It's not what you say it's how you say it.

Many years ago I set out on a task, which now days may look rather stupid and immature.

I set myself this task.

I was running 9 one man businesses, requiring a lot of personal time but not a lot of money. Only three of them were making some money\.

One of the activities was supervising a craft shop Val and I own but did not run. I was visiting this lady late in the afternoon in the middle of winter. On finishing what ever I had to do there, I commenced walking out to the street. The craft shop manageress cautions me, saying 'look out you will get run over'. I told her not to worry and the next thing I knew a motor car had knocked me over.

In bed for a week with my back in a cast. Getting over that I managed to get glandular fever, which really put the cat in the chicken coup.

Could you believe all this small businesses disappeared and only two survived?

At the end of this horror period I looked into the paper to see if I could earn some money to survive.

I am a sucker for a good add. The advertisement read: - I you can do soing so and are able to move freely and had a positive attitude I should ring Russ and he would give the career of the lifetime.

Met Russ and decided his position did what he stated in the add.

I went into training for two weeks. (UNPAID) Just as well the craft shop was turning over reasonable money.

The two week training course had one making lots of commitments of a positive nature and one was to sell a 100 gidgets in the first week out into the field on your own. But here I got reckless and we had seen a video of some guy in USA had sold 100 gidgets a week for 50 weeks. I stated in front of all the class I would sell 100 gidgets a week for 104 weeks.

My first task was to stand in front of 13 Irish carpenters and laborers and sell the 2 gidgets each. Can you imaging me standing in front of these rough and noisy men. I was trembling, perspiring and my voice was squeaky. I spent the whole lunch time with those Irish men and at the end despite the their noise and boisterous behavior, I was successful in getting 11 of these wonderful Irish BUILDERS to buy 2 each of these Gidgets. (One for themselves and one for their wife, girlfriend, mother, father even their brother. I could not believe I had made the first step in achieving my goal of 100 gidgets per week for 104 weeks. Two whole years with no time off over Christmas.

As you can feel. It's obviously not what I said, but how I said it. These MAGNIFICENT BUILDERS took pity on this skinny young guy who was so scared standing in a puddle of water from sweat. I think I broke their collective hearts. What a great motivation event it was for me.

By now you are asking yourself, why I would do that very over ambitious task of selling 100 gidgets a week for 104 Weeks. The Company promised to send me the USA and Australia. I was wrapped in the promise of the future. You see it was the reward I was after. Forget the effort and the sweat and tears it would take to achieve it. I was bribed. It was not what was said it was how it was said.

Cut the over long story short 104 weeks rolled around, we went to the USA and Australia. It was a long two years of hard work and I would have driven in excess of 120.000 miles. In the days before kilometers.

All due to those wonderful Irish Statesmen.

There could be another 103 stories of motivation, if you want to hear them. You must ask me nicely to do that for you I do not wish to bore you.