Very often in life, we do not appreciate the lessons as we learn but much later.
This became evident to me as I was chatting with a client she asked what helped me most to navigate the chaos of the last two years
Having a certain degree of stoicism
It is a skill I partially acquired through life lessons and academics, however I believe that stoicism can not be learned from books alone as you need to be able to practically apply it.
The best school of being a stoic was swimming.
Swimming is a rather boring and monotonous sport, no exciting touchdowns or last minute goals… just mileage. But the better you do your drills, the higher your chances of medalling.
Skill improvement is also delayed gratification at its finest as it can take years to be somewhat proficient at a task (someone tell that to the instagram world).
My next lesson in enduring without complaining came via my first job on Wall street where I started as t a connector or as we called it” AT + T monkey” . You would dial up numbers ( think 500 dials a day) and connect them to your respective broker. Exciting … but what it taught me that success is a numbers game
- you swim that many meters per day at this speed in quality strokes, you will eventually make it to nationals and beyond
- You call x people a day, you make this many connections, get this many leads which will translate into a certain number of clients.
When things were really dark in NY 2020 I was angry just like most of us.
But after a while I managed to shift my focus away from things I can’t influence such as federal policies ( even though I should be in charge) vaccine development, anti-social behavior of certain groups and tried to focus on the tiny world that depends on me, which is my family and my business.
To help either I needed to restore my health at least somewhat, this took all of April and May until I could consider being physically active. Around Labor Day I started rebuilding using the stoic principle of enduring hardship with ( too much) complaining.
At the time, I set out for two rather lofty goals
1. rebuild the business to 150% of 2019 revenue
2. get in my best shape ever.
Rather ambitious since I had lost 30lbs of muscle and 90% of all clients.
From there on, I broke things down into more manageable pieces.
A. If I want the business to survive we need to generate two to three new clients a week for three months
B. Three clients require anywhere from eight to ten leads
C. In order to get to ten leads you need to speak to thirty new people a week
D. From there on we can conclude that you need to speak to four or five potentials each day while keeping the existing clients happy, shooting social media content, doing your own workouts and getting your meals in.
If you stick to the formula you will hit your goals, mine being in photo shoot shape physique ( this pic was taken 6 months after I came down with covid) and running a thriving business
It goes back to the topic of an older newsletter: win the day and don’t try to prognosticate too much. Leave the thinking to the horses, they have bigger heads!
See you on the other side!
Maik