Tag: success

The Daily Stoic: Always Have a Mental Reverse Clause

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman is a book meant to be read a page per day on the practical wisdoms of Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus. On today’s page it was mentioned that Stoics always prepared their mind with reverse clauses.

What this means is that when something occurs in our lives, our mind can view it in a number of different ways. One way will make you self-pity, and make you feel unfortunate and helpless. The other way is empowering, positive, and constructive.

One classic example in my field sales career is rainy weather. One part of the mind will say, how unlucky that it’s raining so much, and only on the days that we feel so ready to get out there and sell! The alternative, reverse clause to this would be to remind yourself that maybe business owners will have more time to hear your pitch because there will be fewer customers on the high street, or that more homeowners will be home to open the door to hear what you have to say.

I also recently lost in the semi-finals of my title defense of my town’s snooker tournament. I could view it in a defeatist attitude and say to myself that I was unlucky, or that I’m not cut out to play this game at a high level. Or I can be grateful that I even had a title to defend in the first place, or use the defeat to spur me on to improve even more. I can even tell myself that now I don’t have to play the final, which means an extra evening in a few weeks time to enjoy some different hobbies or spend time with friends and family.

We can all use these silver-lining thoughts to the seemingly difficult situations in our lives – relationship break-ups, rejections at a job interview, a bout of illness perhaps. In fact, we hear all the time how people who have gone through something difficult recount how they don’t regret it happening at all, and can take strength from it. They sometimes even describe how it was the best thing that happened to them.

This excerpt from the Daily Stoic reminded me that yes, life is difficult. But the level of difficulty and hardship really is subjective in the way that it’s perceived by our own minds. And Stoics believed that the only thing we can control in our own lives is that perception.

Do Today What You’ll Thank Yourself For Tomorrow

After recently listening to the English comedian Jimmy Carr on Steven Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast, and subsequently Carr’s new audiobook titled Before & Laughter, I learned a few things.

Firstly, that Carr is not just a comedian, but a deep thinker and a very wise and funny man. There’s another side to him that you don’t see on television or stage that I found more interesting than the what we usually expect from him and his strange laugh.

Carr opens the book by stating that he always thought when reading others’ autobiographies, “God, that person speaks about themselves a lot!” So what he decided to do for his book was to mix in lessons he had learned that could benefit all of us, with a few stories about his own life. It was a perfect mix: Too much self-help and it becomes preachy, too many stories of his own life would maybe lessen the impact on the reader.

One of the main things I got from listening to the book is that Carr prioritizes the long-term over the short-term. He mentions famous psychological experiments such as the marshmallow test, where young children are tested for their ability to delay gratification. Spoiler alert: the children who were able to delay gratification ended up having better social, health and academic outcomes throughout their lives.

One of Carr’s mantras is to do things that will make tomorrow’s version of yourself thank you that you did today. For example, today I registered for self-assessment on my tax return – something that I dread and do not enjoy, but I will be grateful that I did once it is complete. Other tasks like household chores, brushing teeth, showering, skincare, and working out, would all elicit a similar response from future you.

Then you have things like cultivating relationships with friends, family and significant others. One of the most common regrets of the dying is that they didn’t keep in touch with friends or tell loved ones how they felt about them enough. If we do these things today, hopefully we can avoid a similar fate.

Choosing to do the hard things now make our lives easier down the road. Making sure your car is adequately serviced should prevent a call to a tow-truck later on. Staying on top of work and becoming great at what you do could create financial security in the future. Making sure that you have your devices charged overnight will take away potential hiccups tomorrow.

One reaction I had to Carr’s advice was: if we are always trying to help the future versions of ourselves, are we forgetting to enjoy and cherish the current versions of ourselves? When is it acceptable to have fast food, sit on the couch, binge Netflix or social media? Would we still be present in the moment if we are always thinking of the future?

After hearing Carr’s point, I made some changes to my life where I valued the future version of myself more, and began to think longer term. I stayed on top of my to-do list, went to bed earlier, used social media way less, worked out, and applied myself at work better.

But I ended up getting an unexpected side-effect from serving my future self. Instead of becoming bored of doing the ‘right’ thing all most of the time, I actually felt pretty good about myself. All these micro-decisions we encounter daily, and choosing the right option to serve the future version of yourself, ends up making you like yourself more in the now.

So taking care of yourself in the future, is indirectly serving yourself in the now.

Don’t Play the Status Game

When I first started door-to-door sales one of my biggest motivators was to gain recognition for my work and become respected as a good salesman.

I had bought into the status game. It’s easy to do, because in the hierarchical nature of humanity, seeking status has benefits – you feel more important, and your self-image increases.

But the problem with the status game is that it is a zero-sum game. To rise in the status rankings you need to overtake someone else. There’s two ways to do that: you being better or other people being worse. In my job, I was always working to overtake the salesperson above me and stay ahead of the salesperson behind me. I was hoping to make more sales than them – if I made no sales, I would secretly hope that they wouldn’t make any either, or I would be further behind in the rankings. If I was doing well, I would distance myself to try to stay in the zone, instead of offering to help the other reps with any insights that I thought would help them.

Another problem of the status game is that it is relative. You could be doing very well by your own standards, but if everyone else is better, you can feel a little inadequate. You are low status in this high-performing team but if you were in a different team you would be the best.

The key: Stop playing the status game. It’s difficult because it’s human nature, but staying humble and not worrying about status, and building others up can create a better environment to live and work in. You start to tune into others’ needs instead of constantly thinking about your own. In an odd sense, you might still end up getting the credit and recognition you were looking for the whole time.

The World Owes You Nothing

The problem when we get something, is that we tend to assume that the world now owes it to us. This can apply to houses, cars, jobs, friends, partners, status and wealth. When we achieve or acquire these things, we start to get comfortable and start to take them for granted. We feel we deserve these things.

But in reality, the world owes you nothing.

Firstly, complacency can take away your job and relationships, because you stopped providing the same value as you did at the beginning. Or, causes outside your control can occur – your car could get stolen, a natural disaster could destroy your home, deaths of loved ones, someone tries to shatter your reputation, market forces turn your investments sour.

Understand that all the beautiful things you may have right at this moment will not be here forever. Do what you can to make important people feel loved. But also recognize that we can decide to loosen our attachment to things, so that if they desert us we can be grateful that we were lucky enough to have them in the first place.

Working Hard Isn’t As Important As Knowing What to Work On

Most of us have been taught the importance of hard work – through our teachers, parents, mentors, and bosses. Hard work of course can lead to success and achievement.

But if you’re going to work hard, you have to know that you’re working on the right thing.

After all, is it really success if you have achieved something you weren’t interested in to begin with?

If you want to get rich you have to know what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. Working hard matters, but hard work alone isn’t going to get you anywhere. You could work hard at being a laborer or as a cleaner but you’re not going to get rich.

On the other hand, you may find some people working in certain industries or in certain roles who are very rich, but don’t work hard. They tend to get paid for their judgement and decision-making rather than their physical output.

Before you get your head down and start working without thinking about it, think long-term. Am I doing the right job in the right industry? Not just to get rich, but does it interest me? Does it fulfill me? Do I like who I work with? Can I see myself here in the long-term?

The Problem with Goals

I’m little wary about the idea of setting goals.

In a way, having goals makes us focus on what we lack, and it’s easy to link our happiness to the achievement of goals. But not all goals get achieved – in that case we postpone our happiness indefinitely.

In my first two years in door-to-door sales, I was encouraged to set sales and commission goals by my managers, so I did. Both years, I fell way short of the goal. Even though I did relatively well compared to my peers, and made two to four times the amount of money as I would have done had I stayed at my previous job, having that goal and missing it by so much was demoralizing.

In my third year of door-to-door sales – partly because of the uncertainty of the coronavirus pandemic – I didn’t set any sales or financial goals. In fact, I was almost certain that I wouldn’t beat the totals I had made the year before because our selling season was shortened. But, I ended up producing more than I had done the previous two years, in less than 60% of the time. Not only that, not having a goal made the whole process more enjoyable.

Don’t get me wrong, I still felt pressure to succeed – it was my first year managing a team and I was determined to show the new reps how the job could be done, as well as keeping our technician busy with work. Some may say, if I set a proper sales goal I may have achieved even more! Although I’m reluctant to agree with that, I can’t deny that it’s possible. Giving up having a goal in sales made it easier to do my job with the right principles – instead of focusing on getting a sale at all costs, I was focused on whether I was truly helping the person sitting in front me as my guiding principle.

It’s not that I didn’t set goals at all that year, it’s that I viewed them more like systems. I would decide how many days of the week I would be working, how many hours per day, when I would be going to sleep and waking up. Not only did I view them as systems, I focused on actions I could take instead of outcomes like sales since there was no way I could truly guarantee that someone else would say yes to my offering – there’s an element of luck involved with that.

How to Fail and Still Win Big

Like anyone else before starting a commission-only job in sales, I questioned whether it was the right decision to try it. I’d had a few months experience of a lead generation job, but I’d never made a sale in anything in my whole working career to date.

So I played through a few outcomes in my head. What if I didn’t do very well? What if I made no sales? What if I came out with less earnings than if I just stayed in my current job working at the front desk of a hotel?

I came to the conclusion that it was reasonable that I would find the job very difficult, and there was a chance that some of those outcomes could indeed come true.

But even if I did “fail”, and earn less than what I would have had I stayed in my job at the time, in what areas would I still win? I would probably at least make a few friends, I would have travelled to new parts of the country, I would have learned at least a few transferable skills, and I would surely have practiced overcoming objection. Even if I made the slightly less money than before but still achieved the other things, I would still have counted that as a big win. At the very worst, I would potentially learn to never do a sales job again.

In the end, I did find it even harder than I thought it would be. There were whole workweeks where I didn’t get paid a single cent for my time and effort. At one point in the year, I went 20 working days without making a single sale – not a single commission. But overall, I had some better periods and I ended up making about 1.5x what I would have if I stayed in my hotel job.

What’s even better, as is the nature of commission-sales, I ended up getting better and better over time, meaning in my second year doing the job I ended up earning just over double of what I would have in the hotel. In my third year, I ended up earning about 5x what I would have in the hotel – I doubt the hotel would have given me a 4% increase in my pay within that time, let alone 400%!

The idea of putting yourself out there to potentially “fail” in order to still win big is sort of related to Robert Kiyosaki’s rule of “working to learn, not to earn”, but also can be applied outside of decisions at work too. Failing to hit a 45 minute goal for a 10 km run still means that you completed the race faster than the average runner, and you still get to reap the rewards of the fitness built up through weeks or months of training. Failing in a relationship, but coming out of it learning more about who you are or what kind of partner would suit you the best is still winning big in the long-term.

Which life situations have you flirted with failure and still won big?

Back to Square One or Back to Base Camp?

Failure is inevitable throughout life. But when failure occurs, we can sometimes think of giving up on our goals or go straight back to square one. But we don’t have to go all the way back to the start.

Instead, we can imagine it more as if we were climbing Mt. Everest and weren’t quite able to summit. Instead of going all the way down the villages at the foothills of the mountain, we can simply regroup at base camp. That way, we can stay acclimatized to the high altitude, and try again to reach the peak quickly instead of going all the way down the mountain, losing momentum and wasting energy.

When we pursue goals in life, we usually learn so many things on the journey that build on our skills, mindset and experience. Just like in mountaineering, we become acclimatized and fitter both physically and mentally. If we then fail, it doesn’t mean that all the development and progress has been completely lost – as long as we pick ourselves back up. If it’s really a worthwhile goal, have the resilience, grit, and determination not to go back to square one.

Find Happiness in the Journey

Sometimes, in the hustle and bustle and the quest to achieve our goals in life, we give up feelings of satisfaction, contentment and happiness.

But the reason why we are trying to achieve the goals in the first place is, in one way or another, to be happy. Happiness that comes from externals is a false joy. Not that it doesn’t feel as intense – it just doesn’t last. This false joy always wants more – it’s greedy.

If we were to think of ourselves as mountaineers, how much of your life would be spent at the summit of a mountain, compared to all the time resting, preparing, training, and climbing? It’s the same thing if we were only to experience happiness once we have achieved a life goal. The joy of achieving would be fleeting.

The key is to find ways of enjoying the whole process of life, knowing that you will try your best to reach the summit, but not giving up the higher values of integrity, compassion, and happiness. Life is made up of moments, and only a small number of moments will be in real, tangible achievement. So accept the moments that come with appreciation of how far you’ve already come.

Lessons in Stoicism: The Illusion of Control, and How to Deal with Adversity

Lessons in Stoicism is a book written by John Sellars that introduces the Stoic school of philosophy made famous by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus in the first and second century AD.

One of the main themes in Stoicism is the idea of control within one’s life. The Stoics asked themselves what they really control. The answer – the only thing we can control is our judgements. Although judgements are only a small part of the mind, the Stoics believed that because we can control our judgements, we are able to control what truly matters for our wellbeing.

So, if our happiness is based on our romantic relationships, career, possessions, appearance, or health, we are leaving our happiness in the control of external forces. Even though we can take actions to aid us to be successful in the categories above, we ultimately cannot control whether a partner loves us, whether a company hires us, whether possessions remain in our possession, and whether the body remains healthy. So make your goal simply to do the best you can.

Another tenet of the Stoic philosophy is how to deal with adversity in one’s life. Stoics believed that adversity is the stimulus that is needed to develop as a person, and that life wasn’t complete without facing any difficulties – that would be the real misfortune! Even so, the Stoics remind us not to seek out adversity and drama for the sake of it, it will happily come naturally in the timeline of our lives.

The Stoic philosophers practiced a technique called the premeditation of future evils. They thought about all the possible bad things that could happen in their lives – the death of a family member, loss of reputation and riches, loss of health etc. This may seem like a negative thing to do, but the Stoics found that when people avoided thinking of these setbacks, they were ill-equipped to deal with the reality of it when the time came. Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk frequently thinks about what he would do if he found out his mother had died in a car accident – not only does it prepare for the probable event that his mother will die before him, it realigns him to what is truly important in his life.

Read more about Stoicism in some of Seneca’s most revered essays: On Tranquility of Mind, Consolation to Helvia, and On the Shortness of Life.