2. Accept the fact you didn’t quite make your sales goal this year. Figure out ways to work smarter next year to increase the odds of achieving your target. When the idea first occurred to her, it seemed like such a win-win situation.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

Marge Brygay was a hard-working sales rep for Inspire Learning Corporation, a company intent on becoming the top educational software provider in five years. That newly adopted strategic goal translated into an ambitious million-dollar sales target for each of Inspire’s sales reps. At the beginning of the fiscal year, her share of the sales department’s operational goal seemed entirely reasonable to Marge. She believed in Inspire’s products. The company had developed innovative, highly regarded math, language, science, and social studies programs for the K—12 market. What set the software apart was a foundation in truly cutting-edge research. Marge had seen for herself how Inspire programs could engage whole classrooms of normally unmotivated kids; the significant rise in test scores on those increasingly important standardized tests bore out her subjective impressions