How Bad Do You Want To Win?

So for about the last 9 or so months I've been grinding at a job that is very demanding: selling hair straighteners at a kiosk.

Doesn't sound like the most glamorous position, but it did have its perks.

For one, I got paid to talk to girls all day and play with their hair.

Two, the money was pretty good.

And three... well, I guess there is no three.

Actually we could say that three is that I'm pretty damn good at my job. Talk about a useless talent..

If only I had focused on computer programming, or making videos, or literally anything else.

But no. I'm an expert hair straightener salesperson.

I would be lying if I said that it didn't come in handy. Actually, it's been a pretty sweet skill to have. It's allowed me to travel all over the world. Anywhere that there is a mall with a hair straightener kiosk, I can go work.

I don't need to be trained. I can negotiate pretty damn good terms because of my experience (7+ years). Some companies will even reimburse me for a flight, pay a portion of my rent...

In fact, that's how I arrived in Australia. Both this time around and the last time back in 2012.

I've had relationships, fallen in love, sold literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of products and gotten to see the world - all because of this useless skill.

So if things are so amazing, then why am I giving it up?

Well... it's not all roses and butterflies. After all, I am required to literally stand at the kiosk and eat a stable diet of rejection for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

With any sales job, most people are going to tell you no.

1. NO they don't have time to talk to you.
2. NO they don't want to listen to your pitch.
3. NO they don't want to buy your product.
4. NO they don't ever want to see you again.

But that's why salespeople make the big bucks. Not everyone is prepared (read: has a good enough reason) to grind for 50 hours a week in a job that is emotionally taxing like sales.

Over the course of a given day, you might only make 4-5 sales. Sometimes less, sometimes more.

That said, in order to GET to those sales, hundreds of people told you no. And they told you no at every step of the way. You just have to ask yourself: do you care?

I remember the first time I took a job like this. There was a salesperson there who was an absolute monster. This guy would sell thousands of dollars per day and made it look easy.

I asked him what his secret was.

He told me, "You have to stop seeing the customers as people, and start seeing them as numbers. How much can you get out of them before they leave?"

I thought that was cold hearted when I heard it, but during these past 9 months it finally clicked in my mind.

Why? Because I desperately needed the money. I had just spent an agonizing 2 years in Los Angeles (my hometown) being a broke loser. I was driving for Uber making $2000/month and barely scraping by. I was eating hardboiled eggs and oatmeal 3x per day.

Australia was my one opportunity. And this job was how I was going to get my life back on track.

So you better believe I fought for every single dollar. Every time I was with a customer I did everything that I could to get them to say yes. Of course I still tried to be ethical, but at the end of the day it was an adversarial relationship.

Either I would get what I wanted or I wouldn't.

Thanks to my hard work, I now have enough money where I can devote the next six months of my life to earning an income from the internet. I have multiple dropshipping websites, 50k+ Instagram pages and numerous contacts with people who are going to mentor me (at a cost, of course).

Would I have been able to do it without busting my ass for these past 9 months? Maybe. But now it's really happening.

Selling hair straighteners will always have a special place in my heart. That is probably the most ridiculous thing you've read all day, but it's the truth.

The fact is though that I am 34 years old now. I'm not a spring chicken anymore. Now I'm an old chicken who goes to sleep at 10 PM and wakes up every day at 6, even when I try to sleep in.

Someday I'll go back and sell more straighteners, but I'll do it on my terms, not because I am stuck with no options. I'll do it for a month in an exotic location, only because I want to travel there, not because I'm broke.

Then again, maybe by then I'll have such a monstrous level of success that I won't need to. The best part about that job was the fact that I was paid to talk to girls all day. When I'm not doing that job, I rarely talk to girls.

I guess the trick is to structure my life so that I always have hot girls around that I can talk to. Bonus points if they give me money and I can play with their hair.

Tomorrow I'm finally leaving this place. This dingy hostel that's been my home for 9 months with its squeaky beds and rotating cast of characters.

Someday in the future, someone will be talking/writing about me and they'll say, "Go on Steemit and look at some of his older posts. You'll see he didn't come from money. He worked for what he had. Like him or not, he's a self-made man."

That's the plan, at least.

Images taken from pexels.com