He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he becomes a monster. When you stare into the abyss, it stares back.
When you are selling a man, at any stage of life, we’re speaking to his ghosts, his loss, his hope, dreams, and aspirations.
We are more than tourists, instead of returning to things as they first were when we met them, we seek to rearrange small aspects of their soul – seeking their approval with a check at the end.
It’s not enough to engage, but to rearrange the very ideas that they hold dear. We play towards a balance, disengaging a bomb while playing with detonation like a cat playing with their dinner.
We hold the keys to a civilization but we must build it brick by brick- we aren’t governing bodies that change worlds at a whim but move towards change getting one small agreement at a time signed.
We are those who chose to be bigger than what society planned for, refusing to concede ourselves to mediocrity – when we exchange our energy for money, we do so knowing that we’re building towards revolutionary means.
Not one of bloodshed, but environmental, economic, and philosophical freedom. We’re not simply making money to buy things, we’re reinventing the world that was given to us. The issue though, is that to get there we must play with our food without being eaten. We cannot let the chaotic emotional energy of our prey own us.
What does this have to do with sales?
Simple, though one pathetic customer may not break us down to the point that our life has amounted to as little as theirs has, repeated exposure to these people can buckle us to the point of soul death.
When you’re choosing to get into sales, you’re voluntarily deciding to play into, around, and battle the very demons that plague people every single day. We jump into people’s chaos to create order with a hidden treasure at the end of our quest, but unlike video games, we only have one life and when we run out of hit points we die. It is our choice, every day, to go to battle knowing full well that we may come back home torn to shreds with nothing to show for it.
No one is there to save you, you – and only you – are responsible for returning home with the loot and leaving the hell hole you left a better place than what you left it.
You must be your own self-help guru, and we will give you the tools to get you there.
Rule Number 1
You are the hunter, not the prey
Mass hysteria is a “conversion disorder,” where a person has physiological symptoms affecting the nervous system in the absence of a physical cause of illness.
It’s a result of psychological distress. It can show up in different ways, from one instance in Tanzania where school children were hysterically laughing for up to 16 days at a time, and others with mass vomiting and screaming.
This hysteria takes hold often when people feel as if they’re control is being taken away from them, in places like missionary schools, after government takeovers, but what’s most fascinating is the finding that insanity can be a virus.
Mental disorders which were not present in societies for centuries can become an epidemic when foisted into the cultural zeitgeist. It can be transferred from one person to another, and I’ve seen this in people in my very industry.
I have seen people broken by door to door sales knocking: their integrity lapsed, they think of lying as their second language, they manipulate only themselves, living minute to minute hoping for a whale to appear that will save them. They begin to think of their job as the lottery, believing that those who succeed are merely lucky.
This is how your prey thinks- they have amounted to nothing not due to their own mistakes, but simply a lack of luck. They continue to behave in an insane manner, doing the same thing over and over again hoping for a different outcome.
What separates you from the prey is principles. All unsuccessful people have one thing in common – a lack of principles. This leads to rule number 2, taken from Jordan Peterson.
Rule 2
Opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated
If you want to succeed in an organization, see places where people are not taking any responsibility. We do this with our customers, they haven’t been responsible for their electricity bills, and we work to help them gain control of it and take the responsibility to do it. I’ve heard countless people go up to people much more successful than me, and say “how can I work for you?’ When asked “what can you do?” They simply say “whatever you need, I’m a quick learner.”
The world is filled with aimless people who think they can pick up things quickly, if they actually could pick up even a pencil on the floor they’d know that successful people have holes that they need to fill but aren’t sure which holes they are.
Taking responsibility in finding places that need specific skills, and learning those skills before others do, will get you towards success more than anything.
Elon Musk doesn’t need another pot head with ideas – Elon already is a pothead with ideas, he needs someone who can run with his ideas and add things he didn’t realize.
Rule 3
Be grateful in spite of your suffering
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
If you fear failure, you’ll never bother to do anything worth writing about – my friends, you must live a life that others beg to live for centuries to follow.
“Failure is the tuition you pay for success. if you do something right the first time and then do it another 1,000 times, the value of that experience is negligible. You might get a little better or faster at it, but you’re not likely to make a quantum leap forward. On the other hand, when you do something and things go really bad, you can take this negative experience and use it to your advantage – but only if you’re paying attention and you’re willing to learn from your mistakes; or treat them as the tuition you need to pay to succeed.”
The TLDR Version
As cheesy as it sounds, every failure is another opportunity to succeed in the future. This isn’t about accepting defeat, give me a man who’s good at losing and I’ll show you a loser. This is about learning how to fight better when your opponent shows up again.
You are the hunter. You must make an agreement with yourself every day that you will not allow yourself to give into the existential dread that subsumes common people. You must exploit the weaknesses that lie within people’s beliefs, and become rejuvenated by every win so that you can win over, and over, and over again.
