Laziness is Learned

Before COVID-19 brought all our lives to a screeching halt, if you asked me whether I considered myself to be a lazy person, my answer would have been a resounding “No!”?

I was a full-time, straight A college student heavily involved on campus and with a full social life. I was constantly on the go and was always doing something.

Enter, an unexpected global pandemic. In the blink of an eye, all the things that kept me busy disappeared. For the first time in any of our lives, we were literally forced to slow down.

After months in lockdown, that slower pace of life became all of our norms. As the world has slowly begun to return to the pre-COVID normal, I’ve struggled to adjust back to the go-go-go.

Starting my first ever sales job was a rude awakening to the fact that I had become comfortable with complacency. I had always been the person who asked “What else can I do?” or “How can I be better?” But, during the months of lockdown, those weren’t questions I asked. We were all so focused on survival during those months that I got out of the habit of trying to constantly improve myself or my work.

This is an easy trap to fall into in the world of sales. Say you hit your KPIs 17 days into the month. It’s easy and tempting to take our foot off the gas and coast for the remaining 13 days.?

There’s something that my boss, Bryan, says to our sales team anytime one of us crushes a goal. He says “Now’s the time to pile on and take risks.”

The idea of piling on really resonated me with this month. My outbound activity has been off the charts this month. I hit my goal of 300 outbound sales activities just two weeks into the month. It would have been easy for me to back off my outbound activity the remaining two weeks, since on paper I’d already done my job. But, in the back of my mind I heard Bryan telling me that this was the time to pile on. So, I put my head down and kept grinding on my outbound. I’m now on track to end this month at over 500 outbound activities.?

The point of all this is to say that the last year turned all of us around and even changed fundamental aspects of who we are. Before starting this job, I truly believed that COVID had turned me from an ambitious and hardworking person into someone who was lazy. I’ve come to realize that laziness is something 100% within your control. I’m working every single day to unlearn the lazy tendencies I developed during lockdown, and the best way to do that is to pile on!