This piece from the Times may turn out to be embarrassingly wrong in its prediction for next Tuesday
BUT...
what it says about hustling is dead right, both in politics and in business
"His primary campaign was brilliant, not just because his message was so powerful: it was because he worked out how to make the machinery of politics work for him. He mastered the art of the caucus; he used the internet as a way to find voters and then got them to the primaries and caucuses. He beat the Clintons largely because he out-hustled them on the ground.
Remember 2004? The reason Karl Rove and George Bush won, despite losing in many polls, was because they found and organised a new bloc of white, evangelical voters and brought them to the ballot box. This time, it’s Obama who has found the new voters under the radar: the young, the disengaged, various minorities and a large phalanx of middle-class white Americans. Of all the unprecedented money he has raised, he has poured an equally unprecedented amount into his ground game. Staff and volunteers are right now working phones relentlessly, walking streets, knocking on doors, constructing peer-to-peer networks and focusing almost mani-cally on turning out their voters on election day and before. Obama has even managed to insert ads for early voting into video games"
Too many campaigns in both politics and business fail to deliver because they seem not to be driven by a desire for winning hearts and minds (or body and soul as we'd be better putting it); it's all to easy to hide behind the big, fancy stuff of "insights", "big ideas", "creative", the ad that will turn the tide etc etc. Even the idea of strategy - as some intellectual or guru like ability to 'think things through' is an excuse to take one step away from actually doing the stuff that makes a difference
The harsh truth is that it's hard to get down dirty (and not in this way) and just...hustle. To do the small things that - step-by-step, inch-by-inch - make something great.
I'm sure you want success for yourself and your clients, but are you prepared to hustle for it? And to get all your team, customers and associates to do likewise?
FREE GIFT: go here, here or even here to learn how to do the hustle