Check out the all of the episodes of The Sales Life Podcast
As told in the Team Never Quit Podcast, Capt. Charlie Plumb- a Vietnam POW for over 2100 days, spent many days hung on a meat hook and in total darkness-no radio, no TV, and no newspapers to stay in touch with what was happening in the outside world. It was so dark in fact that he couldn’t even distinguish colors. He goes on to describe that he and the other prisoners had nothing to do-all they could do was sit in solitary…but even in the horrible conditions he found himself in, he found that the solitary moments were some of his best moments because it spawned his creativity. It was in the solitary confinements that caused him to have to feed off of all of the life he’d lived thus far. And he wasn’t the only one…many of the POW’s did the same thing-one POW checked over his sailboat before mentally sailing the oceans while others played rounds of golf or recited long verses of poetry.
The solitude made them more creative…
Shrouded in darkness, cutoff from the outside world and likely assumed dead, his captors repeatedly beat him within inches of his life, but they didn’t want to kill him, they wanted to break him-they wanted to crush his spirit so that he’d kill himself. Plumb would bend often but he refused to break. His spirit never broke because instead of looking at everything that was happening to him- the thoughts of Why Me, the pricks of unfairness, the gouges of not knowing how much more he could take, he creatively turned into the deep recesses of his mind and brought into focus a life he’d lived thus far. With vivid creativity, his cell became mentally colored with cherished laughs, loves, and learned moments.
Plumb chose creativity over criticism…
Sales is art….
Life too is art…
Musicians and painters know this…every experience is a lyric; every moment is a canvas…
I’m learning not to be afraid-not to run from the solitude. We’re so busy running from here to there-so porous to the thousands of messages being hurled at us everyday…we’re so overwhelmed with agendas and obligations, that we’ve forgotten how to creatively make good art. We’ve put down our brush and instead picked up a gavel-we’re stuck-critically reminiscing the past and worried about a future that hasn’t yet arrived.
Recently, a salesperson shared with me that he’d started reading; the more he shared with me, the more excited he became. Today, as he stands in solitary waiting for the next customer, instead of listening to the negative chatter banging around in his head, he’s now creatively folding his new knowledge into previous experiences that will in turn make him better, more confident and capable with future customers.
Today, don’t run from the solitary moments, instead embrace them. Find the creativity in the life you’ve lived so that you can better enjoy your life that is yet to come.
I’ll see you on the Blacktop.
The Sales Life with Marsh Buice 