You wake up to complete blackness and find your hands bound in front of your chest. By wiggling side to side and pushing your arms forward you find you are encased in a wooden coffin. What do you do? Give up? Panic and waste precious oxygen? Clearly you don’t have the BUSINESS MINDSET.
Just because you’re buried alive doesn’t mean you can get complacent. When a tortuous, claustrophobic death rears its ugly head, winners HUSTLE HARDER.
Visualizing an escape from your living tomb is 90% of the battle! Picture yourself grinding out of this grave. When I’m trapped in a coffin, I simply envision my hand punching out of the dirt like a vengeful corpse. What’s that on my wrist? Is that a gold Rolex Day-Date Oyster Perpetual? And in the background, a sports car? I just self-actualized my way out of this grave and into a black Porsche Boxster.
Starting your day in a coffin is no excuse to skip your morning routine. Perform 100 crunches (limited range of motion) and meditate for 15 minutes as you would every day. Instead of reading the Wall Street Journal, rattle around the change in your pockets for a fleeting whiff of the financial world. Instead of your green smoothie, suck the liquid out of lichens you find on the corners of the coffin. Repeat daily affirmations: “I am a shark,” “I close deals,” “I will die aboveground.”
Many people think that being six feet underground might prevent you from closing deals, but I’m here to tell you that this is a WEAK MENTALITY.
Instead of looking at the negatives, look for opportunity. You’re in a coffin with plenty of extra space. Get on AirBnB and rent out the extra space: antique wood accents, well-insulated structure, quiet neighbors. That’s called passive income. I’m salivating thinking about the cash cow these ten extra square inches represent.
The sharp, stinging pains of centipede bites announce another actionable item. Many insects carry valuable venom that now courses through your veins. No pain, no gain, specifically the gain of toxic material used in smaller doses to treat epilepsy, tetanus, and even whooping cough. Thrash around to maximize these favorable circumstances.
Being bound and gagged in a coffin, like being slathered with honey and covered with ants, offers the immured a TEACHABLE MOMENT.
Without embracing adversity, then you might break down and spend your last moments moping about how unfair life is. Frankly, if I were in this position I would request that I be bound in chains, because that’s just how hard I grind. I’d scream myself hoarse telling my captors they should start flooding this grave, because I dig out of dry dirt before 5 AM every day.
Like snowflakes, no two coffins are alike. Every time I escape from a coffin I learn something new. When the coffin is made of sturdy oak, I learn to break wood with a one-inch punch. When my hands are bound with rope, I learn about knots. When there’s a large rodent buried with me to increase my torment, I learn the ever-applicable skill of rat domestication.
After escaping a slow death, the serial entrepreneur should track down her would-be killers for some SPEED NETWORKING.
Your first instinct might be to exact brutal revenge with an heirloom katana, but a couple of cold-blooded psychopaths who bury people alive complete a driven social circle. I have three different LinkedIn contacts named Bonecrusher. We host a LinkedIn Learning series titled “How to Get Ahead with a Sledgehammer.”
Remember that your network is your net worth. Soon you, Bonecrusher, Ratfuck Jon, and Budd will climb the corporate ladder with nothing but grit, guile, and a willingness to casually execute your rivals in elaborate fashion.
There’s nothing better for your mindset than constant adversity and hardship. Every time my enemies bury me alive, lock me in a bear trap, or put a wasp in my mouth and tape my lips shut, I thank GOD for giving me the opportunity to show off my DRIVE TO SUCCEED.