Growth Mindset and The Best Version of You
When I moved to San Francisco from Atlanta ~ 5 years ago, I sold everything and only had 2 months of savings in the bank in case things didn’t work out. Moved to an Airbnb for the first 2 months. Had no friends in a brand-new city across the country. It reminded me of moving by myself from Costa Rica to the United States 15 years ago. It was scary because I was starting a new life from zero.
I started from the bottom in tech sales; I was a couple of years older than my coworkers. Many of them were more talented, went to better universities, and had more executive presence than I did. It was intimidating.
San Francisco is highly competitive, so my only option was to have a growth mindset, work as hard as I could, and learn from the best. For the first couple of years, I worked harder than smarter. I would try to observe what the best did and try to mirror them. Many times I would just crash against a wall, but I kept trying.
After lots of hard work and perseverance, I also became competitive and started crushing my numbers, mentoring others, and working on incredible projects with amazing customers. One of my biggest career highlights was during my time at Tempo Automation, where I collaborated with engineering teams to build satellites, rockets, self-driving cars that you see around San Francisco, and medical devices that have literally saved lives since 2020.
Then I had a great run at Twilio helping build amazing customer experiences with cloud communications APIs. I recently joined Mindee and I’m learning about Computer Vision technology to process documents faster than ever and bring digital transformation to Latin America! The sweat and sacrifice of the past 15 years have been so worth it.
Building a career in tech sales is not just about the money, but about solving problems to help organizations deliver great products to their customers. The bigger the business impact that you solve, the bigger the reward. Success in sales is a combination of being great at asking questions, solving problems, and collaborating with others.
Something important to mention is that in order to continue growing, the hunger for learning and becoming better must never stop. There is always someone better than you and that’s a good motivator to level up. Don’t be insecure about it. Become friends with people better than you and level up.
You are always a few steps behind and a few steps ahead of others. You either level up, stay stagnant, or level down. It’s your choice based on your personal goals and what makes you happy.
My message here is that it’s okay if right now you feel like you are not good enough at something or you are afraid to jump into something greater. As long as you have a growth mindset, grit, and the belief that you have it in you, with enough hard work, tenacity, and surrounding yourself with the best people in your field, eventually, you will get there.
You may run the marathon at a slower pace than your peers, but one day you will be able to say that you finished a marathon. No one will care in what position you finished, because the majority of people don’t run marathons, but they will respect that you finished yours.
Keep running. Stay the course. Keep your eye on the prize.