Meet Mafalda Johannsen

We were lucky to catch up with Mafalda Johannsen recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mafalda, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?

I believe my resilience was cultivated by my mother’s influence. She was very strict and held me accountable for my actions from a young age. She never allowed me to become complacent with my achievements, which kept me grounded. For instance, after my first writing lesson in primary school, I managed to write a whole text, even though I had only learned the vowels and the letter “p”. While I thought it was impressive, my mom pointed out all the mistakes and encouraged me to strive for perfection. Looking back, I’m grateful for her high standards. They taught me never to settle for average, to pay attention to details, and to always go the extra mile in everything I do.

Additionally, I never took the easy path, which further honed my resilience. Despite my love for literature and languages and my dislike for mathematics, I chose to study business, which involved advanced math that was challenging for me. I pursued this degree because it aligned with my desired lifestyle.

When I moved to the US for my master’s, I faced financial difficulties and struggled to find work due to my lack of experience and visa restrictions. The only job I could get was a 100% commission-based sales position. Without money for a car, I had to wake up two hours early to catch the bus, unsure if I would earn enough to pay my bills. Yet, I persevered.

My resilience, developed since childhood, has been fueled by my high ambitions and by not coming from a wealthy background. My career in sales has further reinforced this skill, proving that determination and hard work can overcome any challenge.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Throughout my career, I have predominantly worked in business development, but my true passion lies in literature and the arts. I strive to balance these two worlds. While my full-time job is in business development, my hobbies are deeply rooted in the arts. I serve as the PR and Marketing Manager for a jazz band called Plasticine, and I’m also writing a sales book in Portuguese. Additionally, I write fiction and music lyrics in my spare time.

Driven by a strong sense of justice, I recently started a side gig to help small businesses and solopreneurs build their sales engines. The insights and strategies I develop are also included in the sales book I’m writing. This combination of professional work and creative pursuits allows me to fulfill my passions while making a positive impact on others.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Resilience, critical thinking, and integrity. Success doesn’t come easily (unless you have wealthy parents). To achieve it, you need a solid plan and process, which require critical thinking skills. You must also have the resilience to follow through, remain consistent, and not give up too early. Additionally, our network plays a crucial role in our success; your reputation matters. If you are dishonest, word will spread, and you will face the consequences.
So, for the folks early in their journey: be open to feedback, understand how the world really works, plan accordingly, be humble, and help other people.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

A lot of people are looking for the right answers in the wrong books. By “wrong books” I mean self-help books, for example. Most of them are terrible advisors: they are full of clichés, fallacies, and over simplistic conclusions.
Great literature, on the other hand, gives you an accurate depiction of reality and helps you understand how the world really works. Some examples of such books: “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner, “Fight Night” by Miriam Toews, “Liberation Day” by George Saunders, “Blindness” by José Saramago, “L’ENGRENAGE” by Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.
A book that played an important role in my development was “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life” by George Saunders. In this book, the author analysis 7 fantastic short stories by Russian writers where they ask the big questions: “How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?”

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