“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” – Kurt Cobain
I was traveling in a public bus.
She came and sat across from me.
She became comfortable in her seat, I smiled at her and she also responded with a soft smile with a waving hand.
Her return smile was a clear indication for me that our 8 hours journey in a bus is going to be very interesting.
We talked about ourselves, specifically our job and profession.
Occasionally our knees were touching each other when the bus was making different motions.
She said that she was a marketing officer in a sanitary pad business.
I told her about my scientific work in a multinational research company. I also mentioned our huge marketing department though I had very little knowledge about marketing.
Any profession including marketing is to create trust in public
I added, “I’ve only a vague assumption of how marketing works in our organization. But I know Seth Godin, and I’ve read his book ‘Purple Cow‘.”
“ I run experiments, I analyze and interpret data, I also document, publish, and preserve all of these,” I further explained.
I was curious, so I asked, “what exactly do you do as a marketing officer?”
“By the way, ‘Purple Cow’ is one of my favourite books from Seth Godin. Very early in my career I learned from ‘Purple Cow’ how to create remarkable ideas and products that will differentiate them from competitors,” she said.
She replied, “My work is very simple, how to build trust in public. Not only in the sanitary pad business but in any business, all marketing people try to build trust in the public. That’s what we all do.”
“In your work as a scientist, probably, you largely depend on yourself, your knowledge and skill, but in my work, I’m mostly dependent on others, mostly in public,” she commented.
“Exactly, you are right, the majority of my work is solitary and bench work” I nodded.
“As a marketing personal, I care less about new products, new technology or innovations, what I care more is what products and services are going to be obsolete soon,” she clearly pointed out.
In response to my smile in the beginning, I’d noticed her smile was very attractive with her upper half very clean and shiny teeth.
At that point I’d predicted that she might be an outgoing professional and our journey could be a different experience.
Her style of engagement in our conversation was showing that she must be an influencer by considering her overall enthusiasm and curiosities on what we talk.
Smile is an amazing human expression.
It connects a lot of different things in our body, mind, soul, and surroundings.
It generates oxytocin in our brain and that provokes a thought.
One simple thought produces ripple effects and generates many more thoughts in our mind.
And one good thought gradually changes into a trust.
When she said that her main responsibility is to create trust in public, I was also trusting her as a genuine professional woman.
I felt like she was absolutely not talking about her job, she was talking completely about her profession.
The fact is, job and profession are not the same things in the long run.
Any job can be only an absolute transactional relationship to us because we work for the money or some tangible benefits or both.
But when we talk about profession, we take pride in our work and accomplishments, we feel good about the people we work with, and the organization.
Most importantly, when our job becomes a profession, we work 24 hours in our mind.
Richard Bolles, author of ‘What Color Is Your Parachute?’ talks about interesting thing about being professional, that means we look forward to a long time doing what we’re doing. We love to do things, we love to talk about what we do. After many years of work, looking back, we say I’ve accomplished many things in my life, but I still have a long way to go, more things to accomplish.
In our conversation, she showed purely professional identity as indicated by author Richard Bolles, the way she was talking to me, the way she was bringing ideas, and the ways she was interested to know more about my area.
I saw a curiosity in her tone, I saw an enthusiasm in her look, I saw patience in her emotions, and I saw an unwavering commitment in her eyes.
It’s very true that trust creates order in human society and if we like to work on in any field based on trust then the job no longer remains a job, it becomes a life-long profession very quickly.
If we don’t have trust then probably human society collapses and there would be no motion in any form whatsoever.
There are always people working day in and day out to build trust in any circumstances.
Trust based marketing is a part of human psychology and reasoning
Do you buy shampoo from a company you’ve never heard of before?
I don’t.
Do you lend money to an unknown person?
I don’t.
Do you travel to rural Afghanistan now?
I don’t.
Who do you trust as your running coach? A Kenyan or an American guy.
Of course, a Kenyan guy because you have many more reasons to trust a Kenyan guy as a running coach.
The only reason we don’t do many things in life is because we don’t trust the unknown.
We don’t trust a new company because shampoo directly touches our body when we use it. It contains chemicals, it’s sensitive so we don’t want to take risks.
We never lend money to anybody whom we don’t trust because we don’t know whether he or she will return it.
Money isn’t just a thing to buy, it’s also an emotional entity to bind us. It can make or break our relationship in a second. We should be very careful.
We know Afghanistan is mouldering with terrorism right now, so we don’t trust people and the government over there, at least at the moment.
These above situations can only be trusted by continuous work on them, as she said, we have to work to build trust.
At one point, she said that marketing is a part of collective knowledge, it always moves from bottom up based on public trust.
Trust was ingrained in her conversation as if she was born with it.
Due to this trust, she said that sometimes she works 10 to 12 hours in the street.
She said that she feels tired so she goes on deep undisturbed 8 hours sleep.
It’s true that if you work longer than regular hours, then you also need more rest, and sleep is the only rest, if you don’t sleep you suffer from mental fog and fatigue.
She warns that many people are not aware about this, they do hard work only by squeezing hours of required rest.
The fact is, we can live 14 maximum days without eating but we can’t live more than 12 maximum days without sleeping, now you can see the importance.
Matthew Walker, PhD, professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of ‘Why We Sleep’ said “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.
In his must-watch TedTalk, ‘Sleep Is Your Superpower,’ Dr. Walker, also known as a sleep scientist, explains the impact of sleep on our learning, memory, immune system and even our genetic code.
The reality is that we only realize this later part of our life and we whisper I wish I could have done that.
Any trust based profession including marketing leaves a legacy
When she was 2 years old, she couldn’t walk, her family was really worried.
As her mom said to her later, everybody around her, her relatives, her neighbors told her mom, she couldn’t walk all of her life.
The only person in her family, her elder brother who was 13 years old at the time, didn’t believe that she couldn’t walk.
Her brother played with her all day, pushed her to walk by holding her hand all day.
As her mom said to her, when she reached 3, making everybody surprised around her, she walked.
She remembered as her mom said, the only person that didn’t surprise at the time was her brother because he had trust that she would certainly walk one day.
In today’s world, people might say she had cerebral palsy, no hope.
Her brother became the top physiotherapist for her at that time.
Only because her brother had immense trust and worked for it.
She made a point that trust is essential everywhere, we had fewer sanitary pads in the past but we have more now because people trusted different experiences of various kinds of pads. Marketing itself drives various experiences in public and that follows innovation.
She said that we have to be very careful to know about the public and why they like something over others.
“Marketing is just a very small fragment of human psychology and reasoning,” she added.
Robert B. Cialdini, PhD, author of ‘Influence, New and Expanded’ said “A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor, we will be more successful if we provide a reason.
As said by Dr. Cialdini, when we become bigger as a company or organization we stop innovation, we stop studying and asking people so our products and services become mundane and obsolete very quickly.
As a student of marketing, she said, “My eyes always remain curious about what people are liking and why they’re not liking.”
When our conversation became very friendly and comfortable, she became very emotional at one point and shared her journey.
She said that she wasn’t only a marketing officer, she was also a co-founder of her sanitary pad company.
“When I was 17 years old, I was walking, running, and selling the cheapest sanitary pads in rural villages all day. In those villages, most of the women never used sanitary pads. A lot of teenage girls had no idea what the sanitary pad was. They all were using old rags and the most damped and dusty, torn-out cloth pieces.
Most girls came from rural families and used to survive on less than $2 a day.
Many of them belong to lower castes called “untouchables,” who had suffered years of discrimination.”
I still remember, one day a passer-by woman asked me,“Where are you from?”
She’s polite.
She asked me how I’m hoping to sell today.
With my confidence, I told her my aim is not to go home without selling at least two pad.
She was an adult woman, and looked at me as she was carrying her grandson by her waist.
“I’m sure you can sell at least two pads,” she said.
“There is a fine line between genuine try and success and I didn’t know whether I crossed that barrier or not.
From that day onward, my journey is continuously going unwaveringly.
By the way, that day I sold four pads,” she said.
She sighed and said I wish I could make a culture of sanitary pads in rural and uneducated poor girls’ society in India, as a running culture in rural Kenya, a football culture in rural Brazil.
In our conversation, she gave me very eye-opening data about my native country Nepal.
A 2016 report, in Nepal, found that a staggering 83 percent of menstruating girls still use cloth while only 15 percent use sanitary pads.
She also quoted data from India, a neighboring country of Nepal, that estimates only roughly 36 percent women, in all menstruating women, use sanitary napkins, locally or commercially produced. She said that around 88% of women and girls in India are using homemade alternatives, such as old cloth, rags, or hay.
She was quite aware of the consequences of poor menstrual hygiene.
Of course, poor menstrual hygiene is one of the major causes of contracting cervical cancer, reproductive tract infections, hepatitis B infection, various types of yeast infections and urinary tract infection, to name a few.
Emotionally, in the middle of our conversation, she said that her mom died from cervical cancer when she was 13 years old.
“My mom died without seeing the sanitary pad,” she softly expressed.
“I don’t want to tell and humiliate myself by saying what I used in my first menstrual period, I even don’t want to remember this,” she said.
I could imagine what this work means for her.
She had no idea when this job turned into a profession and later a drive in her life.
When she was saying her first menstrual period she was looking through the window with moist eyes.
After going through all of her personal experiences, I understood her devotion, her drive, and her commitment in her work.
She wasn’t only doing her work as a job or profession, she was also trying to leave a legacy for rural girls and women.
Conclusion
This was one clear example how a pure job turns into a profession, and subsequently becomes such a drive in our everyday lives.
“We have something unusual in our DNA, sometimes, that prohibits us from adopting a good drive that we trust.
I’ve learned a lesson long back from my personal experience, we need keep observing the world inside and outside our work. If I see someone is doing something good for the society, I take inspiration and I try to incorporate that in my life,” she said.
We exchanged our name and email address during our long travel and continuous conversation.
Laxxmi, that was her name, said that she doesn’t care about being an odd person, what she really cares about is having a drive for a mission.
I fully accept that.
“What the drive gives us is the ability to do what we want to do in the way we want to do it, and that’s an amazing feeling,” she said.
Daniel H. Pink, author of ‘Drive’ said “Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”
Laxxmi, who is one of the most admirable people I’ve ever traveled with for almost 9 hours in a public bus, has a deep sense of mission that’s connected to the loss of her mother.
She, once, told me that God has taken my mom from me and given energy to make thousands of moms stronger.
One thing I learned from Laxxmi is that this drive for each one of us in our lives is very personal.
Now, I know why the drive for Mother Teresa was so different from Michael Jackson and Nelson Mandela personally.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”