Every day.
Every day someone is out to get you.
I’ve always heard that when you are ahead is when you are the most vulnerable, and after feeling ahead for quite a while, it definitely feels that way some days. Most days, I relish in the fact that when I walk into a dealership for a meeting that I instantly get to turn my phone to the “off” position and leave it in my bag. That feeling of being one-on-one with a client and that your time and attention gets devoted to them means that you now have the ability to shut off the rest of the world. It’s a really good feeling.
But, just as all good things must come to an end, so does every meeting. That time when you are in solitude working to better someone’s business must come too, and you have to be on to your next place. This is the time when you have a very short gap to turn your phone back on and see all the emails and text start to come through as you get in a car and aim toward your next destination.
While sometimes, only for a few short minutes that you have out in the open, this is the time when the problems of the day can prey on you. But even in these spans between meetings and in between cities, I often think to myself, “they have to be able to catch me to be able to kill me.”
That may, in itself, be the very essence of this blog’s title. I have always believed that I am not the smartest, not the most talented, not the most athletic, and even on my best days have a hard time being a true people person. But I have always believed and practiced the method that nobody can outwork me and nobody can outrun me.
I was once told that 85% of success is just showing up and the rest of it is how hard you work at it. Not sure how much of that is true, especially in a career in automotive marketing, but being able to work like there is no end in sight is something that really drives me day after day.
There are a lot of people who don’t like me. Competitors being one, past associates and employees being another, and even vendors who try to sell me something (most of which don’t understand I have a double name and insist on calling me “John”) that I will not buy anything from being another, but I never think about any of these people. I am usually too busy moving so fast that there isn’t time to look in the rearview mirror, so they are just like the whitewash that falls into the wake of a really big boat.
This isn’t about having an ego. There are plenty of people in this world who outwork me any day of the week. I’m just lucky enough that they aren’t in my industry, which leaves me the ability to keep living – because I can’t be caught.