Chapter One. What do you want for yourself?

Why do you come to work? It’s a cold wintry morning in a small town and you’ve got a store to open, a cash register to man, or a desk to get to. Why do you bother? It’s an important question—it’s worth thinking about and worth taking a grown-up look at the answers.

Whatever the specific answers, there’s likely to be in there things like: our desire to feel good about ourselves through being good at stuff, to create a little security for our kids, to give our partners reasons to be proud of us, even material things like wanting enough money for a nice house or a great car—or to get enough cash together to stop working for a bit. All of that is good—what’s important is that we be honest with ourselves. Once you work out why you’re really hauling yourself into city center in the dark of a December morning—then you have a chance to understand how to get the best out of that day, the next week, and the next year.

It’s a simple human thing: If I want a nice house I’ve got to earn money, if I’ve got to earn money I need to have a good job, if I’m going to have a good job then I need to perform and get noticed, if I’m going to get noticed then I need to do the numbers, if I’m going to do the numbers then I have to keep my team and customers happy ... you can keep this process winding back all the way to the one small thing—maybe something you hate doing—that you need to do right now, right after you’ve had five minutes of reading this. That small thing you do next—that’s earning you that nice house. It is.

This process, this way of thinking, doesn’t just apply to material stuff: Let’s say your personal goal is a creative one, the work you do, the nasty bits in particular, can be linked, by stepping back this way, to getting your play written, or to quitting retail to go to art school, or whatever. There is pride to be had in grafting in retail in order to use the results of that graft to move you forward toward a non-retail goal. Give the best you can to get the thing you want. Simple stuff.

Action-planning means doing stuff

Most action planning is a load of old trash—action plans and reality are rarely aligned. It’s simple v. complex: A good action plan is one that starts with a goal and then steps back from that goal, practical-step-by-practical-step, until it arrives at the very next thing you must do to move things along.

But just thinking about what you want to achieve is useless without a practical plan: I was taught the techniques of visioning by legendary trainer Bob Caton, and his practical technique is a cracker. Bob is more content with life than pretty much anyone I’ve ever met. His favorite visioning story is of the house he built for himself in Thailand—he bought a patch of land as soon as he could afford to and then every night at home in England, imagined himself sitting on the veranda at a house that didn’t exist. He would describe to himself how it would feel, the taste of the cold beer in his mouth, the warmth of the breeze on his arms, the comfort of the chair, and so on. Then in the morning, he would picture the house once again, and this time he would run a very fast step-back from the beer on the veranda and right to the things he needed to do that day, like call a prospect or get on a 6:45 a.m. train. Two things happened for Bob—he felt better about things he wasn’t all that keen on having to do and he got his house built.

So it’s not just the end-goal that you think about—it’s all those steps that link from there back to the right now. Here’s a simplified rundown of Bob’s vision:

• I want that first ice-cold beer on the veranda of my own house in Thailand.

• I need to build that house.

• I need to have the plans drawn up.

• I need to have the funds in place.

• My business needs to have been successful enough to generate x profit over y years.

• That means I need to have taught an average of xxx days training per year.

• Which would have come from three permanent clients and ten casual contracts.

• To hit those numbers, I need to have pitched nine major projects and developed one hundred good prospects.

• That means x phone calls and y letters over z period.

• I need to write four letters and make six calls today.

Of course, there are also technical steps I’ve left out for expediency such as understanding what you’re selling, commissioning marketing material, and so on. You need to include all that in your plan. But you get the idea—it shows how the grind today, right now, can get you something cool and important in your life.

One of the best things you can do to get yourself motivated is to read Prof. Richard Wiseman’s excellent 59 Seconds (Macmillan, 2009)—in the motivation chapter, he’ll tell you all about where visioning can go wrong and how to stop that from happening. He’ll also tell you how things like sharing your goals make a provable difference to achieving them.

I’m not about to turn into some hokey self-help twonk here and ask you to stand on your chair and shout “I can.” All I’m asking is for the moment’s hesitation before rejecting an idea and for you to couple that to achieving your own personal ambitions.

At its simplest, all this is about being open to achieve things, being slower with “no,” “impossible,” and “just can’t happen,” and quicker with “let’s find out,” “let’s try it.” Thinking this way clears the path to achieving your personal goals.

Raw passion makes us great

All the best retailers are naturally passionate about their businesses. I would suggest it’s the one single thing that unites them—without passion, you cannot achieve long-term success in retail. Sure, loads of other skills are important: leadership, an eye for product, team-building, accounting, service, and design. But all of these can to a greater or lesser extent be learned from a book. If you are weak in one or two of these areas you can still usually get by. But without passion, you just won’t make a life in retail work for you.

Passion is what drives great retail; and customers, as well as colleagues, love it. Passion is the magic ingredient that helps you to bring surprise, drama, great service, exciting products, and delight into the store.

Customers leave a store run by a passionate team feeling like they want to come back. The team looks forward to coming into work, knowing that today might be the day to break some records, have some fun, and create something great. You could be a cashier at ASDA or the head honcho at Target—as long as you feel that passion, the retail world is your oyster.

Passion to make things better

Passion is not about sales; it is about improvement. Mahendra Patel is one of the finest passionate retailers I’ve ever met. MP, as we all know him, worked most of his retail life as a store manager and then as a senior field manager. Before that, MP was a teacher in Uganda. In 1973, MP and his family had to flee for their lives in the wake of Ide Amin’s murderous purge of the Ugandan Asian population. Arriving in the UK with nothing had, as you would expect, a deep impact on Mahendra. Many people would sink. MP didn’t; he started out all over again, this time as a sales assistant in a Dixons store. After more than a quarter of a century in stores, and his having gone through so much, I couldn’t understand why the ultra laid-back Mahendra always refused the offers of promotion into head office that regularly came his way (including one invite, I remember, that included a retail CEO sending down the company jet to bring MP back for lunch and a chat). He could have been running the whole show, I would often, exasperated, tell him. I’ll admit that I began to question where exactly Mahendra’s passion was.

Then over a meal one evening, Mahendra told me: “I am a teacher, I always was. My job is to make as many people as I possibly can feel that they can be better than they are now, that they can improve their lot. Life is about hope and I’ve been lucky enough to give some of the people who have worked with me some of that hope.”

I don’t think I ever saw MP actually sell anything, but his stores, and regions, always performed better when he was at the helm. MP’s passion was for improvement: not to create teams of sales animals but to make things better—better for colleagues and better for customers. That passion is what makes this retail business great.