The Mindset of Success

Republished from a blog I wrote on bluff.com.

I really like driving. Well, let me try to say that a different way. I hate driving. I hate traffic, I hate the wasted time, and I hate the drudgery of driving the same route day in and day out. I love the opportunity that driving affords. It affords, above all else, the time to actually THINK. Most of the time I drive around with the standard NPR fare on the radio, but even when it's on, I'm often immersed in my own thoughts. In a world that moves and changes at an ever-increasing velocity, it's the one time I can think without any outside interference.

During one of my average weekday commutes, I was thinking about my newest hobby, when I made an interesting correlation. Back between 2004 and 2006, on a whim, I found employment as a telemarketer. Fresh out of high school, the opportunity to work with a few of my friends and work somewhere that sounded challenging appealed to me. I really had no idea what I was getting into. I didn't realize it, but I really was about to put my mind through one of its biggest tests to date. In the end, telemarketing may have helped prepare me for a poker hobby.

I quickly caught on to the art of telephone sales, selling newspaper subscriptions for newspapers across the country. I'm sure it helped that the first call I ever took was a sale. However, as the newness and excitement of the job quickly faded after a month or so, I was left with a big challenge. Faced with sales variance, repetition, and difficult call recipients, I was forced to find a way to grind my way from base pay into commission week in and out.

Variance, even though that's not what we called it, played a big role there. Despite my skills, sometimes I would run into call after call of angry people who either were angry at all telemarketers or had been called numerous times, and find myself well below the minimum one sale per hour required. Other times, I would be walking on air making sale after sale. The times where I made sale after sale were easy. After all, I felt like king of the world, like I could do anything. The big challenge was dealing with the dry spells.

When things weren't going good, the internal battle would begin. At first, I would be able to recognize that I was probably just getting unlucky but when things continued to go bad, thought of doubt would creep in. Sometimes I would desperately change up my sales pitch, hoping that it would change something for me. Other times, I would ask an assistant manager to listen to my calls to see if he could offer any critiques that might help me that day, to see if there was something I could improve that day. Sometimes these things would help. Other times they would not. If you were below sales expectations, sometimes they would send you home. They would do that not because they were mad. In fact, they were very invested in everyone's success and wanted you to succeed. They sent people home because no matter how good you are, sometimes you just needed to hang it up for the day. I'm sure it saved them money but oftentimes it helped save my attitude for the long term. The next day, I could come in with a fresh approach. My job was always there the next day.

To succeed over the long term in telemarketing, there were a few skills that were important that helped me. When I first started, I was provided with a script. It covered all three of your required pitches plus a sheet of answers to objections. If one followed this, it helped turn you into a break-even telemarketer. It was enough to keep your seat. To succeed however, I listened to coworkers on the phones when I wasn't on a call, trying to pick things up. This helped but didn't lead to immediate success. What lead to success was taking the scripts and what I learned from coworkers and blending it into something that was my own and also something that was flexible that I could adapt to particular situations and people. The skills to not only synthesize techniques but also make them my own were essential to becoming successful and making a hefty commission almost every week.

Another skill that was vital was my attitude. I had a teacher in high school who was a silly man but he was always strangely positive. I asked him about this one time, and he told me that even when you feel negative about a situation, even pretending to be positive can have a positive impact not only on your mindset but the mindset of others. I put that into practice not only at telemarketing but in life. Granted, I do show other emotions. I'm not some sort of happy freak, but when it counts, like at work or at the poker tables, I carry the positive mindset. To me, it really is essential to being successful at anything. Especially in life, being more inclined to view things positively is the mindset of a leader. Like I tell people at work, identifying problems is great but things don't begin to change until you offer solutions.

So when I was a telemarketer, I put this mindset to use day in and day out. Even if I felt unsure about how I would do on the phones selling that day, I talked like I already knew it was going to be a great day. And nine times out of ten, it was. I knew the coworkers I wanted to talk to at work, too. I didn't want to talk to the guy complaining about his string of "almost sales" or the woman who complained that everyone she talked to that day hung up on her. Like a virus, those people would eat away at my mindset and my confidence. The coworkers I wanted to talk to were the ones who were upbeat and positive. Even if I was only doing so-so, I wanted to talk to the guy who was on fire. Together, our positive energy and thoughts would help us. With telemarketing, like in poker, the battle was keeping your head in the game. Even if things got bad, you wanted to keep your head in the game so that when opportunities came about to make money, you could extract maximum value. If I let negativity eat away at me, I could let sales go that I could have gotten on any other day. It was essential to believe in my skills and abilities and that if I kept to my A-game, the sales would come. And they always did.

It might seem like a stretch to everyone else, but I feel like telemarketing not only taught me a lot about myself and my resiliency but also gave something back. I'm sure that I had a personality and attitude suited for it, but like any talent or ability, it allowed me to train my mental endurance day in and out and payed me well when I succeeded. Even though my journey is still in its infancy, I feel like telemarketing helped prepare me for a poker hobby. The mindset, the endurance, just about everything has helped me so far. That's why if you ever talk to me about bad beats or how you got screwed out of a pot, I really won't care to hear it. In the worst case scenario, you throw me off my mindset and my game. Best case scenario, its the same except maybe you feel slightly less angry about it. When you put in the time and effort to learn, review, and improve, sometimes you just have to know that you will succeed. When you lose to a runner-runner or someone hits trips on the river, you just have to know in the long run, that's money. Money in the pocket's money in the bank.

So sorry for the long blog entry but that's what I think my edge is. I have been in this situation before--In a long grind upwards, where I constantly have to reassess and analyze my mindset, my skills, and my plays. Somedays I am successful. Somedays I find holes in my game. Other days, I just have to hang it up.