Today is thirty years since I have watched television!
In 1996 I sat down and did an exercise in who I wanted to be in life. I already had two full time jobs and worked out I would need an extra six hours a day to achieve what I actually wanted. It hung over me for months. I could not see where the time was coming from.
Then I came home one night exhausted and there were infomercials on every channel.
I unplugged the TV, carried it out of my flat in Kings Cross, and threw it on the street. The next morning on my way to work I saw the dodgy guys from across the road plugging it in their car rental garage. One of them screamed ‘it still works’ right as I walked by. So there was no getting that back.
The first few days were genuinely hard. I had no money to buy a new one and it forced me into boredom. After a few days I walked into a bookshop and bought some Shakespeare. Read it that night. Went back the next day and bought another classic. That was thirty years ago and I have not stopped since.
My imagination woke back up.
The Lesson Is Not What You Think
I am not telling you to work harder. I am not telling you to be busier. By no means is this telling you to do more work.
I had a sales meeting this week with a young BD who was super excited and kicked off by explaining how busy he was and asking how hard I had been working lately.
I said I have not done anything all day. ‘I consider not having to work hard a key metric of success.’
He looked at me like I had cancelled Christmas.
The expression “I gave it my all” is for people who do not achieve. Sure you gave it everything you had. But there are no participation awards in sales. No second place. If someone else does more they will probably win. That is simple and uncomfortable and true.
But doing more does not mean being busy. It means being high performance when it counts. And you cannot run high performance all day without a way to decompress. An interesting fact about salespeople is the long term successful ones skew heavily towards introversion. Because the extroverts tend to burn out in five years.
Four Hours
For me that is four hours outside of work. One each of meditation, reading, painting, and exercise. Not because I am trying to be well-rounded. Because that is how I process the day so I can turn up repeatedly to the sales grindstone and be high performance the next morning.
Every conversation I had. Every angle I did not see clearly in the moment. Every follow-up I need to make. Every nugget of gold buried in an exchange that felt ordinary at the time. That processing does not happen at the desk. It happens in the four hours after.
How often do you suddenly think I should have said that, or you wake up at two in the morning with the answer to a problem you could not crack all day? That is not distraction. That is your brain doing the work it cannot do while you are busy performing.
I have always said I have two modes. On and off. When I am on I am a million miles an hour. When I am off I am equally off. Both are work. There is a great TED talk on the performance zone versus the learning zone that explains the neuroscience behind this better than I can. The short version is that you cannot be in both simultaneously. Growth happens in the learning zone, which only becomes available when you step out of the performance zone completely.
Any body builder will tell you that the muscle only grows in the rest phase. Shock horror, your brain is exactly the same.
This is one of the reasons working from home does not work for me. I need to be completely on at work and completely off at home. The blurring of those two states is where performance goes to die.
How High You Soar
I was speaking to a law student on the bus this week. She asked how do I become successful.
I said how high you soar at work is equally how low you need to decompress at home.
The TV on the street in Kings Cross in 1996 bought me six hours a day. Thirty years of those six hours is something like seven extra years I bought myself. I worked sixteen hours a day for twenty straight years with one hour of personal time every eight weeks. Longer, harder, faster, smarter, and better than anyone around me.
But forget your vanity metrics, especially in sales. It is not the extra calls. It is not the longer hours. The quality of human that turns up to work is wholly determined by what you do when the work stops.
At Outsold we encourage hammock time. Colouring in books. Daily team walks. Not because we are soft. Because we understand that the processing, the insight, the sharpness that closes deals, does not come from the desk. It comes from the silence after.
Metaphorically throw the TV on the street. Or the mobile phone. Or the PS5. See what you find in the silence.
Jamie May is the Managing Director of Outsold, an Australian founder-led sales agency specialising in outsourced sales teams, fractional sales management, and B2B lead generation across Sydney, Melbourne, and nationally.
