This is the third episode of a five part miniseries on Building Resilience, you can find episode one here.

Spinning 'round in Circles

You may have heard, it said that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. What goes around comes around. The pendulum swings both ways... and obvious cliches. But realistically, we all know that this is true. Humans live and run on cycles: annual holidays, birthdays, new year's monthly bills, weekly routines work, rest rinse, repeat as salespeople. We live and die by monthly, weekly, or annual sales quotas; but we make money one day at a time.A day is just the chunk of time can, most meaningfully control. Minutes and hours... they're just too small, too fleeting; and too subject to the fate and will of another. Weeks are also hard to grasp. You can review a week when the week is over, but on any particular day, you're just focusing on that day. You're not thinking about the week in total. Each day seems to be filled with opportunity and purpose. They just seem to be the smallest chunk of time that we can reasonably manage.

Clichés for a Good Reason

Every day can be a new day. The sun can rise and it can be the first day of the rest of your life. Today can also be the last day you ever drink, or the first day you stop letting that thing from your past, hold you back. Every moment in history started on a day. Every great victory was won on a day. The greatest events of your life may sweep across many years or weeks building up to that day, but we always measure it back to a day. It's apropos that I'm releasing this episode right after a holiday weekend, 4th of July. We blow stuff up. We eat too much. Maybe we drink too much, and then we have a tough week to get through where no one's really in the office anyways. So we going out our numbers and we trudge through. But now is the week after, and we're in the middle of the summer, and it's very tempting to slack off on any one day. One of the greatest challenges we have in sales is that our success feels like powerful highlights in the midst of long gray dullness, a series of wins and losses spread over a lifetime.

The Value of Any Single Day

But that's not what it really looks like. In reality, a successful sales career is a series of performing the right activities over thousands of days. That's what discipline, and consistency are for. And for a few glorious days, every month or year, you will reap the benefit of that consistent work, that consistent discipline. You'll close a deal and you'll celebrate. But you didn't close the deal just on that day, there was a lot of work that went up to that. It will seem like these wins, fall out of the sky or reward by fate or chance, but that's not how it works. A successful career can be measured by successful days.Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Each day, affords us an opportunity to waste the resources we've been given. Each day gives us a chance to be one day further away from success. Every day we waste can be rust gathering on the ball-bearing, which slowly grinds your career to a halt. No single day of sprinting or no single day of laziness will lead to your total success or failure.It's a sum total of the efforts spent over time. It is therefore very important to spend your days wisely. One who is wise realizes that there are only so many hours in the day that can be spent working. One must sleep. One must rest. One must be more than a sales person. You have to pay bills, and go to the DMV, and buy groceries, and cook food. Setting aside specific hours for work and protecting those hours is one of the most efficient ways to have a successful day. Protect your working hours by creating bookends around them.

Creating and Using Bookends