A mentor of mine, Karl Morris, once shared a quote with me he attributed to the late, great golfing legend, Seve Ballesteros: “Fall in love with being a tenacious golfer.”
Seve was not the most technically pristine player of his era. He was something more useful: relentless. He built a career on creativity, grit, and an almost stubborn refusal to let difficulty become defeat. He did not just tolerate the fight. He loved it.
That distinction matters more in commercial/fleet sales than almost anything else I can think of. Because the professionals who truly develop in this industry are rarely the most naturally gifted. They are the ones who fall in love with the process of getting better, especially when getting better is uncomfortable, unglamorous, and unwitnessed.
The Dealer Who Got Stuck
Recently at a truck club event, a dealer pulled me aside after my session on AI and content creation. He had been using AI to write social media posts for about a year. He felt like he had given it a real shot. The problem was, after a while, everything it produced looked identical to everyone else: stacked emojis, hollow enthusiasm, over-reliance on the word “fostering”, and sentences built on the unmistakable AI cadence of “It is not this. It is that.”
He had concluded, reasonably, that AI content was a dead end. So, he stopped, and for roughly a year, he had been stuck.
What we worked through together was not really about AI at all: he’d been outsourcing his thinking instead of using the tool to accelerate it. Handing the wheel over and blaming the car, if you will.
We started conceptualizing prompts together, rooted in his voice, his customers, his specific market, his expertise. He got quiet for a moment, then said, “I forgot I actually had something to say.”
That is what tenacity looks like when it is quiet. He didn’t quit the problem. He stayed close enough to it that when the right conversation came along, he was ready to move.
The Long Way Around
I’ve got a great connection that works at a dealership in Alabama. We’ll call him “D.D.” He came through our Ultimate Boot Camp for the first time with very little commercial experience. Attentive, willing, unproven. The first camp gave him a framework, but he had to go earn the reps.
He came back for a second session, eighteen months later. Then, attended a third, less than a year after that.
Each time, he was layering. The things that had not clicked the first time clicked the second. The things that clicked the second time became habits by the third. He stayed in the discomfort of being a work in progress longer than most people are willing to.
Today, D.D. sells enough commercial units that he’s reached the point where he is turning business over to less experienced colleagues, not just closing deals but teaching the process. He tenaciously fought to become a producer, and now he’s growing into a leader.
Three boot camps might look like redundancy from the outside. From the inside, it was compounding. And compounding is invisible until suddenly it is not.
That is Seve in the rough, behind a tree. Lament the lie for just a moment, but then turn all the attention to simply figuring out the next shot.
A Decade in the Making
For nearly a decade, I have known that our training work lacked a tangible, interactive tool. Something a dealer could put their hands on in a session and immediately feel the practical, applicable value of. That gap cost us, repeatedly, in rooms where a demonstration would have changed the outcome. I sat with that discomfort for a long time. Not passively. I kept looking, kept building toward something, kept the problem active even when the solution was not visible.
Recently, while preparing for a presentation to a group of commercial dealers, that decade of pressure finally found its moment. To anyone in the room that day, it may have looked like it appeared overnight. It did not. The session was the spark that the kindling gathered for years needed.
That is the part of growth that does not make the highlight reel: the years of carrying the problem. The months of “almost.” The quiet refusal to accept a gap as permanent.
What Tenacity Actually Looks Like
Seve’s quote is not about white-knuckling your way through difficulty or “grinding”. “Falling in love with being tenacious” means finding genuine satisfaction in the process of staying in the work, especially before the results arrive to justify it.
The Truck Club dealer did not find his voice in a ten-minute conversation, he had it all along. He just needed to stay close enough to the problem long enough to find it again.
D.D. did not become a consistent producer because he attended a Boot Camp. He became one because he was willing to come back and learn more. Twice.
Self-development in this industry is so much quieter and more demanding than a singular seminar moment. It is the willingness to be unfinished, stay in the battle and simply figure out the next best step.
The best in this business are the ones who fell in love with figuring it out.
So, tenaciously chase what’s best for your customer. Tenaciously chase what’s best for your own development.
Get to work.
About the author: Will Brogan is the Strategist for the Commercial Truck Training Division at the One Nexus Group. Will has been a part of Ken Taylor & Associates since 2012, overseeing its transition to the One Nexus Group portfolio in 2024. Will has an excellent track record of developing and delivering training programs and building highly effective leadership collaborations with a variety of industry partners.
