Better to be Dumb and Persistent than Intelligent and Patient

You may have heard this story before. My dad told it to me when I was a kid.

A dumb frog fell into a big barrel of cream. He was close to drowning when all the other frogs gathered around the top of the barrel. They all started laughing at him. But the frog was so stupid he thought they were cheering him on. So he started paddling faster and faster and faster until he turned the cream into butter. Then much to the surprise of the other frogs, he was able to hop back out of the barrel.

Sometimes people can be so smart, they know all the reasons why something won’t work. "It's bound to fail." But somehow, some way, some dumb frog comes along and makes it happen.

I was guilty of this too

When I first got started on the road to mastering marketing and life insurance lead generation techniques, I was constantly bombarded with negativity by the grizzled veterans in the office, even my Sales Manager laughed at me.

"You're not really going to go ahead with this are you? I know you're tight on cash, but don’t you think this stuff is a little off the wall?"

I'm not knocking them; I'm guilty of the same thing sometimes. I constantly fight this battle. With all my experiences and accumulated knowledge I sometimes have the disadvantage of being "too smart."

That's right, being too smart can be a disadvantage.

You can know something so well that you become close-minded while something that has never worked in the past may now work under new conditions. But you can become blinded by your own knowledge and not even realize it.

A prime example of this is when a man known as the father of Alternating Current (A.C.), Nikola Tesla took his discovery to Thomas Edison. Edison refused to accept this concept and literally told the press that people would die if they used this method of alternating current to power their homes.

Today, "Alternating Current" is the method by which modern homes are powered. It is the power that enables you to watch T.V., make toast, and use your computer.

Here, a man as brilliant as Edison refused to accept "Alternating Current" as a viable method of power distribution,he was simply too smart and too familiar with the topic that he couldn't see past what he thought to be fact.

So before you are willing to give up on new ideas, concepts and techniques to generate new business, make sure you have looked at things from all angles. And by all means, be very careful on whose opinions you accept.

Dean Cipriano is the founder and president of Insurance Selling Systems. Dean is a life lead generation expert and has helped thousands of agents get more life insurance leads then they ever though possible. Dean offers all life insurance agents a free report to review his system.