Friendly Competition, It’s a Powerful Motivator

One of the great­est ways to get moti­vated is to find some­thing that moti­vates you with­out real­iz­ing your work­ing harder. Let me clar­ify with this story of mine.

Back in about 2000–2001 I worked at a tele­mar­ket­ing job. I was paid min­i­mum wage, but we received com­mis­sions for the sales we made. It was a sim­ple job. We had a script that we read off a com­puter screen and it had generic responses for what­ever the poten­tial cus­tomer might object to.

I got pretty good at it and pretty much mem­o­rized the script and could rat­tle it off with­out even look­ing. I started ab lib­bing the responses and learned how to talk to them with­out sound­ing like I was read­ing from a com­puter. I was one of the top seller’s there.

But that’s besides the point of this story. I’d say there were about 20 of us per shift. Every week we had a lit­tle con­test to see who get the most sales in the 8 hour shift. The prizes ranged from an extra break to an actual money bonus. There were a few of us that were really good at mak­ing sales, and it was always us few that were in the run­ning for the win. Some­times I won, some­times I didn’t. But I always tried really hard.

This is a very sim­ple exam­ple of friendly com­pe­ti­tion. We all got along and we were all friends to a degree. But we were com­pet­ing against each other. It was a cold blooded bat­tle to reach the top.

When it came down to it, the biggest ben­e­fit wasn’t just win­ning, but that we all pushed each other. We always made the most sales on these com­pet­i­tive days then any other day. And it was sim­ply because we all pushed our­selves try­ing to outdo every­one else.

So, if you have some­one you know that is after the same thing you are, let’s say get­ting leads to your pro­gram, you might want to con­sider some­thing like this. Set a time limit and see who can get the most leads in that time.

Not only will you both be work­ing on build­ing leads with­out real­iz­ing it, but you will also be push­ing each other towards improve­ment. Which we can always use.

~Chris

Have you had an expe­ri­ence like this? Didn’t it make you get more done with­out seem­ing too much like work?

Sim­i­lar Posts:

• Is It Really Worth it to Always Be Acces­si­ble? How About Not Accessible?
• Schiz­o­phre­nia and Mindset
• How Has 2009 Been For You?

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