I messed up

The hard thing about hard things is that if you don’t do them, things get harder.

And yesterday was a hard thing day.

I made a sales call.

And it sucked.

I mean, it wasn’t completely terrible, but it wasn’t great.

Luckily, my prospect was also a friend of mine and he was able to give me some feedback at the end of the call: “You’ve still got too much engineer in you. Hit the pain points and then give a price.”

Noted.

See, my background is in engineering and operations.

I’ve only recently (past 3 years) started writing, getting into marketing (2 years), and trying out sales (yesterday).

So, I am a newbie.

But, if you want to be a stud, you have to be ok with looking like a spud.

In other words, the first anything is going to be sub-optimal.

The only way to get more optimal is to get the reps in and keep trying.

So, 1 sales call yesterday, I’m going to shoot for 1-2 today. Then keep that up for the foreseeable future.

And it’ll get better.

As uncomfortable as that critical feedback felt yesterday, a worse feeling would be to give up entirely.

When these types of situations come up, I think about the first time I did anything that I’m proficient at now:

• My first banjo gig was really bad. A really good banjo player to 14 year old me: “You need to work on X, Y, and Z, that wasn’t very good.” He was right and the advice turned my playing around.

• First time to the gym was embarrassing. My brother, luckily, was there to coach me through the mistakes. Gym is a huge part of my life now.

• The first public speaking engagement I did was with my fly down (zipper broke). Which led to a total loss of confidence, haha. Now, I’ve spoken to rooms of 500+ people with no problems.

In each of those cases, I had the option to either quit or embrace the suck and keep going.

I’m going to keep going.

If you are in a similar position and things aren’t going well, just remember, a new, more confident you is on the other side of consistency and a bunch of hard work.

Don’t quit.

We are going to make it.

Cheers,

Swanagan

P.S., if you liked this, refer it to your friends (or acquaintances) and I’ll send you a t-shirt.