Being Sick Sucks
The two takeaways from Celin Dion's rare condition
I am an entrepreneur. I believe in the mantra of “daily progress”. I share everything I learn on the road to wealth. Here are insights from last week:
Being sick sucks.
If you are feeling crappy 1/3rd of the time, you are doing well.
The lifeline of every business is sales.
You can access previous editions of my weekly emails here. Let’s begin!
(1) Being Sick Sucks
I watched this documentary over the weekend. You can feel the pain in Celine Dion's voice. The one thing she loves the most, singing, is the one thing she is incapable of doing anymore.
She has a very rare, one in a million disease called Stiff Person Syndrome. That is a very bad hand that fate has dealt her. Life has taken her from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. I bet if she can trade some of her wealth or fame to get back her ability to sing, she would do it in a heartbeat.
If you don't have the pillar of health on your side, you can forget about everything else. Being sick sucks! All your energy just goes into feeling better.
In the documentary she says "If I cannot run, I will walk. If I cannot walk, I will crawl. I won't stop." Yet I couldn't help but feel like her body and mind are giving up on her. At 56, she is still fairly young but you can see that the disease has taken a toll on her.
The key takeaway that I took from this documentary was that:
Life is unpredictable. And uncontrollable one in a million events happen everyday 8000 times. You cannot do anything about the things you can't control. All you can do is choose how you respond. Celine Dion is choosing to fight the condition she finds herself in.
Do the things that you can control so that you can make the most of this beautiful life - move, eat healthy tasty food, do not damage your lungs and liver by smoking and drinking, look after your mental health by working on things that challenge your potential and surround yourself with people who love and care for you.
(2) If you are feeling crappy 1/3rd of the time, you are doing well
I was feeling crappy yesterday. The stress of expectations and responsibilities was weighing on me. And I reminded myself of the below message from Olympian Alexi Pappas. It was just a crappy day on the path of doing great things.
The Rule of Thirds basically states that if you are chasing your dream or doing something really hard then you will feel crappy a third of the time, good a third of the time, and ok a third of the time. And if the ratio is roughly in that range then you are doing just fine.
However, if you are feeling good all of the time then you are probably not pushing yourself hard enough. And if you are feeling bad all of the time then you are probably pushing yourself too hard and burning out.
Turn up for all the days - the good, the crappy and the meh. It is how dreams get built.
Today feels like a good day. I will push harder to get more done with my teams.
(3) The lifeline of every business is sales
It doesn't matter how great an idea you have, if you cannot get your prospect to open his wallet and give you money, then you will fail.
In global sales meetings where teams are responsible for millions of dollars in sales, I have seen every step of the sales process dissected to what I would call "doing the reps".
Have enough calls been made?
Have the followups happened?
Did you log the interaction?
How long a time has passed since your last interaction?
Did you discover the prospects pain points?
Did you counter their objections?
Did you use the tools at your disposal?
Why did you win?
Why did you lose?
There are whole teams built to make sure that sales people do their jobs. The "sales enablement" department builds the processes in an ideal world scenario, mapping out each step for each scenario. The "revenue operations" department monitors whether the execution of the processes are in line with what has been designed or not. This builds a roadmap and accountability into the system.
If you do the reps the way it has been mapped out then you will likely get the results that have been projected.
Without sales, nothing else happens. This is why some of the highest paid professionals are sales people. They know how to take the steps designed in an ideal world and turn prospects into customers in the real world.
Some of the smartest entrepreneurs are also some of the best salespeople. Some make the sale before they even build the product. They validate whether there is a starving crowd that they can cater to and whether they have an unfair advantage.
Message to self: Get out there. Sell. Face the rejection. But do so many reps that the law of averages makes money flow into your bank account.
Harsh Batra (LinkedIn)
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