How To Get YourSelf Psyched Up To Do Something You Don’t Want To Do.
Every day I’d park my car on the other side of Melbourne City next to a chemical factory because it was free.
As soon as I got out of the car, I could smell the chemicals and I would feel a burning sensation down the back of my throat. I’d walk about 30 minutes from my car to the call center where I worked, holding an old shopping bag with one muesli bar and a can of Minestrone Soup. The office building was old and had smelled like cigarettes because half the workers smoked to escape the realization that their dreams weren’t working out.
Working in a call center was tough. I had all my calls listened to by team leaders and these magical fairies called “Quality Assurance.” Their job was to listen to my calls and email me feedback on each one. They were also responsible for seeing if there were any breaches of compliance given that there was financial advice involved. Many of these magical fairies had never taken a call in their life but would talk down to you like they had. If they didn’t like you, or you question their feedback, they’d mark you down consistently. This led to your income capacity being reduced and in some cases getting fired.
The lady that listened to my calls was named Wendy. She’d been with the company for several decades and smoked more cigarettes than Marge Simpson’s twin sisters Selma and Patty. She was drastically overweight and proud of it. Her hair was grey like a witch and no meeting was complete without a bottle of Coke and a pack of smokes on the desk. She smelled like how I did when I flew to Europe and went two days without a shower because of the flight and back-to-back stopovers.
Working in the call center was rough, but I thought in my mind “Somewhere there’s a guy/girl that’s doing the same thing and one day they are going to be CEO or start a seven-figure business.”
Someday I’d be working with that guy/girl because I knew I had similar potential. That same person was going through the same struggle I was — I wasn’t the first. I decided to use my ‘starting from the bottom career opportunity’ to go further than I could ever imagine. In week one, I hit 200% of sales target and won an award. By month two I was winning every award that was available. I was getting referrals to other departments when my colleagues said it wasn’t possible.
The guy sitting next to me ran the call center union. He spent his days fighting the company and saying “We need more money and better benefits. We work too damn hard not to get them.”
In reality, he’d have two-hour lunches, break for tea and a biscuit every 60-minutes, and gossip behind all the leader’s backs. He didn’t deserve anything because he didn’t work at all. I did though. My day job was very much an individual pursuit. I was part of a twelve-person team, but all of them were on performance review except me. They all hated their job and just wanted a payout. Not me. The downside of becoming like my colleagues was that I knew I’d have huge regrets.
These regrets would cause me to become pissed off and want to celebrate Friday like everybody else. I wasn’t going to have that. Not over my dead body!
I used my energy to do the best I could to break my personal bests and improve myself in the process. This led to me getting time off the phone, to use as I pleased. I used this time away from the phone to watch Ted Talks with my manager.
I also made the bold decision to go to the company directory and ring senior leaders who typically made $500K plus bonus.
I’d ring their mobile phone and they’d ask where I worked. I told them I was in the call center and had big dreams. To my surprise they didn’t laugh at me — they actually wanted to help me and they did. One of them ran the face-to-face sales business and offered to keep in touch with me about roles.
I eventually got a role working for him and selling face-to-face with the six-figure pay cheque that went with it. In this role, I built up even more skills. A lot of it was done on my own and I had to find motivation within myself. On the way to an appointment, I’d pump Tony Robbins MP3’s in my car or read ten minutes of Think And Grow Rich.
The gig was hard and the sales targets were incredibly hard to reach. I did reach them though. Every. Damn. Week.
There were many painful moments during this process. I went through some rough breakups and even dealt with a mental illness that would come and go. My confidence levels were up and down like a yo-yo. While working this job, I’d keep looking for other jobs but often fall short. People would promise me careers and then it would never happen. At the same time, I tried to do my own interviews with entrepreneurs via Skype. No one online was that excited by them and I eventually stopped doing them.
One night out of frustration, I wrote a blog post that was all about my own struggles and how I overcame them. I felt like I was standing in the middle of the street with crowds of people walking past me on the way to the Football while I was wearing nothing at all and had all my bits showing and simultaneously freezing my ass off.
I hit publish on that blog post and a lot changed. 84,000 people shared it. I got emails from lots of interesting people.
I’d then go to my sales job each day with a secret weapon in my pocket. I kept my overnight success quiet from my work colleagues. All of that changed when I was asked to present to the sales team. I shared my online story with them all. Many of them were shocked. They knew I worked the same rough job as them with all the pitfalls yet after hours I had somehow found this secret passion that others loved too.
I’d created this new life for myself.
Pretty soon I got a major promotion in my career and the online success grew quickly. Those years working in the call center were hard. I did the work when nobody else around me would. I put in the effort not quite knowing what was at the end of the rainbow.
Getting psyched up every day to work a boring call center job was all based on the idea that I could do something incredible if I started from the bottom and focused on small wins each day.
What separated me from everybody else was that I embraced the boredom and the pain of my call center job to take my life to the next level. I got the career I wanted and a side-hustle I love by being okay with the mediocrity I had to deal with in the short-term.
Pushing through boredom and pain is the difference.
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