If It Makes Sense to You, Try It — Barry Biegler

I believe it is possible to take an active role in improving my life. I originally thought of this as trying to be “happier,” but happiness is too narrow. There are many ways to improve life, and becoming happier is just one of them.

Throughout my lifetime, I have accumulated short phrases that help make my life better. When I get off track, one of these phrases often pops into my mind. It helps me deal with the situation and return to a more productive path. Some help me a little; others help me a great deal.

I don’t always know where a given phrase came from. I may have gotten it from a forgotten self-help book or a random person on the street. Some I created myself. I also make no attempt to prove the value of a phrase scientifically. I am not an expert, and I am not trying to convert you to my religion, politics, or overall philosophy. I am simply sharing phrases that help me, in the hope that one or more of them might help you.

Each phrase stands on its own, but I suggest reading from beginning to end. I have intentionally arranged the phrases so that many of the ideas build upon one another. You will run into some repetition, but it is deliberate. I often need more than one phrase to remind myself of an important principle.

I encourage you not to spend much time on the phrases you disagree with or think are stupid. Just skip them and move on. You are not looking for the stupid ones, you are looking for the one phrase that might make your life a little better.

As I wrote this book, I often imagined that I was writing it for myself when I was eighteen years old. I was intelligent, curious, and genuinely wanted to build a good life, but I needed help. I believe many of these phrases apply at any age.

Don’t expect every phrase to work immediately. Habits are hard to break, especially those learned in childhood. If a phrase seems important for a significant issue in your life, I encourage you to stay with it for a while before deciding whether it works. So, don’t get lost wondering where a phrase came from or whether it can be proven scientifically, and don’t spend your time on the phrases you think are stupid. The book is titled *If It Makes Sense to You, Try It* to encourage you to use your own judgment and see if any phrase helps.

On the surface, it seems like a good idea to try to be “perfect”—to get every answer correct on a test or to be a perfect spouse, parent, coach, or employee. However, I discovered that my definition of perfection was the single biggest source of stress in my life.

When I was growing up, if I got four A’s and a B on a report card, my father would ask, “Why did you get a B?” If I hit four great golf shots and then sliced one out of bounds, the only comment I heard was about the bad shot. My coping mechanism was to try to be perfect—to get five A’s and hit every shot perfectly. As I went through life, no matter where I was or what I was doing, my attention automatically went to what was not perfect and what needed improvement. I rarely noticed all the things that were already going well.

Striving for perfection led to many achievements. I earned good grades, excelled in sports, became a top salesperson at Hewlett-Packard, and eventually started and ran a successful software company. Yet I enjoyed very little of it because I always focused on what was still wrong. I criticized myself, my environment, and sometimes even the people around me.

Eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t perfection. The problem was how I had defined it. I didn’t need to give up on perfection—I needed to redefine it.

I wanted to write this book for many years, and I wanted it to be “perfect,” which seems like a good goal. The problem was that I had never clearly defined what a “perfect” book looked like. Without a clear definition, I kept reviewing and rewriting the material, making tiny changes. I also kept adding new topics because a perfect book would include every useful phrase I had ever used. As a result, the book was never perfect and never got released. So I redefined perfection: The book would be perfect if it included my most important phrases and explained them reasonably clearly. That was a definition of perfection I could actually achieve, and it finally made finishing the book possible.

I did the same thing with the software company I started. For years, my vague definition of perfection was fixing every problem, returning every email, and making sure every customer and employee was happy. Those are admirable goals, but they are impossible to achieve. As I pursued this definition of perfection, I worked more and more hours, took work home, stopped playing golf, and rarely saw my kids. No matter how many hours I worked, there was always another email to read or another problem to solve.

So I redefined perfection. My company was perfect if it stayed in business every year and provided a good living for my family. We could have unsolved problems, unanswered emails, angry customers, and unhappy employees and still meet that definition. I could achieve this new definition while working a 20-hour week, leaving plenty of time for golf, family, friends, and the many other things I wanted to do. The company flourished, and by my new definition, it was perfect.

I have continued to redefine perfection in many areas of my life. My children and grandchildren can make all kinds of mistakes and still be perfect. A picnic can be perfect even if it rains. A vacation with bad weather or lost reservations can still be perfect because of the time spent with my wife. My last youth hockey team won only four games and lost twenty-two, yet it was a perfect season because we had fun and built friendships that will last a lifetime.

I’m not saying I accept mediocrity. When I redefine perfection, I make sure the new definition is possible and still achieves the primary goal.

Questions beginning with “what” are usually easier to answer—and more likely to produce useful action—than questions beginning with “why.”

Suppose someone has a physically abusive spouse. Why is the spouse abusive? Maybe they had a terrible childhood. Perhaps they use drugs, have a mental illness, or simply enjoy controlling people. You could spend years debating the reason and never know the answer.

The “what” is much clearer: What is happening? The person is being beaten. What needs to happen next? Get the hell out of that relationship and as far away from the abuser as possible. Understanding why the abuse happens is far less important than stopping it.

Perhaps I have a friend and frequently feel worse after spending time with that person. Why does the friend affect me that way? Who knows? The more useful questions are: What happens when I spend time with this person, and what should I do about it? The answers may be obvious: I consistently feel worse, so I should spend less time with that person—or stop seeing them entirely.

I enjoy nature and wide-open spaces. I hate big cities. Why? There may be many reasons, but I don’t need to uncover them all. What matters is that, for whatever reasons, I am happier in open spaces, so I choose to live where open space surrounds me.

“Why” is not always a bad question. It can help identify the cause of a problem and prevent it from happening again. But “why” can also become a hiding place. We can analyze a situation endlessly when we already know what is happening and what we need to do.

Perhaps you hate your job. You and your friends can spend years discussing why your boss is a jerk, why the company has stupid policies, and why the work makes you miserable. That conversation may feel productive, but it changes nothing. The “what” is simple: You hate your job—get a new one.

Ask what, not why. “What” usually points toward the action needed. Why is open to endless debate.

This book is a collection of short phrases that help keep me on track. I discovered they can also be very useful for employees and others trying to do the best job possible.

Managing employees was the most difficult challenge of the forty years I ran the company. I like to do things myself, not try to get someone else to do it.

I was in sales my entire professional life and was very good at it. I knew how to navigate the complexity and close a high percentage of the deals I worked on. However, it was proving very difficult to pass this knowledge on to my sales team. I tried a wide variety of managerial techniques and provided extensive training, both in group and individual settings. But my salespeople were losing a lot of deals. We had strong competition, and the products were about equal. Often the best salesperson got the deal, not the best product.

I remember one young man who was extremely bright. He did excellent work in our support department for a few years and then he wanted to move on to sales, where he struggled. I tried to help by giving him all sorts of ideas, strategies, techniques, and “tricks of the trade.” We were both frustrated that it had not helped.

One day he went to Florida from our office in Colorado to do a demonstration for a potential client. He spent an entire day with the prospect and called me from the lobby of the hotel. I asked him how the demo went, and he said, “It went great, they loved it, the owner was in the room and thinks we are by far the best.” I asked, “Did you close the deal and get a deposit check?” to which he responded, “No, how do I do that?” I told him to go back to the owner’s office and say, “Can I have a deposit check, please?” So he did and returned to Colorado with the deal completed and the check to prove it.

A few days later I was at lunch with this salesperson and someone asked him, “What do you do for a living?” He responded, “I’m a check getter.” These four words clarified the entire complex sales process for him. He quickly became our best salesperson by far, and eventually the sales manager.

We talked frequently about why he found the phrase he invented so useful. He explained that I had taught him many valuable strategies but had overwhelmed him. He was trying to employ all of them on a deal. Always do this and that in a demo, make sure to use this wording in a proposal, visit customers at their location, bring up all the great references, etc., etc., etc. He went on to say that he realized those things were all just potential tools he could use, but he didn’t have to use any of them. Effectively his thinking had become, “I’m a check getter, and what is stopping this person from giving me a deposit check right now?” Sometimes the answer was, “Nothing, go ask for the check.” Sometimes the person only needed a very short demo on one feature, or to be given one customer reference.

I use this concept frequently. For years I wanted to write this book. I would start and stop, never getting very far. I now think, “I’m an