Trying not to gloss poetic, the relentless pull of poetry plies my resolve to explain our endless pursuit of running a perfect automotive business, or at least to be considered good enough, so that in the end, we can be content. A retrospect of a job well done.
Becoming an automotive jobber or service center is easy enough, but being successful is an elusive measurement, if not an ambiguous adjective. Achieving the heights of greatness in our own eyes requires being focused on the peak of the summit, and sure footing and timeliness in your attempts.
If you find yourself trying to reach these lofty heights, a curiously wise note of remembrance is to be conscious of the dark valleys and hollows you had to transcend whilst digging and pawing with radical imaginative abandonment, searching and reaching through a seemingly pathless wood plodding toward your foreseen self redemption. Robert Frost would have been happy with that entire run-on sentence of a paragraph.
What I’m speaking about is balance. To simply be the best oddly is not good enough, and good enough might be far more envious.
For instance, if your auto parts store is the best at finding those hard-to-find items, does that imply you are also the best at finding the easy ones? If you find this to be a challenging question, I’ve got your attention. If you smugly consider yourself one of the best, I challenge you by suggesting the shrewdness of your strategy may have possibly isolated your businesses true noteworthiness. Rather, you may become known for a singular point of excellence.
I’ve often said it’s hard for the smartest person’s opinion in the room to make money by exciting the imagination of listeners. Why? Because for most of us, our imagination is contained within the boundaries of the subjective world (our reality). Simply put, “we want,” yet motivational speeches are not enough to get us what we really think we want. Worse still is when we do finally achieve a level of success, we are not quick enough to realize what we have achieved.
Our desires cloud the omni-evident. We tend to want to be the smartest, fastest, prettiest, best priced, and abundantly stocked parts store or service center known to man. Shockingly, many of these types have failed miserably because they forget the most important thing.
To illustrate this, a good example is displayed by this inane statistic: The number of people who have scaled Mt. Everest vs. those who have not. Approximately 4,000 people have, over 6 billion have not for a percentage of the current population of .0000006%. If climbing Mt. Everest is an allegory for perfection, it seems it is indeed lonely at the top.
On a side note, more people have died trying to scale this peak, than have accomplished this feat, and far more have attempted the trek than death and success combined. For the individual climber, accomplishing the task is the pay off, regardless the cost or risk. What’s the goal of the Sherpa? Money, I say. He gets paid regardless of what height the expedition ascends to. That’s what your goal should be. Nothing more, nothing less. If you make money, your distinction is one of success by proxy.
Our philosophical definition of success can be a dangerous illusion, for it may never be fully achieved, only dreamed about. True success in this business is quantifiable by making money. Like the Sherpa, the trips all the way to the top require the equally important trip back down, as well as everything in between, and all the while, he manages to make money.
Lofty goals can be attained and regardless of all the spin-doctoring, self- help books and motivational 12-step programs, many of us will remain average auto parts jobbers and service centers as long as we still make money. Average. The best of the worst, and the worst of the best.
Unrecognized, yet the most important of our entire industry for our backs support those above us, and our hands help pull up those below us. Redemptive imagination of extreme success is balanced by ironic awareness of the needed dull realities of everyday life in a parts store. Have some fun along the way.
I leave you with the last lines of my favorite poem, “Birches.”
“I’d like to get away from the earth awhile
And then come back down to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk,
Towards Heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
-Robert Frost
Or be the owner of an auto parts store and/or service center, especially if you love what you do, for your success will be assured and need not be measured.
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