Marisa Peer and Vishen Lakhiani argue that successful people do hard, unpleasant work first rather than waiting for motivation. Vishen took a sales job he hated in 2001, hit his call targets with discipline, and became top seller. A drummer worked taxi and nearly fast food jobs to free daytime hours for auditions, eventually joining Simple Minds.
Chapters
So the first thing that people who are incredibly successful do is they do what they hate. They are fully prepared to do what they hate to get to where they want to be. And people who fail, they will give up their dream before they do what they hate to do. People who are very successful, they never, ever, ever wait for motivation. They do it because when you do it, you become motivated. A great writer won't go, well, I just wait till I'm really motivated to start writing this book. No, they get up at 4 in the morning, they don't want to, and they start to write. And then of course, they become motivated. So you wake up in the morning and you go, you're not going to go, yay, it's 5am I'm putting on my running shoes and going for a walk up Laurel Canyon. Of course you're not going to do that. You're going to wake up and go, God, I really hate working out. But Marissa said successful people do what they hate to get to where they want to be. Of course, the wonderful thing is that when you do what you hate first enough times, it starts to become natural. Like, I've got to do my taxes, I'll do that first thing. I've got to confront someone. I'll do it first. And so I still to this day wake up and think, oh, I don't really want to do that. So I'm going to do it first. Because what I do want is to belong to that group of very, very successful people. So I know what the membership is. And every time I don't want to do something, I think I don't want to do it. But what I do want is to belong to that group. So I'm doing it first. And it's a great way of thinking because it starts to move you around, wanting to do it for all the right reasons. Many, many years ago, I met someone who wanted to be a rock star. That was his ambition, actually. Particularly, he wanted to be a drummer. And he was a very young married man with two children to support. And he was going for a lot of auditions. And of course, all the auditions take place during the day. And every time he had a job, they wouldn't let him take time off. So he decided he would have to work nights in order to audition during the day. And the only job he could get was a job he hated. He was a taxi driver and he hated it, but he did it. But he just wasn't making enough money, so he thought, okay, I have to work at McDonald's. I get more money, I can work nights. I'm free to audition. And about a month before he'd applied to work in McDonald's, he'd been for an audition to be a drummer in a band. He didn't know who the band was. And the day he was due to start working McDonald's, which he absolutely hated even the thought of, he got a call to go, you know that band you auditioned for? It was actually Simple Minds, and now you're the drummer in Simple Minds. So he never worked in McDonald's or drove a cab again for the rest of his life. But when he told people that story, they'd all go, ugh, I would never work in McDonald's. Oh, my God. I'd never degrade myself by driving a cab around London. And I'm like, don't you think you're missing the point? His ability to do what he hated is what made him a rock star, because he had to have his days free to rehearse and audition. But if he had your mindset, I'd never do that. He would never be a multi millionaire rock star. It was because he was fully prepared to do what he hated, to swallow his pride to keep his vision in mind. I want to be a rock star. I must be free for auditions. How can I do that? Well, I have to work as a cab driver and in a fast food restaurant, which I hate, but I'm going to do it because it's going to take me to my goal. And it did. But the people who laughed at him and said I wouldn't do that, none of them are rock stars.
When I graduated from college, I moved to Silicon Valley with, like, dreams of striking it big with a dot com. And I failed miserably. The only job I could get in 2001 was a job selling technology to law firms. It was a dialing for dollars job in San Francisco, and I hated it. I was a computer engineer. I wasn't into sales. I hated picking up the phone, talking to lawyers, and then going, is this a telemarketer? You're trying to sell me something? Click. And some of them would curse at me, like on the phone. I hated it. But my mentor, who was the sales advisor, gave me a really interesting thing. He said, look, I know the math. All you gotta do is get four lawyers to spend 30 minutes on the phone with you, and one of them will buy. And how do you get four lawyers to spend 30 minutes on the phone? Again, it's a math game. You gotta call 25 statistically 4 out of 25 will give you that 30 minutes. So all you got to do to make one sale a day, which would be like hitting your target, would be to make 25 calls a week. And I hated those calls. But when I could see that. When I could see that all I had to do to get success was do that with discipline, even though I hated it, I started making five calls a day. So I'd show up to work and I'd slay my first dragon before lunchtime. I try to do five calls, and everyone else would shuffle papers, read a book on sales, surf the Internet, tell themselves that they were bracing up for their first call or getting themselves in the zone. I would just do those five calls, and I ended up being the number one person in that company in terms of sales. But it was that discipline of doing that horrible task that I hated. But again, like what we spoke about earlier, the more I started doing it, the more I started loving it. And soon I just love those calls.
Cool.
Because I knew that each of those calls was going to get me one step closer towards the goal.
People don't understand that you got to make yourself do it. Our mindset is, I don't like that, so I'll go home. I tried lifting those barbers really hurt. I'm leaving. I went for a run. My knees ached. I called someone and they went, no, thanks, we don't want to write about you. I'm not going to do that again. Of course, no baby ever says, yeah, I tried that feeding stuff. I seem to get banana in my hair. So I just gave up. Even at school sports day now, where they don't want to reward the winner, that every child gets a medal for joining in the race. And it's not really life, you know, in life, we do reward winners, and we've stopped teaching our children to be winners. And we just want them all to be competitors. And they understand that life isn't fair. They do understand that sometimes you have to work harder. And I think we've gone too far. The other way of saying, if you don't love it, it doesn't feel right. Don't do it. And I think that's a great sh.
