The Power of Curiosity / Overcoming the Narcissistic Urge 177JUST CURIOUS
It was the second year in a row that I was delivering a keynote speech
for this company’s President’s Club banquet. When the awards were handed
out, I noticed that the same gentleman ( John) had finished number one
last year. I also noted that the distance between number one and number
two (for both years) was like the distance between first and second at the
2000 golfing U.S. Open (15 strokes between Tiger Woods and Ernie Els).
John had again lapped the field.
I asked someone next to me if John did this every year, and he said,
“Every year that I can remember.”
This aroused my interest in learning what made this guy tick. I ap-
proached John after the banquet and asked if he would be willing to have
dinner with me the next evening—to which he agreed. I then asked him to
do a homework assignment before we met again. I asked him to try to dis-
till his success into a solitary word.
The next evening, John informed me that he found the answer to my
question. He thanked me for asking, as he had never before attempted to
condense his success into a single principle. The word he chose was basi-
cally a description of his nature. If I were to pause here and allow you, the
reader, to try and guess what this word was, chances are that you would not
get it on your first 20 guesses. In fact, I have performed such an exercise in
sales trainings, and John’s key word rarely comes up in the first 30 guesses.
Here is the word he gave me—curiosity.
John explained it this way. “I thought of all the other words that others
attribute to sales success: hard work, goal oriented, people skills, etc. But I
decided that the one feature people notice about me is that I am naturally
a very curious person. I love learning about people. They all have unique
stories to tell, unique paths that they have taken, and unique hopes for the
future. I like hearing about my clients, their children, and their grandchil-
dren. I think clients like this about me, so they tell their friends about me.”
“ENOUGH OF ME TALKING ABOUT ME... ”
John’s compelling success is due to his curious nature, which in turn
holds at bay his own inner rumblings for attention, glory, and credit. These
inner rumblings, reflected in our conversations and behaviors, are what I
refer to as the narcissistic urge. My favorite example of this urge is the guy in
Hollywood who said to his friend, “Enough of me talking about me, how
about you talk about me for a while?” Overinflated egos and personal inse-