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During a practice round at a major golf tournament recently, one of the players hit an exceptionally beautiful shot. A fan in the gallery exclaimed, "Man, I wish I could hit a shot like that!" The player walked over to the fan and said, tongue-in-cheek, "No, you don't."
The fan looked confused. "What do you mean?"
The player replied, "You don't want to hit a shot like that because that means hitting a thousand balls a day, every day, for the next 20 years. That's what it takes to hit a shot like that."
And that's true for pretty much everything you want to accomplish life—whether it's playing golf, the piano, selling, investing, or mastering AI. If you want to be elite, you have to do a lot of repetitions of the same thing to reach the top.
Adopt The Mamba Mentality
You've got to practice constantly. And this is what a lot of people miss. See, the truth is you can have anything in life you want—pretty much within reason—as long as you're willing to do the boring work.
You know what separates Warren Buffett, the greatest investor of our generation, from other investors? He's read over 100,000 financial statements in his lifetime. Think about that. 100,000 financial statements. That's not exciting work. That's not sexy. It is sitting alone, poring over numbers, analyzing balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statements, day after day, year after year, decade after decade. But that boring work made him one of the richest people on the planet.
Or look at Kobe Bryant. Kobe was famous for his "Mamba Mentality" which meant showing up at 4 AM to practice, hours before his teammates. It meant shooting thousands of the same shots over and over. His trainer once said Kobe would practice one simple move 700-800 times in a single session. Not 10 times, not 50 times. 700-800 times. The same move, over and over and over again. That's the boring work that made him a legend.
Going out to the driving range and hitting a thousand balls with your seven iron is one of the most boring things you can possibly do. Crap, hitting 50 balls with your seven iron is boring. But that's what separates the top performers from the low performers—they're willing to do the boring things.
Top Performers are Always Working at It
In sales, top performers are constantly studying. I meet them all the time. They show up in my seminars, read my books and listen to my podcasts. They’re taking courses on Sales Gravy University. They invest in learning and practicing every single day.
When we run role plays, they jump right in. They recognize that, yeah, that's boring work. But you've got to do the boring things, the repetitive things, to get what you want.
Be Careful What You Wish For
So the questions you have to ask yourself when you make that wish for what you want or set a goal is:
How bad do you want it?
Are you willing to do the work?
Are you willing to make the sacrifice?
Are you willing to grind day in and day out?
Are you willing to do all of boring reps that nobody ever sees in order to reach the very top?
Success is Paid for In Advance With Boring Work
You can accomplish anything once you accept that the price for success is paid for in advance. The price of admission to the elite levels of any profession is doing the boring work that most people aren't willing to do. Let me give you an example from my own life.
Years ago, when I was starting out in my sales career, I made a commitment to make 100 cold calls every single day no matter what. Rain or shine. Good mood or bad mood. Whether I felt like it or not. You know first hand that cold calling is not exciting work. It's tedious, repetitive, and rejection dense. Honestly, most people—including my boss—thought I was nuts.
But those 100 calls a day allowed me to out perform and out earn all of my peers. It made me the top sales rep in my fortune 200 company. It bought houses, made me wealthy, and eventually gave me the platform to write books, speak on stages and build Sales Gravy.
The Michelangelo Principle
I like to think about it as the Michelangelo Principle. You know the story—someone once asked Michelangelo how he created his masterpiece David from a block of marble. And he replied, "I just chipped away everything that didn't look like David."
Excellence works the same way. You chip away at your limitations through practice and repetition. Every cold call you make chips away at your fear of rejection. Every role play you participate in chips away at your awkwardness around handling objections. Every book you read chips away at your ignorance about your industry or your craft.
The Invisible Work Nobody Every Sees
It's not glamorous. Nobody's going to film you making your hundredth cold call of the week and post it on social media. Nobody's going to celebrate you for doing pre-call planning on a Sunday evening. You are not going to give you a standing ovation for waking up an hour early to invest in professional development before work.
This is the invisible work that no one ever sees. The small, seemingly insignificant actions, performed consistently over time, yield massive results. This is the Law of Cumulative Impact.
Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time with 28 medals, trained for 5 straight years without missing a single day—even on Christmas, even on his birthdays. His coach said that by training 365 days a year, Phelps gained a 52-day advantage over competitors who took Sundays off. Those single days compounded into the most dominant swimming career in history.
The problem is, most people quit before the compound effect kicks in. They do the boring work for a week, maybe a month, don't see immediate results, and give up. They never experience the exponential growth that comes from consistent, boring effort applied over years.
Embrace Discomfort
Look at Tom Brady. For 23 seasons, he was typically the first player to arrive at the facility and the last to leave. At 44 years old, he was still doing the same boring drills he did as a rookie.
His former teammate once said that Brady would spend hours studying game film that most quarterbacks would skip over. While other players were enjoying their off-seasons, Brady was working with his receivers on timing routes. While they were taking vacation, he was perfecting his footwork. That commitment to uncomfortable, boring work is why he has seven Super Bowl rings.
But that discomfort? That's where growth happens. It's like working out. If you've ever done any serious physical training, you know that muscle growth happens when you push past comfort. When your muscles burn, when you feel like you can't do one more rep—that's precisely when you need to do one more.
Sales excellence works the same way. When you're tired of practicing your pitch, do it five more times. When you're dreading making another cold call, make ten more. When you think you think you've prepared enough, do more.
Get into the habit of Eating the Frog. "Do the thing you least want to do first thing in the morning." That thing you're avoiding is exactly what you need to do to move your career and income forward.
Tedious Discipline is Your Competitive Edge
Recently I was working with a sales team.There was this one rep, Mike. He was middle of the pack—not terrible, but not stellar either.
During our training, I emphasized the importance of research and reading to develop industry knowledge. Most of the team nodded along, but Mike took it to heart. He committed to spending 15 minutes each morning specifically to gain a better understanding of his industry and grow his business acumen.
Six months later, I got an email from Mike's sales manager. Mike was now the top performer on the team. His close rate had doubled. His average deal size had increased by 40%. All from a simple, boring discipline of spending 15 minutes learning about his industry. .
When I called Mike to congratulate him, he made a confession. He said, "Jeb, to be honest, I hated doing the research at first. It was boring and felt like a waste of time. But after about two months, I started noticing patterns and understanding my customers better. Discovery calls went deeper. I saw opportunities to help them that I would have missed before. My customers gave me a seat at the table because they viewed me as an expert."
That's how the boring work transforms. What starts as tedious discipline eventually becomes your competitive edge.
There is No Such Thing as Natural Talent
Before going any further, let's address the myth of natural talent. I hear it all the time: "Oh, she's just a natural salesperson." "He is a born closer." It’s pure BS. I've coached plenty of "naturals" who failed because they relied on charm instead of working to master the craft.
True sales excellence isn't about what you were born with—it's about process and skills. And skills are built through the discipline to do the boring, repetitive work.
Take Jerry Rice, widely considered the greatest wide receiver in NFL history. Was he the most naturally gifted athlete? No. He wasn't the fastest, strongest or the tallest. But his work ethic was legendary.
His off-season hill training program was so grueling that teammates who tried to join him would literally vomit. He would run the same routes thousands of times until they were perfect. He would catch hundreds of balls after practice when everyone else had gone home.
That's not natural talent—that's an unnatural commitment to doing the boring work. The truth is that repetition is the mother of skill.
Greatness Has a Price
Before the Beatles became famous, they played over 1,200 live shows in Hamburg, Germany. They would play eight hours a night, seven days a week. That's over 10,000 hours of practice in just a few years. That's what made them the Beatles—not just natural musical ability,