Three months.
Apparently, science says it takes three months of doing something every day for it to become a habit.
After that, it’s ingrained in you, and you just keep doing it.
This is particularly true for the things that are harder to do.
I’m not talking about easy things because we do them because they’re easy.
I’m talking about harder things:
Learning something that’s not natural
Doing something that takes extra effort
Doing something that’s uncomfortable
Most people give up after one week or one month when results don’t come,
which is why we often don’t get good things.
Three months is just the entry price, then you start to get good.
This is the same for sales:
Three months of cold calling
Three months of cold outreach
Three months of posting every day
Three months of content
Three months of doing a podcast
Three months of doing a newsletter
Three months of hand-writing emails well-researched
All of these things,
done every day, are the entry price to sales.
Obviously, that just gets you to step one,
but as with most things, that’s the hardest step to pay.
Learning anything has a price, and for sales, once you pay that price, there’s magic on the other side.
But in the first three months you get no reward, no payback for effort and that’s the challenge
But you start to
Understand
how to call,
How to lead gen.
how to talk to people,
how to relentlessly write comments and post on Linkedin,
how to do content
This is a differentiator for many people I work with.
That’s the hardest part for them.
The first three months there’s no feedback loop.
Just silence.
We all start well-intentioned, and then very quickly we stop.
What’s on the other side of three months of the hard things of sales?
There’s deals
There’s money
There’s confidence
There’s a realization that you can do it
You just have to pay the price,
and I’m not going to lie, the price is high.
This stuff is hard,
but I’m going to be cheering you on.
You cheer yourself on.
Once you get to step one, you’ll realize that most people are not there.
They’re all looking for the shortcut,
and as I love to say,
whether it’s sales or ultra running or anything hard,
there’s nothing on the easy path.
All the goodness lives on the hard path.
Let’s do it, people.
Don’t wait for one day; make today day one.
Then just another 2 months and 29 days to go.
Get at it!
Content of the week
The Source
If you need motivation, watch this: the greatest ultra-runner of our generation, Courtney Dauwalter.
The film is about the source of her why. Why does she do hard things? How did she get better at it? She calls it the “pain cave.”
This is a beautiful 30-minute description of why we do hard things, how we get better at them, and what it brings to us. She is the queen of ultra running, and I really hope you enjoy this.