was not really that good. Not only that, but he was too short. What they could not measure, though, was just how badly he wanted to be the best at what he was doing. Nor did they know, at that point, that there was a shorter distance that for linebackers was even more important, and that’s the way you get off of the ball. And so when he was playing linebacker for the Chicago Bears, when a running back would break through the line of scrimmage, the typical linebacker would cut him off about seven or eight yards down the field. Singletary started so fast that he caught them many times at the line of scrimmage. He held them to two-yard gains where the others were permitting five, six, seven and eight-yard gains. They couldn’t measure that.
This is what I really want to talk about to you. See, this man had tremendous pride in what he did. Now again, Bible students occasionally say, “Well, pride is kind of a dirty word.” Let me tell you something about words. They change meaning. For example, if I were to look at any one of you and say, “Why, you’re silly!” you’d be offended. Unless you knew that the word silly comes from the word selje, an old English word which means blessed, happy, healthy and prosperous. So if anybody ever calls you silly again, you ought to just grin and say, “Man, you don’t know how right you are! You got it right on the button!”
Now what’s this got to do with pride? The Bible speaks of false pride or vanity. Pride is an honest evaluation of that which is good.
Think with me as you read this book. Could it possibly be wrong for me to say to my children, “I am proud of the values you have”? Could it be wrong for me to say to my staff, “I am so proud of the job you do”? See, pride—I love the acrostic it forms. It is Personal Responsibility In Daily Endeavors. Pride’s important.
For the first fifteen years of my career I was in direct sales. I’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors in my lifetime. I don’t ever remember getting excited about going out and knocking on doors. I did it because that was one of the things I had to do to make sales. After a period of time I started putting on cooking demonstrations where the hostess would invite in several couples and we’d cook up the meal and make the sales. I finally got semi-smart and realized I couldn’t do it all myself; ran an ad in Columbia, South Carolina, for a lady to help me. A lady named Gerry Arrowood responded.
Now, to give you an idea of what her personality was like; she baked cakes and took in sewing to help support her three daughters. Does that tell you something about her? Very quiet, very shy. But also very neat. I told her what I wanted and, in essence, I wanted her to do the cooking, wash the dishes, clean the cookware and clean the kitchen. I mean, a real top-level job! And we talked about it a little bit and she said, “Oh, Zig you know, I’d love to have that job. I love to cook. Don’t mind washing dishes. Don’t even mind cleaning the kitchen. But, as you can tell, I’m very shy. I gotta get a promise from you that you will never call on me to participate in the actual demonstration itself.”
I could instantly tell that Gerry and I were gonna get along real good! Well, we did for a couple of months and then one night my mouth overloaded my back. I made too many promises. I said, “Gerry, you gotta help me.”
“Whatchawanmetodo?”
“I want you to deliver these six sets of cookware I sold and teach the husband and wife how to use it on their own stove.”
Now, virtually everybody who will ever read this is not going to be able to relate to my next statement. Sheer terror filled her eyes. She literally, physically started shaking instantly. “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!”
“You can’t do what, Gerry?”
“I can’t deliver that cookware and teach those people how to use it on their stoves.”
I said, “Gerry, every night for the last two months, that’s what you’ve been doing to the host and hostess!”
“Yeah, but you’re always here. If I foul up I know you’ll bail me out!”
“Gerry, it’s not that big a deal!”
I didn’t even come close to making that sale. I mean, she just wasn’t buying any of it.
We had a twenty-five to thirty mile drive back home. It was very quiet.
Then, just as she started to get out of the car, she’d been thinking about it, obviously, she turned to me and said, “All right! I’ll do it. I’m not gonna sleep a wink tonight. I’ll probably foul up the deal tomorrow. But you stuck your neck out. You got the people’s money and you told ‘em it’d be delivered tomorrow. I don’t want to hurt your reputation, so I’ll do it. But I’m gonna tell you something, Zig. If you ever do this again, then it’s gonna be your neck, it ain’t gonna be mine! I’m not gonna EVER do this again!”
She got out of the car and I don’t know if she slept that night or not. I know I didn’t!
The next night I got one of the most exciting telephone calls I have ever gotten in my life. Came in about nine o’clock. It took me about forty minutes to get that introvert off the telephone. I mean, she, word by word, step by step, blow by blow, gave me minute details in everything that took place.
She said, “When I got to the first family, Zig, they had the coffee made and the dessert on and we had a wonderful time! They told me how personable I was, what a great personality I had and how professional I was! Zig, I had a wonderful time there and three of the six couples had the coffee on and the dessert ready and they all bragged on me. I’m tellin’ you I had the time of my life! I’ll do this any time you want me to do it.”
Didn’t happen that year or the next or the next or the next. But a little less than five years later, Gerry Arrowood was the vice president in charge of sales training internationally for a multi-million-dollar cosmetic company. You know what I believe? I believe with all of my heart there will be tens of thousands of Gerry Arrowoods who will read this book and they will rationalize, accurately so, “If she can do it, I can do it, too!”
Now I’ve got one major regret in this whole episode and that is I did not retain the name and address of the first couple she delivered that set of cookware to. I’m here to tell you that she approached that first home with fear and trembling. She was in a mad dash—she couldn’t wait to get to the second one. It’s amazing what a word of encouragement will do. Somebody once said there are a lot of people who have gone a lot further than they thought they could because somebody else thought they could. That first couple had a profound impact; they are unsung heroes. They really did something for Gerry Arrowood.
Have you ever noticed, normally speaking, that when somebody says, “I’m gonna tell you something for your own good,” then they tell you something bad? Did it ever occur to us that if we’re going to tell somebody something for their own good that we ought to tell them something good for their own good? It’s an old principle. Andrew Carnegie, a hundred years ago, had forth-three millionaires working for him. He was the first great industrialist our society produced. A reporter got wind of it and asked him, “Mr. Carnegie, how on earth did you hire forty-three millionaires?”
Mr. Carnegie said, “Well, none of them were millionaires when I hired them.”
“Then what did you do to develop them to the degree that they became so valuable to you that you could pay them so much money they became millionaires?”
Carnegie taught us a great lesson when he said, “You develop people in the same way you mine gold. When you go into a gold mine you expect to move tons of dirt to get an ounce of gold. But you don’t go in there looking for the dirt; you go in there lookin’ for the gold.”
See, I happen to believe there’s a gold mine inside of everybody we deal with. I believe people have got a great deal more inside of them than they realize. The Gerry Arrowood story—you see, it took an awful lot of courage for her to take that first step. Courage is not the absence of fear; it’s going ahead despite the fear. Shakespeare said, “The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.” When Gerry got that, she liked it so much she started doing other things. She became a student, she