What Practice Really Looks Like at Work And In Sales

In this episode of The Fuck It Shift, Adam Ross breaks down the difference between simply showing up for work and deliberately developing the skills required to move your career forward.

Adam talks about why putting in eight hours a day doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing meaningful work. You can arrive on time, complete your routine and still wonder why your income, opportunities and life haven’t changed.

He also explains what practice looks like outside of sports. In sales, that means listening back to your calls, studying what moved the conversation forward, tracking your performance and recognizing your weaknesses before your manager has to point them out.

This episode is about becoming an active participant in your own growth instead of waiting for someone else to develop you.

Adam uses Steph Curry and Kobe Bryant as examples of what happens when preparation goes far beyond the minimum. The people trusted in the biggest moments are usually the ones who practised situations nobody else thought were worth preparing for.

He also explores why success leaves clues. Instead of assuming the top performer received special treatment or possesses something you don’t, you can study their habits, decisions and skills to understand what separates their results from yours.

Because getting to the next level isn’t only about working longer.

It’s about understanding what the next level requires—and practising until you’re ready for it.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Fuck It Chift Podcast. I'm Adam Ross, and I'm joined by producer Jay as always, who starts a show with a question.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Adam, I was talking to somebody recently and they're in their mid-20s, and they were saying to me, you know, I've been working so many years now, and I look at other people and they have XYZ. I don't have that yet. What am I doing wrong?

SPEAKER_01 0:23

You are, first of all, stop fucking comparing yourself to what you think someone in their 20s is supposed to have or have not. Get that phone out of your hand and stop comparing yourself to somebody you don't know, you don't know the circumstances, and you have no idea what seed capital or what their idea of work even is. And while we're on the idea of work, I brought us here. I can say this factually. I have a team full of 20 to 30 something who ask these questions all the time because they look at me and think I got it all figured out. I don't. This is my first time playing the game, too. I'm figuring it out as I go along. But I know what work, what it means to work. Here's the thing you show up at a job nine to five. That's your schedule, whatever it is. You show up, you put the time in, and you say to yourself, I don't get it. I don't have the car yet. I don't have, I don't have the house yet, I don't have the girlfriend yet, I don't have the boyfriend yet. What am I doing wrong? I'm here every day. And I say to you, and I say this to my team often when we have these conversations, is you're not fucking working. You think you're working. Putting the time in and showing up and pushing the button every day is not work. When I say work, I'm talking about do you practice? Do you buy into what the company's doing? Do you know what you do? Do you know what you do? Do you know the problems you solve? Are you focused on helping people? Or are you here just putting the time in? Are you at your job just putting the time in? Are you spending so much time reading comments, doom scrolling, looking at somebody you think's successful, thinking about buying their online program, I'll save you the money. You're not gonna fucking do their program either. Because if you don't put the time in and you don't understand, sorry, if you just put the time in and you don't do the work required, you're not gonna fucking shift anything. You're gonna find another thing to fail at and to be unhappy about because you haven't taken a step back and asked yourself in this new role, in this new job, on this new idea, whatever it is you're chasing, because you're changing your life right now, what does it mean to actually be successful? And what do I need to do? If someone said to me, not why isn't all this shit happening for me and why don't I have the Ferrari and the really hot girlfriend or the really good-looking boyfriend and live in a mansion and have a family? Instead, they came to me and said, What's required to get to this level? Because that's where I want to be. And I would help them work backwards and break it down all the way down to how many phone calls they need to make and how many people they need to speak to. How do I know that? Because that's what I did to get here. But I knew that showing up and doing nine to five and going home every day wasn't going to build shit. I had to make my nine to five the most productive, the most impactful, and the most opportunity for growth every single day. And I think it had a lot to do with losing everything and building from ground zero and knowing that work is required to be successful. I use this analogy often with my team, and I'm a sports guy. So I will I will say, who right now do you think at the last second of the game you want the ball in their hands for a three-point shot when you've got to make it? And we can they give some players, and eventually it comes down to what I say, well, I think Steph Curry would be the guy that I would want to shoot. The guy shoots from the stands for fun. So we agree, Steph Curry's the guy that we want. He's put the work in. He practices shooting from the sidelines. On the day he puts the work in, his opening session is a three-pointer from the seats. It's gotta be worth at least 12 points. He practices those shots. Kobe was famous for the workload that he put in, the practice. He played games in his mind before the game. He was sweaty and tired before the game. It's that level of investing in yourself that gets you to the next level you're chasing, not the clock.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Because you're in sales, what does practice look like for somebody in sales? And also compare that to what does practice look like for somebody that's just a nine to five job?

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Okay, great question. Because I get this asked all the time. How can I possibly practice when every call is a different person? How about we start with do you ever take the time after your call to listen to it back, to score it, to read the transcript, to make notes if your company doesn't record phone calls or doesn't have transcripts, to make notes about what impacted you during that call and what you said that moved the needle that got the person interested or helped move the conversation along? You don't. You wait for your manager to come to you with a report to tell you the things you're not doing. So, what does practice look like? First of all, get interested in being interested in growing yourself. You should be scoring your own performance. I wouldn't wait for my manager to tell me that I'm not actioning the script or hitting the points or getting the right conversion from lead to application. I would know those metrics myself because that's how I built the company. I knew I only had X amount of people to talk to. I needed X amount of deals, and I needed to figure out how to get those people to be interested in doing business with me by listening, by caring, by doing more than just giving them the product, figuring out what the problem was that I needed to solve. And you do that by scoring yourself. So first, score yourself. Know what type of player you are, know where your skills are, and then ask for help on how to grow them. I'll give that person hours of my time versus the person who says, I don't have the Ferrari right now. What am I doing wrong? So when you're in sales, it is about scoring yourself and pressure and putting pressure on yourself to get better and to grow your skill set. Sales is a lot like having a backpack full of tools that during the conversation at any time you should be able to pull them out. Sales is one of the greatest things you can be in when you want to rebuild your life because the income commission's unlimited and it you get rewarded for the effort and the skill sets that you develop. There's very few jobs like that. If it's a nine to five everyday job and it comes with performance metrics, those are the ones that you make, you set out and you make sure that you hit those so that you have an ability to level up your income. If they don't have that within your company, you're in the wrong company, you're probably only making X amount of dollars and staring down the barrel of making that for the entire time you're there. It's going to be hard to rebuild and level your life up if that's what you're stuck at.

SPEAKER_00 8:25

You talk about giving more time to the individual who will ask, what are the steps I have to take to get to that level? Would you say life and success is all about just asking the right questions?

SPEAKER_01 8:36

How many times, right, do we say to each other, success leaves clues. If someone else is doing something in your field that's unbelievable, that you admire, and they're on your team, they're on inside your company, that's a person you should study. Chances are they've learned their success from somebody prior from them as well, or around others. Success leaves so many clues right in front of us, but you know what we do instead? We look at that person and we make judgment calls. They get special treatment. There's something different about them. I'll never be like them. They do this better than me. I hear that all the time when we do company reviews. Yo, where do I rank on the oh yeah? Well, those other people are just better than me. Bullshit. You're allowing that story to be truth. They're no different than you. They probably just understand what it means, the difference between nine to five and work.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

If we could wrap this podcast with this somebody's listening, whether they're in sales nine to five, trying to rebuild their life, if you could give them one question to ask either their boss, a leader, a mentor, somebody, what question should they ask first to those individuals? Great question, Jay.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

I want you to go to your sales manager and your next sales meeting, your next review, and I want you to be the conversation initiator and say, I've spent the last three months scoring my calls and looking at the things that I say that work versus the things that I say that don't work. And I'm trying to remove the ones that are failures out of my everyday phone calls. So I'm really working on that. So if you have any feedback on that, that would be great. But while I'm doing that, I would love to know what skills or what the next steps would look like for me to make insert income that you want to make. I get that so rarely. But that's the person who says to me, I want to be a fucking rock star. I'm learning how to play the guitar. But what other courses or what other steps can I take that once I master the guitar, scoring my calls, I'll get to be live on stage and make that money. That's a person you can work with. Leaders, those are people. That's the if you're a leader in an organization, that's the culture you should. Like, I'm about to do six-month reviews. They're my favorite. Not to hammer you about numbers. You're at halftime. Now we can decide what we need to do, what worked, what didn't work, and we can decide on the changes we can make, the adjustments at halftime we can make to finish the year strong and make them things you can do, not that are industry or market dependent. You can't do anything about the Bank of Canada rate. You can't do anything about anything to do with the mortgage, nothing. But you can change your work ethic, you can show up on time, you can change the way you're scoring yourself and your behavior, you can focus on what you're doing when you're actually at work. When you do that, you open the door to future growth, higher income, and a whole new shift. Until next time, Jay.