Sales 101

Look, I am learning all the time. I probably blew a pretty major sale recently, but the reason I mess up sales, like the reason I mess up most things, isn’t that I don’t know how to do it. It’s that I have so many balls in the air that I fail to devote quite enough energy & attention to the one particular ball. Move too fast, get sloppy.

Get sloppy, make mistakes. Make mistakes, lose sales & customers.

It happens. No one is perfect. But hey it’s a learning experience. Won’t lose the next one for the same reason.

I’ve also been thinking about this recently because a) I am staffing up my sales team and especially the newest addition will need some training and b) I’ve been in buying mode recently. Shopping for lawyers, designers, partners, resellers; and then there are the random people who try to push unsolicited stuff onto me. A number of them have been actually really annoying me, which has led me to think about how to sell (and not to sell) to me, and how this should relate to our own sales process.

Enough background. My bias? I don’t want to sell someone something they don’t actually want just to win the deal. I don’t want to win the battle to lose the war. I don’t want to do something that is not long-term sustainable (i.e. sell under cost). I have always had this bias from my product manager days. Rather be in the ‘more for more’ or ‘more for the same’ quadrants than the ‘less for less’ and actually I can’t even remember the fourth quadrant. ‘The same for less?’ Ugg.

Same thing on the buyer side. I’m not made of money. Even if I were, I’m a New Englander, which means I don’t like to waste money. What I like wasting even less than money is time.

So I'm not going over the basic basics like sales stages, how to qualify a fit, do a needs analysis, talk about decision-making criteria (that's the part I messed up recently, BTW, I think). Obvious things are obvious.

Losing before you begin

Some prospects can waste your time. Here they are:

• The cheapskate: Almost everyone is price-sensitive. I bet even someone at Cisco blinked when they bought Meraki. But some people will buy the cheapest thing, regardless. If you’re not going to be the cheapest option, find these people out and don’t waste your time.
• The already-decided: This happens a lot here in government tenders, but it can also happen in other areas. You already know who you are going to buy from and you’re just getting competitive bids to either negotiate the price down from your preferred supplier, or to make your boss happy, or whatever. I recently fell into this category and I told the competing vendor flat out that they were on the back foot since I already knew the other guys and they’ve given me a good price. They came back more expensive. Unknown quantity more expensive than the devil you know … you decide. Most people won’t tell you, though, they’ll just hang you out to dry.
• The never decider: This sort of buyer may not actually want or need your product or service but will ask lots of questions anyhow, and probably won’t ever buy.

Not being a good match

Not every prospect should become a customer.

• The bad match: Sometimes, you’re not the best match to what a prospect needs. Some deals you should lose to your competition or to a substitute.
• The square peg: Sometimes, what they want doesn’t actually make sense and they aren’t open to hearing another alternative. This would be like the person who goes to a nutritionist and no matter what the nutritionist says, is convinced that a vegetarian diet is going to be the thing that helps them lose weight.
• The ass: Sometimes, they are just not nice people and you can tell this from the start. If you’re in the service business you actually need to deal with these people. Some of them may wind up costing you time, money, hassle, and mental mindshare that should go elsewhere. 

Profiling

You must understand your prospect.

• The buyer: Who is the person who will ultimately make the yes/no decision or the vendor A/vendor B choice? How will they decide (note: what they say and what’s true are often not the same)?
• The advocate: Who is a fan of your organisation or of you personally, and how can you play this to your advantage?
• The objector: Who is there to make problems and raise objections?

There are quite a few other roles, and a heck of a lot of strategy for how to play the people in these roles. You want to know this, take a sales course. Or work with a rock star for a few years and learn by osmosis. But the general point is to understand the people involved.

People don’t buy from companies. People buy from people. People buy from people they like.

I was at breakfast the other day and I got an email from a guy who I happen to like quite a lot. He runs … well it doesn’t matter what he runs. Point of the matter is, I like the guy, had been a bit annoyed that he hadn’t communicated with me as much as I would have liked, then I saw his email and all was forgiven. Why? Because he apologised, because I know full well how it is to be busy.

But really because I liked the guy. That goes a long way. Although it still has to be the right solution. Fangirl or not, if it’s at my cost I can’t put in a product that costs 4x as much when the economics don’t support it.

Communication

Or, how not to be annoying.

You rarely close a deal in the first meeting. It’s happened, but not often. You must provide data, the prospect thinks, asks questions, etc.

That’s for when you’ve had a first meeting. What if you’re prospecting, and trying to set up that first meeting. Here’s what to do:

1. Find out the prospect’s preferred method of communication. For me, it’s email. I am in meetings usually from 9-5. Call me in the day and I’m not likely to answer the phone, or if I do it’s going to be disruptive and I’ll be annoyed. Schedule a time and we’ll talk. And for the love of god DO NOT leave me a voicemail. But whatever, that’s me. Not everyone is like me. Some people prefer being called. Ask. Put it in your CRM.
2. Make the objective of part of each communication to set a time to next talk. But don’t push it.
3. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” There are many different guises in which this one can come up. If you get this vibe, mark the prospect down in your pipeline as ‘unlikely’ or ‘lost’ or if it’s because they are moving premises put down a time to call them in a few months.

Number 3 is a personal pet peeve. There is nothing more annoying to me, who already has far too many emails & calls coming in, than to get an email every so often: ‘Hi! I’m here. Any business for me now?’

No. And you know what? You’re starting to sound desperate and annoying.

I probably veer too far the other way in my own communications. I should follow up with my prospects more often than I do, especially during the early phase when I’m pulling information together from various sources to put together a quote or a proposal. If someone’s actively waiting or has just asked you a question, you should probably contact them every other day or so just to give an update. Matter of fact, I’m going to start doing just that from next week on.

Objection handling

My favourite. It actually is.

• You’re sooooooooooooooooo expensive!!!!!: See the cheapskate above. I got this most amusing statement in an email recently around our conference & event services: “Adam mentioned that we could be looking at a pretty expensive solution which arguably isn’t great for a company that offers a free product.  This is more than we were expecting and is beyond our budget.” Let me get this straight ….. your ‘company’ offers a ‘free product.’ This is our problem WHY again? Well anyway. Back to strategy. Skyrove’s is either more for more or more for the same depending on the exact product/service/market segment. Knowledge is power. Know your comparables, and if you are more expensive, be prepared to back it up. Do not be afraid to lose because you’re too expensive. Unless you’re always losing. Then you are too expensive.
• But “X” doesn’t work exactly how I want it to!!!!! Welcome to the real world. Is there a workaround? Is it operationally feasible? Is the feature in the roadmap? How important is the function to the customer solution? If at all possible, sell what you have. If you have to make an exception, check the ROI. Know your margins. Also, consider how adding a feature or making an exception for this one customer will affect your operations. Complexity kills. I’m a big fan of KISS. A BIG FAN.
• Oooh look over at that lovely sunset …. Gotcha!! The distraction or red herring is another form of objection. If someone says they have issue X their actual issue might be Y. Maybe they say they are concerned about cost but what they mean is they are concerned that your quality won’t be good. Get to the bottom of why they are raising the objection. If you’re lucky this is actually another opportunity to create value or differentiate from your competitors.
• Don’t make buying a mission. You may have heard of barriers to sale. I used to make banana flower salad all the time. All the time. Love that stuff. I haven’t made it in years. Why? I have no idea where to buy banana flowers. That’s a barrier to sale. Another example … in the U.S. you can just go to Valvoline and have your oil changed in 15 minutes without even getting out of the car. Here, you have to take your car in to a shop and wait, and wait, and wait, and … well it’s no wonder I haven’t taken my car in to a shop for a while. I should really do that. Make it easy for your customers to place orders. 

And for heaven’s sake, listen to your prospect. To what they are saying, not just the words that come out of their mouth. I recently got an email asking me to email my credit card details so the person could set up a recurring payment. I replied and said ‘good heavens that is horribly insecure, and since I just want to order so much I’ll make a one-time payment.’ The response? ‘I’ll just call you to collect your details and it’s very easy to cancel the recurring payment.’

…. Way to have understood my concerns, there.

Win/loss & analysis

We get a lot of inbound leads at Skyrove. Handling them is, literally, a full-time job. We win some, we lose some. We like to learn.

• Source: how did the prospect find out about us?
• Reputation: what impressions do they have coming in? What business do they think we’re in?
• Win: if they sign up, why? Who were we competing with and how were we better?
• Loss: if we lose, why?

Loss analysis is probably the single most powerful thing. Did we lose because they didn’t like the salesperson? Because we annoyed them? Because the solution wasn’t a good fit? Because we were more expensive? What did the competition offer that we didn’t? Or did we lose before we had begun but didn’t even know it yet.

OK. I’m sure you’re thoroughly bored by now. What have I been busy with this week? It was a short week, as Friday through Monday is a long holiday weekend in South Africa. So I was doing a bunch of things, but also made time for some long meetings/reflection times. Spent a long time with Doug on Monday, breakfast with Michael on Thursday, and lunch with a market analyst I’d met the prior week on Wednesday. That was very interesting. I probably told him 20x the information that he told me, but what he did tell me was very, very useful.

So Tim Ferriss claims you can become world-class at anything in about 6 months. I’m now at the 7 month mark at Skyrove and you know what: I’ve spent enough time in this Wi-Fi world that I sure as hell wouldn’t consider myself world class, but I can [apparently at least] not only hold my own but impress people who’ve been in the industry for years. What does this mean? Not a damn thing. Because I still need to execute on my visions.

I was at dinner this week at La Colombe with the amazing teams from Unreasonable at Sea. Social entrepreneurs. You know what was amazing to me about this? Well, the sweet pea risotto, crème brulee, and maple meringues were quite good. There was also a Saudi Arabian prince. But no, it’s that we were at dinner for hours and we talked about business, entrepreneurship, leadership, and that actually the most interesting person to me at my table was Kresten Buch, who runs 88mph, a tech accelerator. He’s Estonian, started 88mph in Nairobi, and is now doing it in Cape Town. 88mph is one of our customers (not of the typical sort), but their office has a lot of radio frequency interference so we used it to try out some Ruckus kit because Ruckus is supposed to handle such things well. Now Kresten and his team love us. So thank you, Ruckus.

Anyway, we got to talk about exactly this: how the talent shortage in Silicon Cape and in emerging markets generally is this capacity gap. You don’t have senior programmers with 10 years of experience. You also don’t have people who even understand what it means to execute on their visions. Vision is one thing. Plan is another. Leadership to get people to execute on a plan is yet a third, and arguably the hardest. That whole discussion around the jockey or the horse? You may have someone come pitch to you for funding and the horse (market & product idea) may be awesome. But you may take one look at the team and say: ‘I think you will fail.’ History is littered with funded failures, and also with people who’ve finally gotten funding, succeeded, and then thumbed their noses at the people who said they couldn’t do it.

The other reason that email about the ‘free product’ annoyed me? There was some guy, a gatecrasher, at this event, who was everything that gives social entrepreneurship a bad name. He was all over the show, everything from anti-capitalist to unclear on value prop to even sustainability. I’m sure a nice guy, heart in the right place, but demonstrating such unconscious incompetence. And Kresten was playing with him like a cat might play with a mouse. Now, this might be a bit mean, but I think he was actually trying to help him realise how he needed to tighten up his own sloppy thinking.

When people criticise us, it’s actually a gift.

But I was sensitive to it because I was thinking Kresten would also have torn apart the Ellie of a year ago, because at the end of the day, I was on an unsustainable path myself. That’s why I’m a bit sensitive. It’s one thing to know what to do, it’s another thing to do it.

Flipping beautiful evenings though. Harvest moon. Table Mountain silhouette in the background. My heart could break sometimes at how much I love it here. I wonder what it would take to get me to move, and I wonder what would be more likely? Moving for an opportunity, i.e. onwards and upwards, or moving away if there was strife or civil unrest?

I have been catching myself referring to myself as part of ‘South Africans’ a lot recently. I think the context has been mostly in business: ‘we’ being South African business people. But it’s been three years. I may be crossing that line. And I’m stubborn as hell. I live here but I am an American. If there was violence and civil war, would I leave? Or would I dig my heels in deeper?

Then again, America has its own challenges. The Defense of Marriage Act. My friend Nick had a great comment on this. Short version for those of you not following it: it was a law passed some time back by the Republicans to define marriage as being between a man and a women (i.e. specifically to exclude gay marriage). This is now being argued in front of the Supreme Court as to whether or not it is Unconstitutional. Or would that be unConstitutional? Anyway:

Yesterday's DOMA transcript, # of named appearances:

Roberts: 53
Sotomayor: 36
Scalia: 26
Breyer: 24
Kennedy: 22
Alito: 19
Ginsburg: 11
Kagan: 9
Thomas: 0

Of course, Kagan got the zinger.

If you’re an informed American you know who these people are and how they tend to vote. You also won’t be surprised at Thomas’ and Roberts’ comment count. The zinger: “She pulled up a House document explicitly stating that the intent of DOMA was to express moral disapproval of homosexuality; she said that ‘might’ be a good ‘red flag’ that discrimination was involved.”

Oh, snap. Look don’t get me wrong. I would never say one should not struggle & fight for equality in all its forms. I’m also saying pick your battles. There is nothing I can affect by changing my Facebook profile photo. But I do sure as hell hope the good guys win.

My first week at trying not to work too hard went pretty well. Except that my body was still not fully recovered from the flu. I trained, but nothing crazy. I was a bit flattered by all the people asking me if I was ok, and what happened after the last week of the Open. I suppose I do have a track record of injury to account for. Still, it’s kind of sweet.

More importantly, it’s amazing some of the insights that come when you’re a bit more rested and your head is a bit more clear. I don’t think I had any sense of humour failures in the week. Still too much to do and not enough time to do it.

The seasons are changing though. Autumn is definitely here; the air is crisp, the leaves are changing, and it’s getting dark earlier. I still get confused because I am thinking about autumn leaves in New England then realising that no, it’s crocus and snowdrop season. But I’m about ready laying the foundations for a big growth of our business, which means it’s time to get more lines in the water. Got a big meeting in two weeks which is wonderful & exciting, but I need more big meetings.

But we’ll get there. Right after 13.4.

• “It’s my job to shoot stuff down.” “Huh. … is that your job? … I’d be really good at your job!” – Doug & Ellie
• “Are they all red?” – Stefan
• “It’s been running for two years so I hope it’s not wrong.” – Stefan
• “Niche is very broad.” – Ellie
• “I love it. And if *I* love it …..” – Dave
• “If you have to ask that question, you don’t get it.” – Ellie
• “I’m going to tell him you’re brilliant.” – Dave (the guy had just met me. Apparently I have this effect on people)
• “Also thanks for eating all the fat.” – Doug
• “Yeah. That’s a nice little flaw.” – Stefan
• “I thought South Africa was spelled with an ‘S’.” – Adam
• “False. It’s not nothing. It’s 30 seconds.” – JP
• “I don’t care how rich he is.” – Ellie  
• “A college degree is not what it used to be.” – Kresten
• “Competition is good.” – Kresten
• “I just coughed because I had wine. Not because you’re an anarchist.” – Daniel
• “Yeah but that’s a different kind of entrepreneur. You have to be able to take advice.” – an entrepreneur
• “How many fires do you ride through on a bike?” – Kresten
• “Entrepreneur is a capitalistic term.” – Kresten
• “I think you are a competitor.” – Doug
• “That’s a question. Don’t avoid it.” – Ellie
• “I do think a shape shifting sailing robot is way cooler than a Saudi prince.” – Ellie
• “I think it’s real.” – Johan
• “I was less impressed the third time.” – Johan
• “Yeah. We’re on ‘n’ now.” – Ellie
• “The tower on the hill can’t connect to France.” – Rudolph
• “You’re going to have to hold the bar for the cleans and you’re going to have to hold the bar for the toes-to-bar.” – Chris 

Trainsmash

Wow. It would be exaggerating to say that I wanted to die on Friday. I am pretty attached to life. But as I was walking down the street on my way to the doctor’s office I was thinking that I hurt so much that if I was to be hit by a truck, I’m not sure how different it would have felt.

I’m sure it would have been worse. But to know that intellectually and to feel as you feel in the moment are two very different things.

I had a fever so high I could barely even see straight. I bought some food, went home, started to eat it, realised I actually wanted to be asleep, lay on the bed, and woke up 4.5 hours later.

I suppose I’d been coming down with it all week, and maybe even since last weekend’s CNS fail I should have seen it coming. Monday I felt fine. Tuesday I felt great, couldn’t get under the bar on the snatch which annoyed me but did my first heavy squat cleans for literally a year, tied my PR, then the next lift, which was also easy, my elbow was a bit slow to come around so I tweaked my elbow (beats the hell out of a dislocation) but that’s quite awesome. Progress. Then came torture in the form of a max 500m row 3 minutes after finishing 3 minutes of as many sets of 10 unbroken wall balls as possible. I was lucky enough to get to use the boys’ height for this, unlike the girls in the next class but whatever …. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

500m rows nearly kill me. I fear them. I also kind of love them but honestly every time I do this I get off the rower and my legs hurt SO much I almost want to whimper. Then I think I’m ok, stand up, walk a little bit, and my legs give out. It takes me a good 15 minutes to be able to walk again, it’s stupid.

Wednesday I was feeling a bit weak in the morning session, ok VERY weak, figured I was just tired or stressed or something. I hadn’t slept well. I’d also lost a deal to a competitor which made me very cranky. It’s one thing to lose a deal, it’s another to lose a deal you want to a competitor you know you’re better than. Whatever. I was also absurdly excited from another meeting that day. You win some, you lose some. Resilience & consistency is what matters.

But also too (as Tina Fey would say): delivering what you sell. We have a bit of prep work to do in some of the areas into which I want to expand the business. Win deals too fast, and you’ll spend more time cleaning up messes and potentially developing a bad reputation than the short-term wins are worth it. First order of business: ducks in a row. Second order of business: take over the world.

Kind of like Sam Briggs. She reminds me of a much better version of me. She was a super athlete, world-class, but her form was notoriously terrible. Then she got injured and had to sit out for a VERY long time, and rehab, and learn proper form. Kind of like me. I may not have had the highest score in Africa on 13.3 or even the highest score I could have had, but I had fill hip extension on top of the box every time AND my back was straight on those deadlifts. There is photo evidence of the latter. A year ago that would not have been the case.

Get the form right, get the conditioning right, performance will come. I am frustrated that my form is not what it should be. The irony. It kills me. I wonder if I will ever be mature enough to start getting this stuff right??

Like: ok my diet is pretty good, very clean, maybe too high fat too low carb but I play with that. My sleep I adjusted a few weeks back. But I have been sick a lot recently, if I look at my log of the last few weeks it basically goes like: sick on & off for a week, better for a few days, grouchy & tired for a week, better for a few days, feeling ok, CNS acting strange, a few good days: BAM! Down with disease.

That is not a healthy cycle. Yes there could be a zillion reasons why. But there’s one obvious one: I’m working too hard.

Nope, not super human. But breaking myself won’t make things any better, and it’s a stupid thing to do now two months from Regionals.

Speaking of Regionals, as a result of my illness I was unable to perform the Open workout of this week. So I did one rep of the first exercise. It will be a challenge now to finish in the top 48, which means I’ll have to compete on the team, which is what I’d planned to do anyway. But it takes a lot of the pressure off of me, and also the irritation at some of the scores that I just didn’t find credible. I did recover enough to go through to my gym and judge four athletes in their Open workout, and honestly that made me happier than anything. One of them didn’t even think she’d finish the wall balls and not only did she do that but she got to 79 double unders out of 90. Rocking. I had another guy thank me for helping him squeeze out the last 6 or 7 reps, which I didn’t realise I’d done. It’s not the judge’s job to coach, but it’s not against the rules, either.

It was a week of some good wins, though. Hell, it was a week where I got to do muscle ups on three separate days and that 500m row was a PR. Muscle ups are one thing, it’s having a shoulder without pain and realising that strict muscle ups are not only possible but actually relatively easy that made me happy. I may hate doing strict pullups but strict muscle ups are more fun, so maybe I’ll practice them more.

I also got this most excellent email from a customer essentially saying what great relationship skills our sales guy had, props to me for providing such training, and that with such people as Adam then Skyrove could only be going good places. Well, I can’t take credit for Adam’s people skills. This is why I hired him. Would that I could.

But here’s the other thing the email said – it said that so often we are quick to criticise or give negative feedback but don’t bother to give positive feedback.

The two things are related, I’d say. I sometimes tend to project or over-generalise but so it goes. For myself, at least, I will often tend to focus on the negative. Not so much just because it’s there but because I want to fix it or improve it.

Like: it annoys me when I can’t do something. Like not being able to walk on my hands annoyed me. So then I practiced, and now I’m not by any stretch great at it but I’m loads better than I was a few months back. Once you attain some basic level of competency and it’s not like bashing your head against a brick wall practice is especially fun because progress is so rapid when you’re learning a new skill.

You know some ‘high skill’ gymnastic move like a muscle up or a handstand walk, is really mostly in your head. You do have to be strong enough and coordinated enough to do it, for sure; but you also have to believe you can do it. If you’re afraid of those rings you’re sure as hell never going to get on top of them. I’ve always known it’s my head that fails me before anything else.

I could stand better technique, sure. But we could all stand to be better at a lot of things.

Which brings me to my next point. For whatever reason there’s been a lot of talk flying around recently about gender equality and men and women and blah blah blah. Maybe it’s the receding fever but I’m just so not in the mood for this sort of thing.

Sam is acting in a period piece and she was telling me about some of the historical gender roles that were in play and they are hectic. Even as recently as maybe 100 years ago a woman could no way do what I do at work and in sport. No ways.

What I said above about being grateful? There’s a lot more positive than negative. I’ll focus on the positive thank you very much, negative people or excessive worriers actually just tend to annoy me. Well, unless they’re snarky negative which isn’t really so much negative as just superior. I’m ok with superior as long as it’s justified. You know what they say about people in glass houses, right?

At the end of the day I do what I do which is commit to something, put my head down, and get it done. When I have the power to do that, of course.

Ed Boudrot once gave me some really good advice when I was complaining about feeling disempowered. He told me that while I was, in theory, correct that I should have such and such authority, if I didn’t have it in practice no one was going to give it to me. I just had to take it. Act first & ask questions later.

So what does this all mean? Look, analyse, criticise, plan, act. Gripe, sure, but continuous griping without action (if you can take action) or recommended action (if it’s outside of your direct control) is just complaining. And complaining is distinct from my whole ‘not whining just making conversation’ game that I love so much. What? A max 500m row? How *utterly dreadful.*

Oh the thought of it, yes. If I kind of wanted to cry on Tuesday after that 500m row I really just wanted to curl up in a corner & whimper on Friday as the fever had its way with me. It was 38.6 by the way, or 101.5F. Spectacularly high for me whose normal body temperature is about 1 degree F less than a normal person. Not quite high enough to cause hallucinations but very nearly.

It was weird considering that I felt pretty ok the night before, albeit a little under the weather still. But when that train hit me, it hit me. Now … I’m nearly better but also I’ve done very little besides sleep for three days on end. I haven’t felt this mellow since I can remember.

What was that wonderful George Bush quote? “Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me … you can’t get fooled again!”

• “Well, now you feel like I feel. But for different reasons.” – Adam
• “No..…. Yes!!” – Bronwyn
• “You took out Batman! Why’d you do that?” “Because it didn’t work anyway.” – Ellie & Stefan
• “If you can’t even get it right with four, there’s no way you’re going to get it right with twenty.” – Stefan
• “We all have enemies. I’m sure you have enemies, right?” – Bane (who would know a thing or two about this)
• “I’m glad I don’t dream about hair!” – James
• “It is unlikely that I believe you are a moron.” – Rob (but not impossible!)
• “She’s got the personality of a bread.” – Anonymous
• “Bought them on the side of the road in Fourways.” – Mike
• “We are all about maximising sweating our assets.” – a prospect
• “It shouldn’t be taking calls.” – prospect’s IT Manager
• “I think we may have just met one of the most innovative businessmen in the country.” – Ellie
• “What does he want?” “He wants to Wi-Fi the world.” “Sounds like your kinda guy.” – Adam & Ellie
• “Would you please write 1:42.7 on the board? I can’t stand up.” – Ellie
• “I mean …. *I’m* Microsoft certified. …. Wait, that’s not what I meant.” – Tim
• “Her Twitter account now has a blog and something about her toe went viral.” – Kerry
• “You’re so funny. And mean, too..” – Rob (he hasn’t seen the half of either yet …. Ok maybe half)
• “Add a margin of course.” – Keldon  
• “You can tell by the angle it bounces. It’s quite an obvious ‘no rep.’” – Lloyd (;-))
• “If she doesn’t like how it is, she’s the only one who can change it.” – Tammy
• “That will eat you, no matter what you eat.” – Byron 

Limits

I’m not actually sure what to say. I’m impatient and I have high standards. It’s a hard balance between keeping enough balls in the air that they all keep moving slowly, and driving things to completion.

I was telling some folks this week that I’m impatient, and when I want things done I want them done yesterday.

Well, what happened last week? Met the Silicon Valley rock star, who was everything I was expecting. Gave a somewhat disorganised but otherwise good presentation to the folks at 4Di. I HAD a plan, I just got distracted by talking about data. Played with some more data. Yet another conference call with makers of some very cool technology. Putting the puzzle together. Finished the budget. Had an inbound lead that blew my mind (of course we still have to qualify it).

Nearly bashed my head against the wall trying to open an account with a distributor. I did learn a lesson though: I’ve started just crossing out stuff I don’t like in contracts and then signing them. It seems to be a lot faster than alternate approaches.

Had my first article published. Exciting, but the first of many. Kind of like closing your first sale.

And here I am on the programme forthe London conference. I’ve definitely got some things to say about municipal Wi-Fi, and more and more all the time.

Finished up some product packaging & channel support stuff around conferences. The customer recon continues. This pleases me. I do like to have a solid foundation on which to build. My impatience is one thing, but I also know that a great way to set yourself up to fail is to plan improperly. Figure out your channel and your channel support before going and signing up a bunch of channel partners. Just the basics, you know?

I was explaining to my friend Sam this week the difference between interesting data and actionable data. This is another common business mistake: people focus so much on the information that’s interesting that we lose track of why we’re collecting the data to begin with. Then we have reams and reams of information, but we get lost & overwhelmed trying to figure out what to do with it all. Data:decisions experience:wisdom and context:meaning. Kind of.

Speaking of lost & overwhelmed, I wasn’t exactly lost but I was a bit overwhelmed by the end of the week. I had decided to take Saturday off because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a day off from work and I was afraid of the early stages of burnout. Actually doing so was one of the hardest things I’ve done, but probably necessary.

My stress has been too high, and it all culminated on Saturday morning when I woke up and should have been raring to go for the CrossFit Open, and my body just kinda stayed in bed. I did kind of all right in a workout that I should have been all over but it involved excessive numbers of box jumps and my legs just didn’t want to jump. This workout was 10 minutes of brutal: 5 push press @34kg, 10 deadlifts @34kgs (i.e. nothing!), and 15 50cm box jumps. And it’s easy to short the range of motion on most or all of these exercises. I’m pretty sure all my reps were clean, I do hope my judge would have called it otherwise if it were so.

Bottom line though, in a workout that was all about pacing I paced incorrectly. Went out a bit too slow, and never quite caught up when my legs decided not to come to the party. If only it had been an AMRAP13 or 15 I would totally have killed it. But it wasn’t. One thing I will say is that I realised very quickly (about 2 minutes in) that my game plan wasn’t working for me, so I didn’t panic, switched to something else, and at the end of the day other than my legs not having their normal springiness my only regret is that I didn’t figure this out faster. Well as I’ve said before, I almost never have a workout I’m 100% happy with: there is always room for analysis & learning.

Then adding insult to injury, as it were, I had all sorts of plans for what to do with the afternoon: errands! Reading! Instead I collapsed into bed and slept for a few hours before dinner. Possibly I was still feeling the effects of another crazy acupuncture session Thursday. I’ve had acupuncture before, but never anything like these last two sessions. It’s actually mind-blowing.

Well at this rate I’ll have to start taking days off more often. It’s not a competition to see who can work the longest. It’s not a competition at all, in fact.

We’re all just trying to make something out of a commodity space. It’s hard. It’s really hard to differentiate and create sustainable competitive advantage in a commodity space. But in a way, we’re all in this together. Before I joined the industry I never noticed the telecommunications equipment that is everywhere to be seen. Now I do.

And sure I have something to say about mobile carrier ‘offload’ or backhaul on to Wi-Fi. But you know what? As a consumer I also care. Biggest rise I got out of the 4Di meeting the other day was by storytelling: ‘Does anyone here use Vodacom?’ If they live in Cape Town, you don’t even need to explain why you’re asking.

Seriously. LTE is literally taking the legacy 3G networks down by cannibalising bandwidth. Enter Wi-Fi. It works great in exactly the areas where LTE and 3G do not, and performs poorly in the areas where they do. But anyway the whole industry is agog with this stuff. Consumers don’t care, they just want their phone to work.

OK enough Skyrove product marketing. Let’s talk more about my other obsession.

The half-true-half-totally-damn-false saying in CrossFit is that you’re not competing with the other people around you, you’re competing with yourself. CrossFit even admits that both are true. But at the end as pack animals our ranking is important. Look, if I got the top score in Africa for a workout where I felt I left something on the table I’d be ok with that. I’d also be ok with it if I did my best and finished middle of the pack, but only if I actually believed the scores higher than mine (no further comment required). In this workout I didn’t so much leave anything on the table as I just executed poorly. So the main reason I was upset wasn’t how the other girls fared, but just that I didn’t do well compared to what I’m capable of.

Two weeks in and I’m already over the Open. It annoys me how people game it. You can learn a lot about a person from how they respond to something like this which is essentially just a qualifier and rank isn’t really that important except for bragging rights. All I’ll say on THAT score is props, again, to Lorinda van Loggerenberg for posting her score immediately and giving everyone else a target to shoot for.

So now in addition to correcting my form in the Olympic lifts, I am starting to fix my kipping pullup. And my shoulder which had been scaring the living daylights out of me, recovered enough to let me do a muscle up transition in the high rings with no ill effects. Heck yeah. An amazing thing … to be able to kip without my back hurting and turn over without my shoulder feeling like something is very, very wrong. That was funny though: Chris said something along the lines of: ‘You need to relax! You basically just did a strict muscle up.’ If only he knew …. Well I won’t be so tense next time.

We had our first CrossFit competition team meeting this week. And, a Friday dinner to boot. I am excited. There is just something about being part of a sports team that for me is irreplaceable.

Who knew I was such a team player? In a lot of ways I’m a lone wolf. I actually prefer sitting in front of my computer and working magic with spreadsheets and product requirements docs & whatnot. Going out into the scary world to gather data, then coming back and, by myself, turning it into magic, then sharing with other people. Weird for an extrovert, I know.

I suppose I am settling into my CEO role as well as one can. I’m stressed, yeah. I’m overworked and overcommitted, yeah. I may get cranky from time to time, and get frustrated with how many decisions I have to make. The problem with getting to make a decision is that you then have to take responsibility for it. Well, I’ve made my bed and I now have to lie in it, in more ways than one.

It was hot this week, like 34 degrees or something crazy on Thursday. I know I will regret this in a few months because winter here is VERY unpleasant, but I am ready for summer to be over. The weather finally broke Friday morning; what a relief! I have always hated super hot weather. It’s one of the reasons I always disliked my birthday month. In this country, of course, I have the opposite problem.

It was also beautiful. There is this angle of lighting that happens at this time of year as the seasons change. In the summer everything is very over-saturated and the skies are the brightest blue, with no clouds. In the winter there are amazing clouds, and shades of green that rival Vietnam some days, contrasted with the red earth. Now, there are these wispy clouds in the evening that are the colour of that pink cotton candy.

Speaking of cotton candy, I’m feeling a strong sense of place here combined with a strong longing for the States. I saw a letter with that USPS logo on it at my apartment block, but it wasn’t for me. And now I’m thinking of cotton candy, and Field Days, and all the things I will again miss: peony season, Field Days, the three or so days in spring when there are many colours on the trees as at peak autumn foliage. I’m not saying I want to move back. But I am saying that I miss it. I’ve also caught myself day dreaming of Sausalito, and Stinson Beach, and those golden hills.

I think it’s maybe every place you live gets inside you a little bit. Life is amazing. Everything you do contributes to who you are, and everything has an opportunity cost. Especially where you live.

I guess what I realised this week, in all of its harshness? I do have limits, of course, and they are lower than I sometimes like to think. Yes I know, limits are there to be pushed and fought and you can’t let them hold you back … but just because you don’t want to think of them as constraining doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

• “Radio?? People don’t understand what they can’t see.” – Damon
• “At least you admit that. That the pain might be too much for you.” “I didn’t say that. I just said I felt lightheaded.” – Bryony & Ellie
• “And he agreed to that??” – Stefan
• “And he agreed to that?” – Kerry
• “I heard Tim laughing. Was he laughing at me?” – Ellie (he was indeed … stickers again)
• “Being a small company placed between two gorillas is a tricky place to be.” – Jack
• “Where’s that time machine when you need it?” – Sam
• “For you it’s a state of mind.” – Lance
• “It might seem unrelated, but it’s not.” – Debbie
• “There is often a difference between what people say and what they actually do.” – Laurie
• “I like your enthusiasm.” – Justin
• “Where do you want to be a year from now?” – Anton
• “I confused George and George.” – Ellie
• “He wasn’t too impressed.” – Adam
• “All I know about her is that she doesn’t like other smart people, and that she’s obsessed with shoes. And apparently she’s a little bit scary.” – Ellie  
• “Sounds like he’s been speaking to me.” – Lance
• “Scoop sends us a box in a box in a box.” – Bronwyn
• “I was …. Quite impressed.” – Tim
• “I sound like I’m in sales!” – Rudolph
• “Yeah but that’s your job. Your job is not to make jam.” – Chris
• “He registered a domain name for you? He must really be in love.” – Ellie
• “He says he knows you quite well.” – Pierre 

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Sure. But when you’re enjoying what you’re doing, is work actually work?

I remember back in the old days at Ask Jeeves I would work like crazy. OK, not as hard as I’m working now. But hard. I’d work 7 days a week. For fun. I even said I’d do my job for free (not that they should not pay me or anything). OK I was really underpaid. But I was young, and it was a startup. You’d think I would have learned. And I was learning.

A few years in, when I was in charge of product management for our little Ask Jeeves International subsidiary, I used to have competitions with my co-worker Chris Hanaoka (who went on to great things at Yahoo! and now Microsoft) to see who could stay up later into the night working.

He always won.

My brain shut down. It does that. I’m even better now at figuring out when it does that and going to bed. I have been very good at sticking to my bedtime since I made that decision a few weeks back. I think I still need more sleep though because I have been very cranky this last week or so. Like VERY cranky. Either that or I’m missing some micronutrient or have some hormone out of whack.

So last weekend was great and terrible at the same time. Most weekends, I train, then I work. The whole weekend. It’s the only time I get anything done.

This weekend, between the CrossFit Open and other training, and just hanging around Cape CrossFit, I spent maybe 6 hours at gym. Then I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in months, since pre-Skyrove. I kept meaning to call him, and see him, and I never got around to it. Only reason I made time now? He’s moving to Thailand for a while.

I kind of suck as a friend, lately, and I know it, and I’m not going to do anything about it.

Also, Sunday afternoon I went to hear Jeremy Loops perform at Kirstenbosch. Kirstenbosch is a gorgeous botanical garden I never go to, and it has a summer concert series I also never go to, mainly because I can’t stand crowds. They annoy me. But Jeremy is special.

And also, he’s very, VERY talented. It’s amazing, and I mean like almost heartbreakingly amazing, to see your friends’ dreams come true. Jeremy and Motheo had dreamed for years of playing at Kirstenbosch. I guess many Cape Town musicians do. Then they did. And they brought a ton of their friends along for guest performances. I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss that. Although, yes, I did kind of think about it, and actually there was some stuff I really wanted to get done on the weekend that didn’t get done as a result of the choices that I made.

It’s funny: we did also all go through this back at Jeeves. I wasn’t the only Skyrove employee working the weekend. You don’t do this out of obligation, you do this out of love. People used to criticise and say really, are you going to remember all the hours you put in working here? When you’re old, are you going to look back and remember the time you put in at work or the time you spent with your friends and family?

Actually, that is a strawman, and I hate strawmen arguments. They’re almost as bad as ad hominems. One of the things I didn’t do this weekend was review my brother’s resume. I did take 5 minutes to email him after he nagged me, and one of the things that I said was to focus on achievements. No one cares that you did this, that, that. They care that you saved X customers or upsold Y dollars or managed the team that was responsible for the following product releases. Whatever it is, it’s not the activity, it’s the achievement.

No, I don’t remember the hours I put in at Jeeves. I also don’t remember the hours we all went out to bars drinking. I remember election night. I remember the IPO party. I remember when Jeeves got hacked with an Elvis hairdo. I remember when Ask Iris got hacked. I remember when I learned WebTV’s proprietary scripting AND our ASP code in an afternoon because I had to (and no, I wasn’t a web developer). I remember when Gary deleted the colours table by accident.

I remember when I took Tony Chan into the server room on his first day, showed him how to compile a database, and as soon as I hit enter on the command line script, the power went out. I remember Ted Briscoe’s baseball bat, Jim Spencer wanting to turn the internet ‘up,’ Eric Stromberg tossing items out of his office without paying attention to who might be walking by, and Robin Keller raising his eyebrows in disbelief. I remember that party at the Metreon. Some of it. I remember that boat cruise with the sales team. Actually, I don’t really remember much of that. I remember late nights at Jupiter and Supenkuche with Tucker, and the day that the IS team all came into work with their hair dyed fluorescent colours.

I remember the time that I nearly started crying over my drink and said I hated my job when, in fact, all I hated was my boss.

I remember when we launched Ask Dudley for Dell, Ask Sam for Microsoft, Ask E*TRADE. I remember when we launched Ask Jeeves Japan, and my first trip overseas: to London. I still think a lot of what I like about South Africa is how much it resembles some parts of life in the UK.

I remember our first layoff. I remember our second layoff. I remember when they shut down AJI and I was the only one to keep my job, then when I had to quit because they wouldn’t let me transfer to Natick because Paul Gardi didn’t like DirectHit and I wanted to move to Boston. I remember when they shut down the text ads product (now known to the universe as Google Adwords) because a certain ad sales director claimed he could sell more text ads with humans.

Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.

I remember when I found out Robbie Becker had died of a drug overdose, after he’d been clean for months.

I remember my friends. I remember my enemies. I remember the people I turned up my nose at. I remember the relationships. I remember a lot of stuff, good, bad, and ugly. I remember Not Beer. Most especially that. I still have a beer tool (Netra T1 mounting rail) …. Somewhere.

My point? I actually don’t remember what I accomplished. I remember more of that from later in my career when I was actually in charge of more stuff. But I’m in love with my job now the way I haven’t been since then, and I used to think that it was maybe just being young, and naïve.

I’m still young and naïve even if I try to pretend I’m not. Well, at least I’m naïve. No, I’m pretty young, too.

Would I have enjoyed that time of my life more if I hadn’t worked as much? Who the hell knows? You can never answer that. What I do know is that I’ve always been a selfish little thing in a way, where I do what makes me happy. Right now, working makes me happy even if that makes me a shit friend. It’s not that I don’t love my friends. It’s that right now, I have guilt about stuff I don’t get done at work. I hope this isn’t always the case, but it is right now, and my company is important to me.

It’s important because I care. Yes, I want to succeed and I want it and us to succeed. But also, I want us to do as well as we can. I want us to deliver for our customers. I want to be there for my staff. I want to deliver returns to the shareholders. I don’t care if these are one-way streets. There is a right way and a wrong way to do things. If I’m not doing things well, it’s not going to be for lack of trying. It’s going to be for lack of capability, or from over plain over-committing.

Let me be clear: I’m doing this for them, yes, but fundamentally I’m doing it for me. I’m doing it for me because right now, this is fun.

Also, I’m making new friends through this job. Some of my work relationships are crossing the line into friendships, and you can always try to keep things pretty professional but you won’t always, all the time. We’re human, right? You can tell who my friends are when they are the ones where the majority of communication happens over dinner, or some flavour of chat. Some relationships are deeper than the CRM.

One of the things that I remember most about that hazy feverish night in Denver was talking to J at the tip top of the Denver Broncos stadium. He was asking me how I draw the line, specifically when it came to relationships. You have to be super careful. You do. But you also can’t live your life in fear.

Well, it could be worse. I could be famous. That would be worse.

One more thing? I’m taking Saturday off. Cranky probably means over-worked.

• “You don’t even have to move and you will die.” – Deon
• “He really is brilliant.” – Kerry
• “And he’s different. You have to stand out.” – Kerry
• “This is probably the biggest show of my entire life.” – Jeremy
• “A more complicated formula is just a more complicated guess.” – Ellie
• “Only will have taken me 7 months.” – Ellie
• “My big thing is that there’s two things.” – Rudolph
• “Not every man can drill a hole.” – Bronwyn
• “One of the good things for us is that the service is so bad.” – Adam  
• “I’ve never seen it work that well.” – Doug
• “Bane isn’t a super hero. He’s a super villain.” “She’s right.” – Ellie & Bane
• “The only thing that I don’t like about it is that you seem to be slowly moving to Joburg.” – Jeff 

Patience, grasshopper

Two steps forward, one step back. That’s just how this week felt. Had two major wins, one of which I’ve been chasing three months and the other maybe a month but the company has been chasing for … a year? Both of which should have a good short-term impact on revenues, but then of course, once the deal is signed I want it implemented the same day.

Anyone who knows me knows I can be impatient. It’s one of the things I’m really trying to work on, although heaven knows how one goes about working on something like this. You can fool some of the people some of the time. No, I have been lousy about practicing my qigong but as a form of mental discipline and gymnastics when I go to the studio I can focus and fool my instructor. Sometimes.

We’ve been busy gathering some internal data for a while now, that we’ll use to make some very important decisions going forward. Yes, I’ve been wanting this information since before I started. Am I happy that it’s almost ready? Sure. But it’s driving me completely nuts that it’s *nearly there.*

I suppose what this tells you is that I don’t like 95%. If something is worth doing, I like to finish it. I do sometimes give up on things, but not with the end in sight.

And of course, I did really properly learn my lesson at Heart about not spreading myself too thin. I figure out what my top priorities are, and I work on those. I wish I had more capacity and could get more done, but the only way to tick things off the list is to work down the list sequentially. Humans don’t multi-task well, and I’m no exception. But then when I do turn my attention to something, I kind of want everyone else to drop everything they are doing to suit my whims. Which is also not how it works.

Patience, grasshopper. Right?

Someone had this awesome Twitter post this week: being an entrepreneur is about biting off more than you can chew and then trying not to choke. I really know how that feels. I somehow let the stress get to me this week even though I have been sleeping enough. I am really not sure why.

My mother once said something about me that is very true. I was telling her that I loved learning and growing and she called bullshit. She said no: you hate learning. You like knowing. I do kind of like learning but her main point is correct: I do not like the phase of conscious incompetence. I like conscious competence, thank you very much.

I love seeing how the puzzle pieces fit together. The process of finding all the puzzle pieces can be a bit daunting. The homework of sorting them annoys me: I like to get results now, without really putting in the time to do the homework. I want the success without the prior visualisation. Sure, the right mindset will get you far. But maybe not all the way.

So without giving away the secret I recently learned about how to do well at a 2K row, I’ll tell you the problem I have doing a 2K row. Or 100 burpees for time. Anything in that 6-8 minute range where you can’t go flat out but it’s also not an endurance game.

The beginning is easy: You’re using your ATP stores and you may well have adrenaline. The end is easy, because, well, the end is in sight. It’s the middle that sucks. When it starts to hurt and you know you have a long way to go and it’s so easy to slow down …. Just a little bit. For just a little while. In all honesty, I may love Fight Gone Bad because of its mental challenge but there is nothing that kicks my ass more than a 2K row. Except, come to think of it, a 400m run. That is lactic acid hell.

Weird week. Monday I got a PR on Fran (a CrossFit benchmark workout) but didn’t even realise until later it was a PR because I was upset that I thought I should have done better. Not that I was going to go home and cry about it or anything: almost every workout I do, I analyse for improvement. Like later in the week we did 8 minutes to a 1RM power clean which was the first time I’d gone heavy since the injury, which was literally nearly a year ago. And if you think there’s some fear in my head when I go to clean heavy …. Well, you’d be right. So cool, I get to near my PR. But my form falls apart over 90%. Back to the practice arena, which is fine. Honestly, I love Olympic lifting. Of all the skills we practice, I love this one the most. I would do it daily if I could.

Saturday was the first CrossFit Games Open workout. They even have names: 13.1, in this case. Whoever said CrossFitters weren’t nerds. Well, we’re Type A personalities certainly, many of us. 13.1 was actually a combination of last year’s first two workouts: 12.1 was 7 minutes of burpees to a 6” target, and 12.2 was 12 minutes of a snatch ladder: 30 snatches each @20kgs, 34kgs, and 45kgs. 13.1 was as far as you could get in 17 minutes of 40 burpees, 30 @20kgs, 30 burpees, 30 @34kgs, 20 burpees, 30 @45kgs (it went on, but I didn’t get that far!).

So last year I got 104 burpees in 7 minutes and 5 reps into the 45kg part of the snatch ladder, in a combined 19 minutes. This year, I finished 70 burpees and the first 60 snatches in 11:02. But my Olympic lifting form goes haywire when I do it for reps, and my snatch form decided to completely disappear on me on that day, and rather than muscle the weight up and maybe hurt myself I did take it a bit easy but I still managed 13 snatches at the 45kg weight. Good enough for sixth place in Africaas I write this; you have to filter by Region and change from Individual Men to Individual Women to see the ranking for Africa females. I should finish in the top 10 for this workout once all scores are in, I'd imagine.

Of course, one more rep and I would have been in fifth. That’s how it goes. So I had some fun dissecting what did and didn’t go well in that workout. It was decent; like Fran, I’m not crying about it, but a good learning experience. I am laughing a bit that the last lift was literally a muscle snatch. So if I can muscle snatch 45kgs while exhausted imagine what I can snatch when I fix my technique. Not if, when. I’m done with ifs.

But at the end of the day what’s the most important thing? I’m pretty healthy. In the best shape of my life. And happy, at least if I’m not banging my head against a wall.

Well, on the plus side, I did have a huge ‘aha’ moment one morning. I have my best ideas in the morning when I’m getting ready for work. I can be slow on the uptake sometimes. But let’s just say I got more than a laugh out of watching Pirates of Silicon Valley ten years ago or whenever it came out. Not that I’m going to do anything of questionable ethics. Not that I’m implying anything. Or anything.

Oh, Silicon Valley. Now that I work here in tech, I do understand that appeal the place has. I feel like a very remote satellite to the centre of the world, sometimes. But there are advantages to being a remote satellite.

But there is a huge difference between having an idea and seeing it through. This is where most people fail I suppose. This is even where I fail in, say, my execution of my game plan for 13.1. I guess I wasn’t that far off, just spent more time staring at the 45kg bar than actually snatching it! Daydreaming, perhaps. Not that I would ever daydream while at Cape CrossFit. Never …

Moving on: Lance had asked me this week a random question, or maybe not so random. I said I was afraid of X, which I was getting his advice about, and he then asked what was I REALLY afraid of. So I gave an immediate answer: failure. Then I thought about it, and I realised that was actually not complete. I don’t like to stand up in front of people and announce I’m going to do something, or that I want something, and then completely fail. I, like most people, try to manage expectations.

But you know, most failures you can recover from and most people aren’t as bothered by them as you are. Plus, we know in theory that we learn more from our failures than from our successes. I know enough about what sorts of personality trait will not work for me to stay away from certain men. I have had my fingers burned by certain work situations in the past, and now I know what to look for.

Of course you can also learn from successes, and formulas, and theories. That’s what makes Babson such an excellent MBA if I do say so myself. I doubt I could be doing this job now if I didn’t have that education behind me.

I digress. So failure is a little bit scary but really there are few failures that really terrify me because there are few things you can’t recover from. Your marriage fails or you nearly run out of money or your cat gets hit by a car, you deal. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

But there are some things that are harder to bounce back from than others. Your parent dies, that’s probably hard. I wouldn’t know. Your child dies, that’s probably harder. You get injured, it sucks, maybe you even miss a season, that sucks too.

What really scares me? Permanence. Forever. You lose an arm: that’s forever. Sure you figure out how to move forward with life, but that sort of thing scares me. I may have mentioned this before but when I was a child the way that Heaven was described to me scared the living daylights out of me. A place where you’d go after you die and stay there forever. FOREVER! There was even this phrase: ‘world without end.’ I mean sure it beats the hell out of some Sisyphean existence but damn.

I was also thinking in the week about who scares or intimidates me. The Silicon Valley celeb? No, not really. The super rich? Definitely not. I guess the answer is people who seem in a different category from what I can achieve, like super-humans. And why? Because I presume they won’t give me the time of day.

People are people. We all have flaws. You may first meet someone and be amazed by how smart or knowledgeable they are, and you look up to them. But as you get to know them better, you get to see where they do and don’t know what they’re talking about.

We’re pack animals and like to know where we stand in a pecking order. This is why we engage in those oh-so-unsavoury activities of name-dropping and putting other people down to make ourselves feel better. There is a substantive difference between establishing credibility of your connection, or even venting about a particular instance of something and name-dropping and bitching. If you’re the one who hasn’t noticed that someone has changed, you’re the jerk. Pay attention.

I do tend to be a bit dismissive of people. I’ve said it before and I think it’s true. I have a very long fuse and I really like people of all sorts. Sure I tend to prefer the smart, funny ones: but you don’t need to be the sharpest tool in the shed. You just need to be useful. Pull your weight. Don’t be mean. Don’t be unethical. Don’t be really stupid. I was thinking this week of the only two people I can think of my entire career that I still actively dislike. Both of them were rude, arrogant, and dismissive. In other words, they were mean.

I can be dismissive, sure. But I’ll be nice about it. If you’re unethical the gloves come off.

But back to the being intimidated bit: no matter how cool are some of the people I come into contact with, I’m pretty cool too. And so, most likely, are you.

Lance also recently said that if you have the highest EQ (emotional quotient) in the room then you control the conversation. This is often, but not always, true. Sometimes you’re outnumbered by people just on a different wavelength, in a pack mentality. You can only control or influence a conversation when people are actually listening, and you can’t make people listen.

You can’t make people listen. You also can’t motivate people. They must motivate themselves. A sad thing about my current state of affairs is that I love teaching & coaching. But right now there is too much that needs to be done yesterday, and rather than help grow my team I often must just tell them what I want done. I do explain why, but you learn better by figuring it out yourself.

Sometimes, there’s just not time. Every second counts hey. Guessing 13.2 will be something bodyweight/gymnastics-related, so we’ll see just how tough I am then.

One thing I will say about 13.1: it was 17 minutes of beautiful, beautiful peace. When the world stops and you have literally no awareness of who or what is going on around you. Yes, I heard my cheering section. But no, I couldn’t tell you who was in it. Peace.

• “There’s a lot going on with this bicep here.” – Byron
• “Can you pass me that sissy thing?” – trainer at Virgin Active (he was referring to some sort of a pad for the bar … lest people’s necks get hurt by a back squat)
• “I don’t even want to look at this any more.” – Stefan
• “Judging by the laughs, nothing too serious.” – Adam
• “I have sent our eyes and ears an email.” – Nadia
• “It may be new. But it’s certainly not revolutionary.” – Ellie
• “I’m not known for good timing.” – Doug
• “Who is this guy?” “This is my Technical Manager.” – Doug & Ellie
• “I think a lot of people treat their ventures as children.” – Steve
• “There’s no other boom bar but this boom bar.” – Bronywn
• “The two are not mutually exclusive.” – Dave
• “No, he was just talking sh*t. As he does.” – Ellie
• “You can be paranoid but, Occam’s Razor, right? But then again in his case he has reason to be paranoid.” – Ellie
• “F*ck these burpees.” “I know, I hate burpees.” “I love burpees. But f*ck these burpees.” – Ellie & Conrad (our prescient coach was having us do 3 sets of 20 burpees to a six inch target for time after 18 minutes of other work … I wasn’t loving it)
• “Oh, there’s more than that.” – Stefan
• “I don’t know why I do this. I don’t like doing this!” – JP
• “At least you know that after 17 minutes of hell, you can still muscle snatch that weight.” – Kerry
• “It’s amazing what it’s doing for the world.” – Grant
• “You certainly don’t look like you’re about to hit the bottle.” – Rob