplin, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, John Belushi, and tragedy’s poster child, Marilyn Monroe. Incomplete lives lost in time.

Why does this happen so often? In most cases, it’s because they took their eye off the ball. They fell into the celebrity trap. They let distractions lure them away from success and suck them into the quicksand of failure. They left who they were to become someone even they couldn’t recognize. What a pathetic waste. It’s no coincidence. We’ve seen it happen over and over. What does this mean to you? Let me give you some pointers to make sure none of this ever happens to you:

1. Never forget where you came from. Keep a picture of yourself as a kid nearby.

2. Remember your success is NEVER ALL ABOUT YOU. If you’re in sales, you represent a product or service backed by lots of other people without whom you’d fail.

3. You will have your ups and downs. Be thankful for the UPS and humble during the DOWNS.

4. Winning isn’t about being arrogant. It’s about being appreciative.

5. Always put yourself second. Put your family first. That’s why you do what you do.

If you keep those five things in mind, you will never have to look back on your career with regrets about the empty trail you left behind.

Stay Focused

Keep your eye on your goals at all times. Don’t get ahead of yourself. And don’t get bigheaded about yourself. When you arrive at your place of work, never forget that you haven’t accomplished a damn thing yet. At this point, you’re no different than anyone else until you prove it. There’s only one mindset to bring as you go through that front door—the most valuable thing you have is your time. Never forget this. Make the most of every hour in your day. Make every moment count for something. If you have a good day, don’t fall into the trap of “rewarding” yourself the very next day by slacking off. Do it again! Whatever you did worked! You’re doing something right! Be thankful. Learn from that experience. There’ll be plenty of time for rewards later.

As I said right up front in this chapter, when I arrive at work, I am there to work. When I go home or take a vacation or trip, I’m there to play. Don’t mix the two. Trust me. It doesn’t work. Business and pleasure are not good companions.

Only you know for sure when you’ve put in a solid day of work. If you shave an hour off here and there by taking an extra long lunch, phoning a buddy or friend instead of a customer, or by calling in “sick,” only you know for sure what’s really going on. Since most people can’t be supervised that closely, this kind of work ethic can go undetected for months or even years. But you know what? Even though you’re cheating the company you work for, the one who’s really being cheated is YOU! You’ve stolen away precious time that could have been productive. Instead, you chose to “work the system” and do the bare minimum. Eventually that approach becomes your model for how you work. Pretty soon you don’t know any other way to work.

And who suffers? Besides the company, YOUR FAMILY! That’s right. Every day you slack off, you’re cheating your kids out of a better education that costs a little more. You’re cheating your spouse out of a better home or vacation he or she richly deserves. How proud of yourself are you now? If that describes your approach to work, you’re a LOSER and a cheat. If you’re around people like that in your place of work, avoid them like poison because they will change you forever for the worse. Take a “bite out of that apple” and you’ll never get out of jail.

Listen, I’m not telling you to avoid being friends with people at work. You don’t have to become a hermit to be successful. What I am telling you is hang around with people who can help you. Depending on where you work, those people are not necessarily in your department. In my line of work, I never had lunch with other salespeople. Why? It didn’t matter if I liked them or not. THEY COULDN’T HELP ME. I spent more time with people in the service department where I knew my customers would spend the majority of their time once I sold them a car. I wanted those customers to be taken care of so I knew they were having a first-class ownership experience.

If you’re in the business of insurance sales, you might want to spend some time getting to know underwriters or people in claims to better understand what they do that can help you. Maybe you’re in real estate sales. Spend some time getting to know who’s who in the title companies you deal with. They’re the key to processing your paperwork when you close on a sale. Get to know the bankers and their key people your company does business with. After all, that’s where the loans are approved and processed for YOUR customers. These are the types of people you should be having lunch with, not the guy in the office next to yours who wants to talk about last night’s game.

Picture a rotating Ferris wheel as it comes around again with those same customers back in the market for a new car or truck. You want to be there to greet them with a smile and take their hand as they step off to see you about their next purchase. I didn’t want my sales to be lost in some other part of the dealership because I wasn’t paying attention. I took good care of my service reps and showed them my appreciation. You should always invest some of your hard-earned money to advance your career where it counts.

In fact, every third Wednesday of the month, I took the entire service department out to dinner, on me (and Uncle Sam). I’m talking about 36 people here. I made a deal with a very popular Italian restaurant in Detroit, Schiavi’s, to take good care of my service team. I wanted to service them for a job well done the same way I wanted them to service my customers, the way Joe Girard did it, with TLC—Tender Loving Care. They were reminded and rewarded every month. As a sidebar, I sold more than just a few cars to the people who worked at the restaurant too!

The owner of the dealership thought I was nuts for doing this. Once again, I knew exactly what I was doing. I wanted the service department to know that I trusted them with my customers. I respected their expertise. And most of all, I appreciated what they were doing for my customers and me. I considered all these people important parts of the Girard “sales machine.” I wanted them as primed and focused on success as I was to get the job done right every time for my customers.

And they responded. There were many times that the service reps and techs would stay a little bit longer to take care of one of my customers. They were only too happy to put in a little bit of extra time for me. They were appreciative that I respected them and took good care of them. They were all on my team. Yes, it cost me more than $500 a month to treat these special guys (tax deductible, of course). But in the long run, it was well worth it. If you want a motivated team behind you, be thoughtful and treat them with kindness, not harshness. As the saying goes, “A teaspoon of honey goes a long way.”

The driving force behind why I did this was pretty straightforward thinking. You see, I never for a moment believed that these customers belonged to the dealership or Chevrolet. These customers belonged to Joe Girard. And I wanted them to know that I was better than anyone else at taking care of them. How I did that would determine if they’d come back to me to buy a new car or truck. Like I said—straightforward thinking. The name of the game is service, service, service. And in case you don’t know how to spell it, it’s L-O-V-E. Love.

Jealousy and Envy

We talked about how precious time is in the previous chapter. Many of the sales guys hung out together and would sometimes take extra-long lunches. They were only hurting themselves by doing this. They were stealing their own time. I never went out for lunch. I brought a brown bag from home that my wife made for me. I made sure my time was spent in the dealership where I made my money. My long, leisurely meals were taken on my time. Besides, that’s when and where I enjoyed them the most, with family or close friends away from the job. I knew the value of time better than anyone in the showroom. Distractions were something I avoided like the plague, and my colleagues all knew that too. I was never one for small talk. If it had something to do with work, and specifically something that was important at that moment, I listened. If not, I would politely excuse myself. Do you think they would learn something from that? Unfortunately, most of them didn’t, and many of them disliked me because of that.

As bad as it may sound, I often tell people that once you’re not liked at work, you’ve arrived. It never occurred to them that maybe there’s something to Girard’s idea of using your time well to succeed. I was probably the best example of how to do that in the entire industry, and yet many seemed completely unaware of it. I know it may sound like I was surrounded by a lot of idiots. That was certainly not the case. Some did work hard and wanted to improve. But they were the few. Most couldn’t cut it. Selling cars and trucks isn’t for everyone. I guarantee you, it’s one of the most difficult jobs to do well. It’s a tough racket filled with competition, cutthroat dealing, and a lot of disappointment. That’s one of the reasons you often see such high turnover in retail auto sales departments. Some years, many dealerships would lose more than two-thirds of their sales force. That’s huge! As hard as it is to be successful selling cars and trucks, not knowing how to focus your time properly is like pounding nails into your own coffin. “So why weren’t they focused?” you ask. They were lazy. That’s why.

And their paychecks told the story. I’ll tell you one thing they all knew for sure—my paycheck was higher than all of theirs combined. It became pretty obvious that I was the only one in the dealership that really understood how to make time work effectively. Every two weeks, the manager would get us all together to hand out our paychecks (before he took off to play golf). I recall one instance in particular when I was having a pretty good run of sales. He would go through the names and publicly announce the amount of everybody’s commission checks as he passed them out: $300 for this guy, $450 for that guy, $175 for so-and-so, and so on. I was the last name he would call: “Joe Girard—$11,650.” You could feel the resentful undertone from the other salespeople in the room. It was okay for him to leave now and go play golf, leaving me behind with this ugly atmosphere he just created. They hated me. I went straight to the owner and told him to never have my paycheck given to me in front of the other salespeople again.

By the way, if you think I’m stretching the truth about the difference in what I made compared to the other salesmen, you’re dead wrong! Actually, this should come as no surprise. I was selling more cars and trucks in a day than some of these guys were selling in a month! I can remember very vividly when I actually sold 18 cars in a single day! Many of my competing salesmen would have loved to have sold 170 cars in a year. I set the record with 174 in a single month!

You’re forgetting I was the number one retail salesman in the world! In fact, get this: my sales totals were consistently ranked ahead of 94 percent of all fully staffed auto dealerships’ new vehicle sales totals in the country—as a one-man show! Still questioning the numbers?

The simple truth of why the other salesmen’s checks were so different from mine was not some deep secret or complicated analysis I was doing or anything like that. It was mostly about time. I worked when I worked. They didn’t.

Here’s a typical Joe Girard day:

7:45 a.m. Arrive at work (before any other salesmen).

8 a.m. Align all paperwork (purchasing agreements, insurance and loan information, etc.) and notes listed in my daily planner for customer calls and appointments that day (making sure secretaries hold all my calls during customer appointments).

9–11:45 a.m. Make customer/prospect and follow-up calls and conduct any customer appointments to purchase new vehicles in my office (I was very good at keeping customer meetings to under an hour).

Take 15 minutes each day to head over to the service area to greet and check up on any of my customers in for service and remind them Joe Girard is always there for them (the service reps always let me know when my customers were coming in ahead of time).

12:15 p.m. Review all notes made from morning calls, contacts, and appointments to organize and outline “next step follow-ups.”

12:30 p.m. Take a half-hour lunch break in my office.

1–6 p.m. Continue customer/prospect and follow-up contacts and conduct any customer appointments to purchase vehicles in my office.

6:15 p.m. Review all notes made from all afternoon calls, contacts, and appointments to organize and outline “next step follow-ups.”

6:30 p.m. Review planner to make sure all actions and appointments are correct for the next day.

6:45 p.m. Call it a day and head home to be with my family.

Note: If the dealership was open late till 9 p.m. (as on Mondays and Thursdays), I would take a short break for a snack before getting right back in the trenches to make more calls, contacts, and conduct customer appointments.

You’ll see later on in Chapter 9, “Stay in Touch,” that eventually my sales began to grow faster than I could cope with. I was beginning to sink in my own success. I had to get help; otherwise, I was going to lose a lot of business. I hired two people (at my expense) who worked exclusively for me to do a lot of the preliminary work. It was very important to me that they would be focused, motivated, and loyal, so I paid them well (including their car and health insurance). It worked like a charm. They both made more money than most of the salesmen in the department. (I’ll share more detail on how this worked in Chapter 9.) I could now concentrate on my specialty—the important parts of the customer interface.

Many times I did put in some long days, and I was often quite exhausted by the end of it. But my desire to succeed kept my energy level on fire. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re winning! Here’s Girard’s shorthand advice on how to do it:

If you want to stay on top of your bills, give it 100 percent.

If you want to be number one in what you do, give it 150 percent!

If only the other salesmen would have caught on. Most of them never did, though. They were their own worst enemies. They were losers. The sad part is that instead of being inspired to do better by a guy in their own dealership, they became possessed by jealousy, the green-eyed monster, and envy, one of the seven deadly sins. I could see it in their eyes. Whenever they would see me, especially closing a deal, I think my success reminded them of their own failures and shortcomings. I represented everything they were not. They began to focus on my success instead of their failure. I became a roadblock instead of an inspiration to them.

I remember when I was first recognized as the national leader in sales. I had actually been selling for only three years! That’s what I said—three years! That’s what persistence, attitude, and hard work will get you. When I received the award, everybody cheered. It was a great achievement for me. However, no salesperson had ever done it two years in a row. That was about to change.

The next year, I received the award again to cheers, except this time I heard someone booing me from the back of the hotel ballroom we were in. I told him he ought to go outside and throw up if he was having trouble clearing his throat, to which everyone laughed.

The third year I received the sales leadership award again. This time, I was greeted by boos from the entire room. In fact, I was booed every year after that for the next nine years. Each year, they thought they were going to break me. They thought they could destroy my attitude machine.

What they didn’t know is that’s the kind of stuff I thrive on. They were actually feeding my passion to succeed. I loved it. They were making me stronger and stronger and more determined than ever. Even two of GM’s top executives, John DeLorean, vice president and general manager of Chevrolet, and Ed Cole, president of General Motors—both of whom I admired and respected greatly (and it was mutual)—witnessed the booing when they presented the sales leadership awards to me. They understood the drill. They were at the top of their game too, and they had their enemies.

In that final year, following 12 consecutive years of sales leadership, I took great pleasure in telling all the salespeople there, “I want to thank all of you. You made me what I am. All these years, you’ve challenged me with your boos. This year, I have a very special Christmas present for all of you. Nine months ago, I told the owner that on Christmas Eve of this year, I was going to give Joe Girard a Christmas present. My present is I’m giving Joe Girard to Joe Girard. I am quitting at the end of the year. Thank you each and every one of you. I couldn’t have done it without you. Merry Christmas and good night.” For that I got a standing ovation like you’ve never seen before. But the joke was on them, and they knew it. I wasn’t “one of the boys.” I wasn’t in the “dope ring.” I was Joe Girard.

The odd thing is that I wasn’t their problem. They were their problem. The most obvious difference in our approaches was simple. I worked when I worked and they didn’t. Many of them left early. I never snuck out early or made up an excuse so I didn’t have to be there. I realized I would only be cheating myself, and I didn’t like that at all. When you’re having a bad day, you too can be subjected to moments of jealousy and envy, especially if someone else is having a good one. Part of that is human nature. It means you care and won’t settle for poor results. That’s fine. But if you let it take control, it will get in the way of your productivity because your focus will begin to shift onto finding ways to take the other guy down instead of boosting yourself up. If you let that kind of thing fester, hatred can set in. And that’s not good. That’s like jumping into jail. Stay focused on you and your goals.

Working Hard or Working Smart?

If you’re looking for ways to improve your work output and performance, then think beyond just the quantity of work you’re doing (meaning the number of hours you’re working in a day) and think about the quality of the work you’re doing. Just because you’re working long hours doesn’t mean they’re always productive. You could be working hard but really hardly working. You can’t just work; you have to work SMART to be successful. There’s a huge difference. In almost all cases, working smart means using your time effectively. If you have a job that requires lots of interaction with others like I did (and still do), then think smart. Focus on repeating successful approaches you have used in the past. If you build on your past experiences, emphasizing the good things you’ve done while avoiding the bad things, you’ll undoubtedly begin to see a positive pattern. But you have to work at it. If you study the approaches of other successful people in your business (or any other, for that matter), one thing you’ll find they all have in common is that when they get to work, they work. Period. Distractions are just not allowed in their workday. There are no slackers in any hall of fame that I know of.

You might think working too hard doesn’t “taste” so good after a while, especially if you aren’t getting the results you want right away. Remember the road to success takes time, and you have to work at it. It will come, though. Be patient and stay the course. We’re not talking about an overnight success formula here. We’re talking about a commitment to transforming your outlook on how you live and how you work from now on into the future. We’re talking about your life. If you’ve been in a rut for 20 years, then you already understand the virtue of patience. That’s one of the reasons why I’m emphasizing the idea of staying so focused, hour after hour and day after day, when you work. The minute you lose that focus, you start to falter. Distractions take over. Bad thoughts might even enter your mind. You begin second-guessing and doubting yourself. Did that ever happen to me? Of course it did! I’m human too and subject to the same challenges of providing for a family as everybody else. But I had a trump card to play that few had.

If I had any advantage over my sales colleagues, it was probably that I might have witnessed the darker side of life at home and in the streets growing up more than most. That was the fuel I needed to say, “THAT WILL NEVER BE JOE GIRARD AGAIN!”

I have never looked back. That, my friends, is as powerful a motivator to succeed as you will probably ever see. You’d be hard-pressed to find that in an MBA textbook.

Don’t let any kind of negative thinking anywhere near your day. Stay positive and keep working. There is yet another reason why you should give at the very least a 100 percent effort that’s equally important.

The Opportunity of a Lifetime

There’s no question that working with a purpose and staying focused have the obvious benefit of creating more chances to be successful, more chances to “make a sale,” more chances to refine your approach, more chances to improve, more chances to make more money. That’s pretty clear. So whatever your goals or targets are in a workday, working smart improves your odds of achieving success. It’s a game of numbers. Right? If you understand and believe that, then you’re correct. No argument there.

For Joe Girard, it goes much further than that, though. Let me take you to a deeper level of appreciation and understanding. The reason I believe you should always work when you work is one word: OPPORTUNITY. No, not the opportunity to close a deal or anything like that. I’m talking about the BIG opportunity. The opportunity you only get once. Let me give it to you close up.

No matter who you are or what you are in this life, there is one gift we all share equally; that precious gift from God to all of us is time. On any given day, we are each given the same gift. We all get the same thing—1,440 minutes. That’s how many minutes there are in a 24-hour day. How you use them, spend them, or ignore them is what separates us from each other. I think I could write an entire book on just time alone. I understood the value of time early on in my career. If you came into my office on any day and asked me to spell time, I would say to you M-O-N-E-Y. Money. That’s what time meant to me, and that is what it should mean to you.

When I combined my respect for time with my approach to working smart, I had an unbeatable combination. None of the other salespeople in the dealership ever made the connection between time and money the way I did. They never seemed to catch on to the fact that you only have so much time in your life to create wealth and stability. The problem is you don’t know how much time that is. How many more years are you going to be able to work? How much time do you really have to know and love your families? How long are you going to live? The only time you are certain of is the time you have right now: this day, this hour, this moment. That’s all any of us have.

Here’s something I’ve shared with many audiences over the years to make my point about gaining a deeper appreciation for the value of time. Get your hands on a stopwatch and an index card and try this experiment. As you will see, this is no ordinary stopwatch. It will be your conscience. It will watch over you. It will make you proud. It will make you feel guilty. It is always truthful and never lies. Any time you’re doing nothing at your place of work, like shooting the breeze in the “dope ring,” simply click it on. After you’ve had your fun for the morning, stop the clock and note the amount of time that has gone by. Write it down on the index card. When you go to lunch, turn it on. When you get back to the office, turn it off, again entering the amount of time gone by on the index card. If you take a call from a buddy or friend who calls to talk about something unrelated to work, click the stopwatch on. When the conversation is over, stop the watch and note the time on the card again. Maybe you spent some more time in the “dope ring.” Click the watch on and off again. At the end of the day, add up all the time you spent screwing around instead of working. You’ll be absolutely floored at the amount of time you’ve wasted away doing NOTHING. Even with a minimum amount of “down” time chitchatting, you could probably tally up an hour in the morning and one in the afternoon. While you’re doing that, I’m either making a dozen contacts in those two hours or closing two sales! In a month, that’s 240 calls or 40 closed sales!

Don’t be surprised if on a typical day you spent more time doing nothing than being productive. If you’re perfectly honest with yourself, you’ll probably notice there are times when you actually shot the entire day—never to be recaptured again.

If you put off (or slack off) till “tomorrow,” the clock may have stopped ticking. Listen, I’m not trying to sound like the voice of doom and gloom. I hope you live in good health for over a hundred years. But reality is reality. How you apply the hours you do have is what’s important. Some of you may already feel you’re in a catch-up mode trying to make up for earlier mistakes in your life. That’s okay. You’re trying to get yourself on the right track now. There’s very little I won’t do or say to try and get your attention NOW, while the opportunity exists. You will see a difference if you stay the course with My 13 Rules. That’s the whole idea behind this book—discovering and unleashing the real you!

Concentrate on the Moment

One of the biggest distractions to putting in a full day’s work is losing your power of concentration. If where you work is anything like where I worked, there’s a lot going on around you. It’s noisy. People are always talking. Phones are ringing and so on—it’s an auto dealership. You probably have a similar situation where you work. You have to learn to shut all that out. Sometimes people will want to come into your office. Maybe they just want to chat. The way I handled that was simple. I was never impolite, but I made it very plain to everyone who worked around me that unless it was an emergency, I didn’t want to hear from anybody. If someone didn’t seem to understand, I would say, “Bob, please excuse me but I’ve got a lot of things scheduled that can’t wait. If it’s important, please drop me a note and I’ll take a look at it later. Thank you.” My message was clear: “Not now, Bob.” I rarely ever got a note or message back, which told me they just probably wanted to chew the fat. As a rule, I also kept my office door closed. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I was focused on Joe Girard’s agenda for the day.

I didn’t want anybody bugging me or disturbing me for any reason when I was working. Period. They all got the message, and that’s the way I operated. A lot of them disliked me for that. I probably did offend a few people with that approach along the way. But I made the choice, and it was the right one!

Listen, I’m no different from anyone else. Sure, we all want to be liked. We all want to be accepted. But that was a sacrifice I was willing to make. I wasn’t there to become a member of a social club. I was there to make a living. That was my priority. I had no other reason for being there whatsoever. That was my only purpose for being in that showroom every day. That’s why I was successful.

At the end of the day when I would be driving home, I remember the good feeling I had because I knew I had given it my best shot and put in a full day’s work, even if things didn’t go quite my way. I never had the sense of disappointment in myself that a lot of others must have felt because they slacked off. My appreciation of time was too ingrained in me to ever have that be an issue.

If you think you can cheat time, you’re dead wrong. You’re cheating yourself. Time is master over all of us. There is nothing on Earth that can stop its irreversible march. Only God can stop it. And that happens the day you’re told to “cash in.” That’s the day the party’s over. There’s no going back.

Time is like a thief in the night. It picks your pocket while you’re not watching. You finally realize what it has robbed your life of when it gives you a full open view to stare at in your old age when you have little of it left.

Thankfully, that will never be a regret of mine because I don’t believe one should retire from life at any age. And I am living proof of that too.

All you have is this golden moment—NOW! Right now. What are you going to do with it? Make the most of the opportunity this book encourages you to take advantage of. Work when you work. Think of it as the very last race you will ever run. For the time of your life, give it all the gas you have in you! See you at the finish line!