Born to Do
On harrasing your superpowers and the responsibility to do good.
My grandfather instilled this belief in me from a very young age;
God has entrusted you with gifts, abilities and talents unique to you, it is your responsibility to use them for the greater good.
What are your gifts? How are you going to use them?
More than God, grandpa (in my native “Deda”) continuously held me accountable. I love him for it, I just found the quest to “uncover” these gifts extremely frustrating.
It was never really clear as to what they might be in the academic sense. There wasn’t a single subject I could account as being good at in school. In fact, most I was pretty terrible at.
Due to the scads of drawings I filled notebooks with, out of sheer boredom at class, my family thought I was fit for art school.
Before entering the colourful graffiti filled high school building, as a symbol of hope I made my grandfather a clay angel.
Eight persistent years later after my “D-” graduation from Central Saint Martin’s London Art University I quoted;
— — — — — — — — — —- Asmus Jacob Cartens — — — — — — — — — — —
“I wish to inform your excellencies that I do not belong to the Berliner Akademie, but to humanity […] I can only develop myself here, among the best artworks in the world, and I will go on to justify myself to the world to the best of my powers […] My abilities were entrusted to me by God; I must be a conscientious steward of them, so that when the day comes and I have to give an account, I am not forced to say: Lord, I took the talent you gave me and buried it in Berlin.”
Not to mention, they were happy to hold the doors open for me as I stepped out, and my grandfather keeps sending me sad emails about the artwork he’s never received after that angel. I’ve tarnished my talents and will never be the D.Arts he envisioned.
But what if unlike my entire family, my talents didn’t come with the Prof. Dr. D.Sc. PhD and other fancy titles.
What if they are not as tangible or admirable as one may like. After all talents are a given. We don’t get to pick, we can only uncover, then choose to act on them or deny them.
I’ve probably spent the last three years walking on the deny plank.
There was one thing I was naturally exceptionally good at from a very young age.
It starts with a kindergarten tale of me discovering a puddle full of tadpoles on my way home from day care. I collected as much as I could each day and started a frog farm on our balcony. As soon as the little tads grew into little frogs I would take them with me in the morning and sell them to other little kids at kindergarten. I even had special deals where you could get three frogs for the price of two. The joyful collection of coins and other bits funded an endless amount of ice cream and candy from the shop near by, which kept me from going to bed on-time every night and made my parents and siblings pretty ratty.
My passion for working any resources I had into a transactional exchange, didn’t stop there. At primary school I upgraded to hamsters and at one point had a total of 50 hamsters living in our home as I struggled to part with them and wouldn’t sell them to boys. One summer our housekeeper ended the business as she developed a habit of keeping the doors open for too long at feeding, resulting in 37 hamsters running loose by the time we got back from holiday. Shortly after my parents shut us down.
(Just recently my mother discovered a hamster fossil of the one I never caught when she cleared out the old house)
At sixteen I had my own dance studio and by the power of Facebook spamming, managed to get over a 1000 girls through our doors. A summer job I took involving selling boat excursion tickets on the beach funded half of my University tuition for each of the 4 years I’ve wasted there.
It was clear, this is what I was born to do …
But how can I change the world by selling frogs or boat excursion tickets? And besides, sales people are some of the worse types of people I’ve ever met. They are in it for themselves, opportunistic, greedy, lying, sleazy, butt licking bastards that will screw you over for a tenner. The moment I hear a sales person on the phone I hang up or automatically press delete if it’s in my inbox.
Saleswomen is the last title I would want to my name. Just typing the word into Google and clicking on image search makes me cringe.
Why would anybody ever give me this gift?
My childhood businesses might have been sales driven, but each of them had a meaningful “Why” behind them, that supported my values and belief system.
The tadpole puddle I found was drying, they were all squeezed together and drying up on the sides before they got to grow into frogs. I wanted to save them. The hamster business was a sustainable business where funds were solely used to supply more hamster food and homes (big hamster castles I planted in my mother’s living room). The dance studio was created to empower women. Our mission statement read:
We are a “women only” dance studio. Our mission is to take dance as a skill trained only by professionals and individuals looking to become dancers, and introduce it as an every day ritual to women of all shapes and sizes, natural women. Dance can be used as a strong tool to increase confidence and prepare us for our every day life challenges. Lady dance has been created by women, for women in complete understanding of their needs and desires.
The current little tech startup I’m part of was designed to make vacation rentals easy for owners, so that they can have more time and bigger pockets for their family. The flexibility that comes with tech also enables us to hire remotely and we focus on giving opportunities to mom’s working from home (from entry level account manager roles to top managerial roles).
In our first year we made the mistake of overselling, which resulted in 25% of our clients being unhappy. My heart sank, it physically hurt as I cried in front of my co-founders over disappointing the people we made this business for.
That year I took the developer route as I tried to master yet another academic skill and run away from my sales superpower. The anger I felt towards one of my co-founder that actually closed the sales and made the promises became so unbearable, that at one point I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him.
We almost lost the love and gave up…
But when you are part of creating something, you get to participate in making the rules. You get to make your own rules. Just because something is an industry standard doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do. If others are locking people into long contracts, doesn’t mean you need to. If others are hiding fees, charging on top and taking slices wherever they can, doesn’t mean you should.
If a product is not right for a certain person or the person is not right for your company, you don’t need to sell to him. If a client is unhappy, why not make it easy for him or her to leave?
There’s good sales people and there’s bad sales people. It’s a choice.
The success of an entrepreneur is largely determined by his ability to sell. To sell ideas. To sell himself to his partners and employees. To sell his team to his investors. To sell his product to his customers.
Moving people to do things, buy into ideas, products and other people is my superpower.
Gifts are a given, what you do with them is a choice.
