Would you believe it? We're in bloody March. I know. And it's starting to get a little warmer. A little bit of spring and there's a little bit of spring in my step. Cha cha. Cha. And I'm going to tell you something. Your hips don't lie. Neither do mine. Did that make sense? No, it didn't. Let's talk about Epictetus. Easy for you to say. Easy for me to say. An important place to begin in philosophy is this.

a clear perception of one's own ruling principle. I'm going to start you off with something here from my old pal, Frederick Nietzsche. Yeah. And people might say, well, hold on a second. I recognize that someone else said that everything's a remix. Everything straight down the camera one. Everything is a remix. Remember that? Exactly. So Frederick Nietzsche said with a strong enough why you will bear any how. And sales is one of those things, isn't it?

Where you're faced with, is it worth it? What is dragging me through that next call, that next rejection? What makes it tougher? What makes it easier? And having that inner dialogue, that inner why that drags you through every single call. What I found is before I had children, my sales career was very up and down. I'd achieve the goal. I drop off the cliff. I'd miss the goal. I drop off the cliff.

I was the classic peaks and troughs in performance. as soon as my wife said, I'm pregnant and I've knuckled down, that was the strong enough. Why I kind of found that my motivation comes from something more than me. Some people are very, very good at being self motivated. Unfortunately I'm not, but having children then it doesn't matter how I feel. get up, have to do it. I have to show up and do the thing. And then before you know it, the brain's wired up in a way that's just, just do it anyway, regardless of how we're feeling. There's a strong enough why to pull you through. What's your experience of that? I was in a similar position before kind of joining the business and there wasn't children on the way, but I definitely felt I'd come off the cruise ships. had gone searching for things I thought would make me happy. They hadn't made me happy. And it was getting to, you're getting closer to 30. And I thought, I thought I'd have it figured out by now.

All these bad habits that I said, I'll fix next year. All of a sudden a decade's passed that career, that progression, all those things where I said, I'm going to do it. It felt well, when are you going to do it? I'd always said that if I put my mind to it, I could do anything, but I was never actually putting my mind to it. I think there was a turning point of sometimes you have to experience enough pain to figure out what, what the why is. And I was working a crappy sales job. I'd just moved to Manchester and that was enough to look around every day and go.

This isn't me. I need something, a bit of my own. And I was listening to a lot of entrepreneurs reading the books and the mind was going, and then I, and then I my first marathon and I was like, if I can do something hard, then I can probably do anything. that kind of why I think about it in the sales world. And there's a couple of people in our team that when we've asked them why they were the only ones to hit commission that month for what happened, they said, I had to, I had things going on outside of work.

that meant I had to, there was no choice. I had to do it. We've had that from, we've got two offices, haven't we? We've got one in Bournemouth and one in Manchester, two separate conversations with people who hadn't already spoke to each other. Why did you hit target this month? The response was the same because I had to. Yeah. Because the why was strong enough to bear the how. Exactly. And there's a lot of people that I think are missing target, unpredictable in the results because they haven't found that yet. And then a guy reached out to me and said, how do I find out what my why is? Why I'm doing it. Now, one argument could be if you have to ask that question, you probably doing the wrong thing. And you talked before about the rocking chair test, haven't you? So when I'm sat on my rocking chair, there's a few different ways you can do this. When I'm sat on my rocking chair, what do I hope the life is that I've lived? But the other point would be if I'm sat on my rocking chair, looking back at this exact point in my life right now, what do think I should be doing?

Almost putting it in another situation. the thing is you can say to yourself is if I was talking to a brother or a sibling or a friend who is in the same spot I'm in right now, they were lost. They weren't sure if they were on the right path. What advice would you give? Yeah. You've taken that step back from yourself and you're able to see things for what they really are. But yeah, sales is a funny one because I've definitely had my moments with it where it felt a bit like in the wrong path. The story I was telling myself at one point in my life was, I can't believe you've let your life turn out like this. I'd say every day when I was going to my sales, or I can't believe you let your life turn out like this. there's that's so interesting that you say that because the way you say that, let me say that back to you. I can't believe you've let your life turn out like this. Yeah, exactly. It's just a change of tone. Just a change of tone, which I think, which I think is so interesting. You're so right. The rocking chair test. I think we spoke about this and we laugh, but like the future consultant.

And in those moments, you can't pay with the money, you pay with time. And you ask future you, what should I do with this time now? Or if this is the challenge that I've got, or this is the task that's faced me, what would future me? would tomorrow me? Or what would 50 year old Jack be grateful of? And also looking to the past, what would 10 year old Jack be proud of that you did? And it is about kind of, have I lived my life to the fullest?

We kind of, talk about, I think it was Seneca, life isn't short, it's just that we waste a lot of it. And it is such a shame that we go through lives and we just do the day to day. I've been in sales since I was 16 and you've got those days. You can't remember the majority of the days. So how do you turn those kind of meaningless days into moments? Well, it's about kind of mastering your craft and getting better and working so that.

It kind of compounds and it accumulates into something magical at the end. Exactly. So remember what Nietzsche said, find your why. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zach Thompson. Remember you will die. Any black pepper with that?