Desperation is the Origin of Success

While you feel immune to going out of business, you really aren’t. One lawsuit, one data breach, a few unhappy clients trash you to their social circles, one rogue employee leaves a takes a bunch of clients with him, and you’re in a bad place with bills to pay and less income than you planned.

I don’t care who you are; any of us could be in this situation as entrepreneurs.

Complacency is the first step towards surrender

The opposite of desperation is complacency.

Here are a few examples of things that complacent advisors say:

• I’ve been in business for 20 years and the way I’ve done things has worked. I’m fine without doing anything more. I don’t have to do this.

• If somebody doesn’t want to do business with me, then we’re not compatible. I only want the clients who click with me.

• I’d love to market my business better, but the cost/benefit doesn’t make sense. Unless it’s guaranteed that I’ll get new clients within a month, it’s not worth my time (and instead you go golfing spending just as much time and money).

• I leave at 4:30 every day. Can we do this call next week?

• I can’t do that (can’t means, “I won’t,” by the way). It’s beneath me.

Sorry to rain on your ego parade, but if GM, Bear Stearns and Chrysler can go down, so can you.

Polaroid had it made in the shade too and when their engineer came to them with the idea for the digital camera years before the rest of the world thought it up, they shot the idea down. They were doing fine without it! Now are they?

Complacency feels great but it will rob you of any control over your future. You are letting your guard down. That’s a weakness.

Why desperation is your best friend

When I look back at great accomplishments in my life, every single one resulted from a great sense of desperation I felt:

• When I was studying for the CFA exam one night, the power went off and I continued to study by candlelight. Another time, the heat went off and I studied until my hands went numb. Against all odds, I passed CFA level one on the first attempt despite my background as an English major.

• I once sat at my computer and sent out LinkedIn messages to recruit for a webinar I was having. I typed until my feet hurt and I was getting shooting pains in my back. After a few hours of this I had enough people to run the webinar.

• After I had my first baby, I was so scared of something happening to her that I used to stay up at night and watch her sleep. After a few days I literally collapsed from exhaustion. Then I woke up and did it all over again.

• After I left my job as an advisor, I had two kids in two years and zero income coming in the door. I couldn’t sleep at night; I was so worried I wanted to barf. I started making YouTube videos and writing blogs all day. I did this until people started noticing. Within a few months I could pay my bills. Today I have a thriving business, which has impacted thousands of lives across the world.

In all these cases it got the point of physical pain. But that physical pain wasn’t as bad as the feeling of desperation that I was trying to get rid of.

In the end I got what I wanted, didn’t I?

These are the moments where you take incredible action without even thinking. It pushes us past the point of reasoning, which is often when we have the potential to achieve great things.

Don’t blame desperation

Desperation is underrated and misunderstood.

Let me clarify. For an advisor to be perceived as desperate in the sales process is not a turn off; in fact, desperation combined with value goes by other names such as commitment and ambition. Desperation combined with lack of perceived value is the real issue because then people doubt you.

Now, certain groups within the advisor industry have given desperation a bad name. “Oh those dishonest brokers, they sold me an annuity I didn’t need.” True, working on all-commission with a monthly quota makes you desperate, and along with that comes the temptation to behave unethically.

Desperation is a feeling; conning someone is a behavior. Behavior is a decision.

If you go down the wrong path, it’s due to decisions made out of a lack of creativity or a failure of your ethical system. Or maybe you’re at the wrong company. But don’t blame desperation.

Get so desperate you barf

Get rid of any shard of complacency in your mind and get good and desperate – so desperate that it leads you to do things that you feel physically in your body.

Now that I’ve established that desperation is 100% the way to go, here are a few guidelines for acting out of desperation so strong it makes you want to barf:

• Be okay with being desperate. Tell yourself you are desperate as a mantra. Say it without shame: “I’m desperate to grow my business. I have no choice but to grow my business and I have to do it today.”

• Be careful who you tell that you feel desperate. Everybody is going to tell you to stop feeling this way and that is why those people themselves never get what they want.

• Don’t let desperation push your self-awareness out the door. Make sure desperation is causing you to come off as sincere, efficient, humble, committed, and driven rather than needy, pushy, or greedy.

• Desperation is counterproductive when it causes you to put your own interests before others. If you need to enlist the support of someone else, such as a lawyer or business advisor, to make sure you don’t do this, it’s a necessary expense.

• Be desperate for time. I’m so desperate for my time that I’m jotting down blog ideas on the subway on the back of my kids’ school nurse forms. I’m making prospect calls dialing with one hand while pushing the carriage with the other.

• • Be desperate for certain other people. When we’re successful at something, it makes us believe we know it all and there’s nobody who can tell us anything. Get desperate enough for results and you’ll put your ego aside and see that there is somebody else who knows something you don’t, somebody else who is better at something than you are, and that you need that person.

Sara’s upshot

Yeah I know, desperation doesn’t feel good.

But being broke feels worse.

It is undeniable that as an advisor you are an entrepreneur. Period. I don’t care who you are. And as an entrepreneur, every single day when you wake up in the morning, you cannot deny that you are playing a game. You can always be beaten. There’s always somebody smarter, and that person can put you out of business in a heartbeat.

Be desperate. It’s the only way to protect yourself.

By the way, if you’re desperate enough that you want to learn to slay on LinkedIn, learn the way to do that here.

Sara Grillo, CFA, is a top financial writer with a focus on marketing and branding for investment management, financial planning, and RIA firms. Prior to launching her own firm, she was a financial advisor and worked at Lehman Brothers. Sara graduated from Harvard with a degree in English literature and has an MBA from NYU Stern in quantitative finance.

Read more articles by Sara Grillo