

Eureka - It Really Takes Years of Hard Work - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/business/03unbox.html?ex=1359694800&en=08574f3568bc9c5e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

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wallflower
Bob Metcalfe: <http://tinyurl.com/3yqsb6>

"1. Selling Matters

I have a six-story townhouse in Boston overlooking MIT on the Charles River. I
often invite young engineers and would-be entrepreneurs over to schmooze. Many
of them tell me my townhouse is beautiful and they hope to invent something
like Ethernet that will get them such a house.

The picture they have in their heads is of me lounging around on the beanbag
chairs in a conference room at Xerox PARC in 1973. They see me having this
idea for a computer network and submitting it as an invention proposal to
Xerox. Then they envision me putting my feet up and letting the royalties roll
in until I have enough to come up with the down payment on the townhouse with
the river view.

My picture-the actual picture-is different. It's the picture of innovation
rather than invention, the weed instead of the flower. In my picture it's the
dead of winter and I am in the dark in a Ramada Inn in Schenectady, New York.
A telephone is ringing with my wake-up call at 6 a.m., which is 3 a.m. in
California, where I flew in from last night. I don't know yet where I am, or
where that damn ringing is coming from, but within the hour I'll be in front
of hostile strangers selling them on me, my company, and its strange products,
which they have no idea they need.

If I persist, selling like this for 10 years, and I do it better and better
each time, and I build a team to do everything else better and better each
time, then I get the townhouse. Not because of any flowery flash of genius in
some academic hothouse.

Most engineers don't understand that selling matters. They think that on the
food chain of life, salespeople are below green slime. They don't understand
that nothing happens until something gets sold. The way I think about it is
that there are three sets of people in the world. There is the set of people
who will buy your products no matter what (think of your mother). There's the
set who will never buy your products (think of your competitors). Both are
much smaller than the set of people who will buy your products if the products
are competently sold to them. That vast middle set is why sales is so
important, and it represents one of the key differences between invention,
which comes up with a brilliant new idea, and innovation, which gets that
inspiration out into the world.

Sales may not matter in invention, but it matters-in a very big way-in
innovation."

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mixmax
Definitely worth a read.

Bustes the myth that some people just have good ideas and make millions on
them.

Unfortunately it's all about hard work. :-(

~~~
Hexstream
"Unfortunately"?

That sounds empowering to me, to the contrary.

