Built for the Objection
What 395 pounds, three marriages, and three funerals taught me about the word no.
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35 short chapters
Nothing over two thousand words. Written to be read in the gaps of a working week.
Told straight
No five-step system. The years as they happened, including the parts most people leave out.
For anyone starting over
Owners, operators, sellers, and anyone who has been told they were too heavy, too loud, or too late.
Three formats
Read it, carry it, or keep it on the shelf.
The no was never the problem. The no was the information.
Mike Sedita has been getting told what he can’t do since he was twelve years old in a jersey that didn’t fit.
Too heavy for Pee Wee football. Too big for the uniform. Too far behind to catch up. Not qualified, not what we’re looking for, not going to make it. Some of it came from people. Some came from his own body. Once it came from a doctor who told him he had run out of road.
At twenty-nine he weighed three hundred and ninety-five pounds. Seven months after surgery he weighed one hundred and seventy-five — and found out that a new body does not come with a new head.
This is not a business book wearing a memoir’s jacket. It is the account of a man who has started over more times than he can defend in polite company: a brother, a mother, and a father buried inside four years. Three marriages. A partnership that cost him millions because he couldn’t bring himself to disagree out loud. And then, at forty-nine, forty-five straight days without a single sale at the work he would go on to lead the country in.
If you have ever been handed a no and taken it personally, this book is about the ninety seconds after.
1
The Press Box
A borrowed jersey, a man with a microphone, and a mother who took the stairs two at a time.
2
The Ledger
The bus, the seatbelt extender, the roller coaster. What three hundred pounds actually costs, item by item.
3
July 31, 2001
Three hundred and ninety-five pounds and a surgeon in Hackensack.
4
175
Seven months later, standing in a room full of people who had come to hear how — and nobody asked.
5
June 2, 2019
The phone rings at four in the morning. Michael, I need you.
6
Punta Gorda
Four hours down I-75 with his mother, ten weeks before she died, asking every question he’d never asked.
7
The Escape Hatch
Forty-five days without a sale, and two questions on a telephone that fixed it.
8
The Objection
Everything he now teaches for a living, on four pages, free for the taking.
The no was never what was standing in my way. The no was the instruction.
It took him until his fifties to work that out. Every person who ever told him no handed him a piece of paper with something true written on it. The only job was to open it and read it — instead of taking it personally and throwing it away.
— From the prologue
Read the first two minutes
I was twelve years old and already built like a grown man. The league had to special-order my uniform, and opening day arrived before the box did.
My coach didn’t make a speech about it. He stripped off his own number 34 and handed it across the bench. Jersey’s running late. Wear mine.
It hung past my shorts. I tucked it in, tied my cleats, and ran out to the dugout. I was twelve. All I cared about was getting to the plate.
The guy running the public address system that spring was a man everybody called Joe. Three hundred pounds, a well-known relationship with alcohol, and the coach of the rival team — still irritated I’d picked the Lions over his squad. In Wood-Ridge, they handed him the microphone anyway.
I stepped in for my first at-bat, and Joe leaned straight into the mic:
“Now batting — wearing his coach’s jersey — Mike Sedita.”
My mother was working the concession stand directly below the booth. When I glanced back toward first base before the windup, her window was empty.
Who is Mike Sedita
Mike Sedita is a performance coach for Best Version Media, where he trains new publishers across the country to launch community magazines and build local media businesses of their own.
He grew up in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, the youngest of three sons of a factory production manager who served eighteen years on the local school board. He left college two semesters short of a degree and spent the next three decades selling — sports picks in an Atlanta phone room, Fords in Smyrna, Georgia, and eventually multi-million-dollar media campaigns for national brands. He founded 16W Media Group, named for the New Jersey Turnpike exit he grew up beside.
A Million Dollar Producer and the holder of the largest single sales month in his company’s history, he lives in Apollo Beach with his wife Kacey, his stepsons Ethan and Evan, and a bulldog named Norman who has heard every story in this book at least a hundred times.
Built for the Objection is his first book.
They are going to hand you a no.
Then get up tomorrow and get your three yeses anyway.