Tag: Work

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.

Live to 100: Ikaria’s Secret to Longevity

Live to 100 is a Netflix documentary series about the Earth’s Blue Zones – small geographical areas where the residents live unusually long lives. In the series, bestselling author Dan Buettner visits these Blue Zones to try to find the secrets these people hold to their longevity.

In one episode, Buettner visits a small Greek island called Ikaria to find out more about their way of life. Of course they followed a Mediterranean diet consisting of fresh ingredients, olive oil, while using meat only sparingly. Because of the lack of natural port, the island had to be self-sufficient and grow their own food on the island up until the 1980s.

The way of life there seemed less focused on the Western hustle and bustle of work and material success, and there was no indication of the strenuous workouts you would see in a Western gym. The pace of life is slower there than what most of us are used to. Everyone cooks their own meals (usually for others), and the residents stay active doing chores like gardening.

The five main secrets to longevity Buettner found from Ikaria were:

  • Herbal tea: Herbal tea is full of antioxidants and other anti-inflammatory markers. Inflammation is the biggest cause of chronic illness such as heart disease, neurodegenerative disorders or almost any other disease you can think of. So the daily drinking of this tea in Ikaria, which it seems they also pick from their local surroundings and make in a traditional way, could be a key to their longevity.
  • Raw Honey: The honey you can find in a grocery store is boiled, while the honey that is consumed in Ikaria is raw. The boiling of honey destroys the pollen grains which is reported to give health benefits. In Ikaria, raw honey is made in hives that are moved across various parts of the island so that the bees can gather nectar from different kinds of plants, along with other micronutrients.
  • Partnership: In Ikaria, there’s an emphasis on marriage and partnership. In the show, Buettner meets a couple who both remarried around the age of 70, and 25 years later they are still healthy, happy and appreciative of each other. They both describe how they gave each other a new lease of life when they met.
  • Wine: The wine in Ikaria is hand-made traditionally, and consumed sparingly. Buettner suggests that this could be a contributor of why Ikarians live so long.
  • Dancing and laughing: Ikarians are a social group of people, holding parties where you can find people aged 14 all the way through to 100+. What Buettner noticed was the emphasis on dancing, which is an easy way to burn calories and increase heart rate, but also mixed with conversation and laughter which I’m sure is restorative to the soul.

The overall lesson that we can learn from the culture of people in Ikaria? Cook and eat local produce, live life slower, create loving and deep partnerships and enjoy company with others as much as possible.

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.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

The lowest common denominator of your life is simply: You.

Out of all the terrible, unlucky things that have happened in your life, you were there for all of those events. Equally, all the joyous, remarkable things that have happened in your life, you were there too.

In that case, since you are the lowest common denominator in all these life events, you are the single biggest reason why all these things happened, whether good or bad. Instead of blaming our parents, our exes or the media for our troubles, understand the role you have played in allowing these factors to limit you and therefore shape your life.

Whether life is perfect or whether it’s a living nightmare, you have the responsibility and the privilege of deciding what you think about it, and how to respond to it. Stop giving people the power to ruin your day or shape your life. Ultimately, you have the power to decide what your circumstances mean.

Sometimes you read stories of the rich and privileged, who seem to have it all, stumble in life and fall prey to destructive behaviors and never-ending misery. On the other side there are people out there with much more modest means who fill their lives with love and gratitude.

This just proves that instead of always trying to change our environment to suit our temperament or our tastes, it is more important look within. We think a holiday will cheer us up, or a new job or new relationship. And it might work, in the short-term. But then we realize that we are enacting the same pattern over and over again. There is no point in running away, or hiding. You can’t escape yourself.

Because no matter where you go, there you are.

The Importance of Foundation

Entrepreneur and angel investor Naval Ravikant highlights the importance of learning the foundations in life.

Put simply, it’s becoming competent in skills such as numeracy, writing, reading, speaking, and listening. The better you are at these things, the stronger your foundation and the simpler you will be able to learn anything else.

In my own life, my speaking and listening was more of a weakness so I decided to work as a door-to-door salesman in the summers – there was no way I could succeed in it unless I learned how to speak and listen to a high level. In my off-season I spend a lot of time reading books and writing on this blog, in order to become more comfortable and competent when having to communicate and understand the world through written word.

These skills are not only useful in the world of work, but also everyday life.

How to Increase Job Security and How Much You Get Paid

If you feel underpaid at work, the reason is simple – you’re replaceable. You’re dispensable. There are some types of jobs where you know if you left today, there would be a replacement for you ready and waiting and happy to pick up the slack that you’ve left.

You feel like you’re wasting your time – getting paid too little for a job that you know that most relatively able people can do, or at least get taught to do without too much time and effort.

So what can you do about it? One option is to try and find a more specialized job that involves skills that are more valuable and less common. But what if you have no unique or valuable skills? Then it’s time to start learning, either in your own time or by securing a new job with pure enthusiasm, humility and a hunger to learn.

The other option is to stay in your industry, but to find ways of adding value to your company that you know no-one else can do. This can be by building relationships with people outside your organization, so that you become the channel through which correspondence is made. This can be through learning the ins and outs of the industry, and keeping up with current trends where other members of your company may have dropped the ball. You could offer to take responsibility of big projects, so much so that if you left, the project would be almost impossible to see through. Find specific skills within the scope of your role that you can do better than not only everybody else in the company, but everybody else you know.

Either way, the key to job security and getting paid well is not only your value to the company but your indispensability. Become indispensable to the point where you know it would take weeks or months of headhunting to be able to find someone that could even come close to replacing what you were able to do for your organization’s success.

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 Three Biggest Decisions of Your Life

Entrepreneur and angel investor Naval Ravikant advises that young people should be spending more time making the big decisions: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.

These three things will pretty much determine the quality and trajectory of our lives. Sometimes we find ourselves going with the flow, entering relationships that we aren’t 100% sure of, spending a lot of time doing a job but spending so little time deciding which job would be best for us. And usually the place we decide to live in will determine who we meet and which jobs are mostly available too.

Once we decide these three things we can be much more intentional with our lives instead of being taken whichever way the wind is blowing.

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?