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Musings
I woke up and started scrolling. On the toilet, I started looking at my Apple watch: first, messages then email. Was there a text or anything on Messenger? A complaint email and a note to send more information, which I mull over as I brew a Nespresso. Coffee in hand, I plop down to write—but first—grab my phone.
“Life is short, and Art is long,” so begins Hippocrates “Aphorisms,” which could be the greatest take away from his complete body of work.
Mrs. Eastman introduced me to The Odyssey in tenth grade. She handed us the classic Fitzgerald translation. The exciting twists and turns of the plot enticed me. I felt enthralled with Odysseus’s adventures with the sirens, slipping past Polyphemus, the bone crunching Cyclops who was blinded by Nobody, his swimming between Charybdis and man eating Scylla.
In a marathon, at kilometer 30, there is a phenomenon called "the wall." At this wall, the body, which stores enough sugars to keep going for about 30 kilometers, stops moving. Runners who have completed more than a few marathons, at certain times in their career, experience this wall. Paula Radcliffe, who holds the world record for the fastest marathon run by a woman, hit the wall in the 2004 Olympics. She faded, and then stopped, slumping down on the pavement next to the spectators, crying. Hitting that wall is not a pretty sight.
What book would you take with you if you were stranded on a desert island?
The majority of management training centers around team management (hire, train, and retain), individual performance, and exceeding targets. Yet, more careers crash and burn from the neglect of managing up, not down.
APAC leaders find business in Japan bewildering, challenging, or just ignore the differences and blunder ahead to the detriment of the business. Headquarters demands results, but instead listen to familiar excuses.
Sail into the cave.
A sales person will drive an extra mile, make the extra cold call, spend longer on that RFP, do a bit more research on her client, read the client’s annual report before walking into the conference, work as many hours or persistent days just to get the job done. The best salespeople, like the best athletes, move beyond required action and into the exceptional, whether going through sales training, putting added information in the database, or making more sales calls—they take the one extra step others ignore, forget, or neglect. The great sales person knows that in the sales race, there is only first place or nothing; no medals are awarded for second best sales person—only unemployment checks.
営業担当（セールスパーソン）は常に、コールドコールを一本多くかけたり、提案依頼書に少しだけ多く時間をかけたり、クライアントの調査にもう一歩踏み込んだり、商談の前にクライアント企業の年度報告書を読み込んだり、仕事を終わらせるために残業や休日出勤をしたりの毎日です。一方で最高の営業担当（ベストセールスパーソン）は、プロアスリートのように、「求められているよりも一歩踏み込んで」結果を出します。これはセールストレーニングへの出席、データベースに情報の追加更新、セールスコールを多くかけるといった、誰もがわかっていながら無視したり、忘れていたり、できないと諦めていることです。ベストセールスパーソンは常に、営業成績のレースには一番しか存在しないと言うことを熟知しています。営業成績二番目以降にはメダルもトロフィーもありません。ただ「一番ではない」という結果だけが存在するのです。
People make the world go around. They teach you what is possible and that nothing is impossible. Be inspired; read biographies. If you can unlearn the "how to" of our society--getting that "right answer" out of a white paper, and replace it with the "who to" attitude, you'll open up creativity to help boost success. You can find out what is universal, what works throughout the ages. Start to meet these people, living and dead and learn from them.
The challenge is mixing and matching and thinking that input work is really output work. When I’m checking email, this is not output or generative work. In general, it won’t make the company money nor save the company money: it’s an activity where someone reaches out to me.
We talk about life being hard sometimes. Of course it is! That’s the point.
Q. In the corporate world who has the potential to make the most money?
A. Sales people.
If you are in sales, and everyone is in sales, then you need to harness your discipline to become the best. Here are 7 things, if done with discipline, will immediately improve your performance.
1. EXERCISE
2. STUDY
3. TAKE ACTION
4. TIME MANAGEMENT
5. MAKE 10 CALLS FIRST THING IN THE MORNING
6. FIND 3 THINGS A DAY FOR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
7. CREATE MESSAGES
A Commonplace Book originated from categorizing and taking down notes from what one reads, capturing quotes, images, and ideas. In contrast to a journal which is chronological, a Commonplace Book is categorical. John Locke wrote a book on how to keep a Commonplace Book, and writers like John Milton and Virginia Woolf organized their thoughts into such notebooks. Harvard has photographed Commonplaces dating back from the 16th century and in a variety of languages. Wikipedia describes Commonplace books, or commonplaces as,
As a leader, you must demand the most of your people to achieve the best for your team. Expect excellence. If you demand it for yourself, make sure that you demand it from others.
The people around you affect your life. It’s you’re job to select the best people who will make you creative, boost your confidence, give you honest feedback, and help build you into a better person. Of course, science is proving this now with obesity and smokers and that people can drag you down. But looking even broader at the flowering communities in history, you can pinpoint it to specific centers, such as in the 1400s of in Italy, especially around the Medici of Florence and Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino. Also, in the 1500’s around Weimar and the massive personality of Goethe as well as his circle of Schiller, Herder, Wieland and Bertuch. And in the small town of Concord in New England in the 1800s where Emerson was widely known and respected along with other luminaries such as Thoreau, Prescott, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Quincy Adams, and Webster to name a few. And I’m sure you can also name your own circles historically or in your own life from school and work where people just flourished together.
It’s easy to think that our education was to blame or that we are stuck in a job. Accept your schooling. Work well in your career. And from time to time at lunch, slip your shoes off, dream, explore your desires, and take a small action into your dreams.
Out of principal, I felt cuts needed, so I diligently slashed the easy ones…
So much of our life is bombarded by outside forces: social media, television, emails, pop-up windows, news, and a plethora of other signals shouting at us to take action. If you want a barefoot lunch, it behooves you to take a moment and contemplate the world in a different way. The stoics presented an empowering, engaging, and enduring philosophy that continues inspire us to this day. Try on a few of the quotes, read some of the writings, and take the action steps below to give the philosophy a test drive.
Homo sapiens have been able to adapt, change, move across the globe, live and thrive in different climates, create more and sophisticated tools, build roads, buildings, bridges, skyscrapers, rockets to the moon, and stations in space. They have created systems that have helped defeat certain death, ease birth, fight disease, feed and clothe not only millions, but billions. These animals have learned to communicate, speak, sing, read, and write. From these certain systems, they have made themselves into humans, beyond an animal, and create and form beauty from the smallest thimble to grandest cathedrals.
