Springsteen on Fire and Worry

 

“You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart.”

–Bruce Springsteen (1949 – )

American music artist

What you expect to happen – what you believe in your mind – can have a tremendous impact on what actually does happen.

If you’re going to try to accomplish something – if you make the decision to make the attempt – the best thing you can do for yourself (and your colleagues) is to expect a positive outcome. Anything else can only inhibit your efforts.

Worst-case: If you fail, you get an education for your future efforts.

 

Remember…

We earn more challenges by dealing with and overcoming more challenges.

Embrace your experience. Enjoy the weather.

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Barton on Daring Belief

“Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something
inside themselves was superior
to circumstance.”

–Bruce Barton (1886–1967)

American advertising executive

U.S. congressman

“Diligence is the mother of good luck.”

– Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)

American statesman, scientist, and printer

luck: noun: a force that makes things happen

You want more luck? Be the force that makes it happen…

  1. Prepare. Work hard to be ready for the opportunities that are important to you. Research. Practice. Perfect.
  2. Be awake. Pay attention to the people, events, and things around you. Evaluate logically and trust your gut instinct.
  3. Take action. Put yourself out there. Explore. Be vulnerable. Make contact with people. Take risks.
  4. Expect positive results. Optimism improves your chances. If (when) you fail, embrace the lesson and continue on, smarter.

That’s it. Now go be lucky (and sell something).

Barton on Pushing It

“The big rewards come to
those who travel the second, undemanded mile.”

–Bruce Barton (1886–1967)
American advertising executive
U.S. congressman

Sales challenge…

What if you checked email only 3 times a day?

For about a month and a half, we’ve been doing this as a team at JustSell to see if it helps us.

The rules…

Check and handle email upon arrival then check and handle email at lunch. Check and handle email after 4 pm. At home, check it all you’d like (but hopefully that won’t be more than once a day).

Here’s what we’ve learned so far…

  • We recognized our addiction to checking email.
  • We identified how it became a default task (automatically checking it when returning from a discussion, meeting, trip to the bathroom, etc.).
  • We saw how we sometimes used it to hide out from our more important work (“If I’m addressing email, I’m doing something. It may not be the most important thing in the long term but at least I’m of use at this moment.” – Do you see the problem with this thinking?).
  • We learned that our email could wait* and that as the day came to an end, we were more productive and happier. (Although the first few days were very uncomfortable and had us oddly distracted by our lack of distraction.)

It’s cwazy**…

Why is it that we would allow ourselves to be distracted from what we rationally know to be our more important work that gets us closer to our goal of making good things happen?

(how to check email 3 times a day)

* Our customer service people check email hourly in order to be sure we’re addressing customer needs quickly. We don’t believe we’ve lost any sales and we’ve had no negative feedback on our response times.

** And if we still have your attention… This spelling of the word indicates a deeper level of crazy – so cwazy that we’d spell it cwazy. You think that’s crazy?

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