You probably don't know this but I listen to a lot of podcasts. I listen on podcasts on just about every topic. There's a podcast about Halloween (the Michael Myers horror movies) that I'm listening to. Before the podcast started I could say I'd seen the first couple of movies (apparently there are like 8, who knew?) but for some reason I've listened to over 5 hours of content about this series of movies. Anyway, this morning I was listening to the How I Built This podcast. This is a podcast where the host interviews the founders of successful companies and talks to them about what made them and their companies successful. This week it was the founder Tempur-Pedic, Bobby Trussell. Yes the mattress company. The company is worth a lot of money and Trussell is the man who brought those comfy foam mattresses to America.
The thing that stood out about this episode is that in most instances Trussell probably wouldn't have made it on to the show. See Trussell failed a lot at a couple of different things. To the point where he was up to a million dollars in debt. The thing that makes Trussell different from most people is that he kept showing up to work.
When Trussell got the deal to distribute Tempur-Pedic in the US, the contract stated that he had to sell 10,000 mattresses in the first year in order to maintain exclusivity. He sold 70. Most of us would have given up after missing the mark by so much. Trussell kept going and as recently as 2013 his annual income was about 75 million dollars (based on a quick Google search).
This is still a blog about health and fitness. So I'm telling you this because Bobby Trussell practiced the one thing that you need to in order to be successful in your health/fitness journey. Consistency.
I'm going to assume it was never Trussell's intent to be a million dollars in debt. However he kept at it. Because he kept at it he came across memory foam mattresses. Then he believed in those mattresses so much that after missing his sales goal by 9,930 mattresses he kept going back to work.
So the next time you step on the scale and the numbers don't go the way you want, think about Trussell's million dollar debt. You'll never get to where you want to go unless you keep doing the work to get there.
