Salesman, sell, something.

Salesman, sell, something.

I am writing this to another ‘me’, whoever you are, I hope it is helpful. It is the advice I was once desperately looking for.

Everybody is a salesperson, this is because we are always selling a little bit of ourselves.

When I say “salesperson” I am talking about me but also about you, whoever you are and whatever you do at home, business and in the millions of discrete transactions that make up a life.

Because I am a salesman in title and being I am using me as an example.

I am a haphazard mix of the best and worst parts of the character, habits, appearance and the quirks of a salesperson. However none of me is the ‘sleazy’ or annoying, fake charisma ‘let’s be friends’ and so on, a usual ‘tell’ of the lesser salesperson hustler talker.
If we had lunch you would like and respect me. You would think I’m super intelligent, speak with self-discipline and ask good questions.

According to the results of all those expensive corporate personality assessments, I have a strong sense of urgency and I am willing to argue and ‘not be liked, this is true. It’s a nuanced thing and these can be traits of a great salesperson, it depends on the amounts.

A salesperson is a product and can be quantified and qualified on a spreadsheet and converted to a letter grade. You’re either an A, B or C salesperson. I have always been an A+.

Some people are ‘right place, right time, right person’.

Throughout my sales career that was me. I have seen sales people come and go. The C’s loiter about, the B’s are B’s. The A’s are stars. Like I said, I am A+.

I use a lot of discretionary effort in everything I do. In retail transactions there is the person who greets you and smiles and is immediately responsive and makes eye contact when you ask where is the whatever, or ‘how are you?’ That is me on a massive scale. I went above board to make everything perfect, like a very finely tuned assembly line, prospecting, sales, communication, setting expectations, preparing agenda in advance, follow up, close and more follow and so on. Other sales people can’t do that. They waste time at their desk and think 100 cold calls is what work is, and that a meeting is just a meeting, and not your grand schema for the prospect and the relationships and its bountiful after effects.

When you are lucky enough to be in the ‘right place, right time, right person’ you make lots of money, you are treated amazingly well. You are a revenue producer. You understand the intricacies of your own role and the economics of your desk, the company culture and its bureaucracy.

This salesperson I have described, me, is a workaholic and work is part of my very identity and existence. I am truly the same person outside of the office as I am when I’m in it. That’s not always a good thing because you can treat the home environment too much like the biz one.

When you’re this person, like me, you’re compromising time with family and friends and can’t always distinguish between work and ‘not work’. And, when you are not in the thick of it, you’re uncomfortable, it gnaws in you. My name must always be highly recognized and warmly received.

The answer to your question, which was also mine, is that you have to leave.

An ‘A’ can only truly flourish in their current environment because it’s been tailored to them, they are a product of the company. You can live a great life like this and you are special, you are a big achiever. This advice I found and offer is for you, and it’s also for the A+, cos you have an even bigger problem.

You have to challenge yourself, you have to do more. Either right at this moment or soon. If you are that person that I described, that is ‘me’, you have to go. One way or another, now or ‘then’.

It is like in the third Matrix movie, when Neo learns that ‘he’ has existed many times before, that he is just another iteration. Worst of all, he learns that rather than being an anomaly, he was created, architected and that before he was even born, his ascent and demise was scripted. There is nothing special about him, he is just a slot in someone else’s org chart.

Big, successful, smart companies created you, you are a brochure. You make a lot of money and your employer knows it cos they cut the checks. Your employer also has plans to recapture your earnings and commissions and reallocate it to their shareholders.

I am urging you to become the shareholder. It is the path I took. A’s and A+’s have to shine brighter and the real money, stuff that they can generationally pass on for a long time doesn’t happen in your current office.

When and why to leave.

I used to have season tickets to the NY Rangers and Knicks. My seats were on the wood and ice. The person who sat next to me became a friend of the high fiving and idle chit chat type.

One day we were talking and he said “you make a lot more money than I do, but I have something you don’t have…equity. I own my work”. I took it as a casual comment. Later that same year I came across his bio in the Forbes 500. I went back to him, we met at his office and we went way beneath the surface of his comment. To abbreviate all of our chat: He lets his salespeople make a lot of money, but not enough to get rich. His firm operated and executed on this with a precise methodology and plan.

But I care about you (cos you are me) and not them. You have to plot exactly how restrictive and binding the golden handcuffs you submitted yourself too will be. I don’t mean that you should leave now, but just as much as your company is insidiously planning your earnings evaporation, you have to plan your earnings remedy.

Here is the advice I looked so desperately for, it is me talking to me.

If you are considering leaving, before you leave your company, take an absurdly long vacation.

Some people don’t think this is possible and that they can’t do this for many reasons, maybe financial, whatever it is. Perhaps they are right and they can’t get away for a while, or alternatively, they could be so stuck inside the cogs of their machine that they can’t even fathom not being able to get away for a few weeks. Will it be expensive for some people? Yeah, it will. But it’s my own experience that the alternative of not taking time off will be more expensive.

Hard work has a numbing effect on the sensory system. To restore your awareness of self and environment requires an extended time away from work. Try 2 months. Just get away.

You will either come back determined to stay or be hell bent on leaving. Maybe you should stay at your company forever, that’s not a bad thing, maybe.

This is the ‘maybe’ road map.

Leave your company when you have acquired enough of its insight, its intelligence, a comprehension of the total system and its moving parts. This usually takes anywhere from 7 to 10 years. Transfer all that to a young(er) company where it has more value. Arbitrage yourself.

Do not evaluate a new company on the basis of your income potential. Consider it instead based upon equity, not just in the new company, but regained equity in yourself, your time and life, it all comes together. Like I said, we are all always selling a bit of ourselves and you have to make sure you are being properly compensated.

Find the right company or start your own. Know honestly which environment is right for you. It requires an honest assessment of ‘who you are’. You never had to do this when you were the superstar at your (old or current) company because they defined your identity for you.

Retrain your concept of the value of time because it is warped.

When you are working for a company your time has been bought. The largest chunk of your day, and therefore your life has been rented by them. It is your body and mind but you have sublet it. Your company decided and conditioned what is and isn’t important, they prioritized your day.

Now you must regain your concept of time and its value. It will blow your mind and it’s very difficult. It takes immense discipline. But, I know you can do it.

Whether you stay or go, you have to regain your concept of time and its value. It will blow your mind and it’s very difficult. It takes immense discipline. I have learned:

Emotional reserves are easily depleted and takes tremendous effort to replenish.

I discuss it here, part 2:

Let’s begin…

Now let me tell you how much effort it’s taken me to get ‘myself’ back.

In 2012 my company went public and my obligations to them were completed so I split.
I had money in the bank but I no longer had a place to go to, if there was a choice I may have taken ‘a place to go’ over ‘IPO money in the bank’ because it was my home life more than my home. I felt hollow without it. I would wake up in the middle of the night trying to solve business problems that were no longer mine, a strange feeling.

I could have gone to another company but after 20+ years of nonstop movement I knew I needed to recover, but I didn’t know what I needed to recover from.

It was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder but I had never endured anything traumatic.

It wasn’t “burnout” because I loved every moment I was in my office. All those years I would get in early and leave late and everything in between was awesome, highly productive and it had thrills like I was an xtreme athlete, but in an office and no physical exertion. Other than those small details, it was exactly the same as an xtreme athlete.

I thought about going to another company and maybe everything would go back to ‘my normal’ and all that ‘stress’ and ‘disorder’ would no longer be ‘post’, it would be current – and I had trained myself to live in that environment.

This is what happened to me: I didn’t have anything else to pay attention to, but myself. It’s like all your life you’ve been in a room full of people, action and motion, and then all of a sudden you’re alone, and the only company you have is the jerk on the couch, and that was me.

Have you ever seen Breaking Bad? In the last few episodes Walter White is hiding in some remote Unabomber type of cabin in the snow. He no longer had all the mayhem and chaos that he thrived on, it was just him, him and just him. And as it turns out, he really didn’t like himself, his mind was not his friend.

As a “meh, Ok, I’ll do it cos whatever, it’s something new and an experience’ I started going to a Buddhist temple. 20 minutes of meditation was excruciating until I got the hang of it and the ministers who led the weekly practice were helpful to me by not talking too much. I’m not a Buddhist and they didn’t encourage me to move in that direction. The most interesting thing for me was the one-on-one teachings that emphasized awareness of delusions.

There’s such a big difference between someone who spends a life conserving their words, opinions and genuinely is listening and responding to me – it’s much much (much) better than what everybody else does, even those who love you. In fact, those who love you have the worst dilemma because if they say the wrong thing it’s the wrong thing and if they say the wrong thing it’s the wrong thing. It’s usually a no win situation for them.

Somehow I found Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life and Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius.

This is important in itself because my parents never instructed me on how to optimize my life.
Of course they said great wonderful and warm feelz smart things, but it wasn’t a lane I could ride the bicycle of my life in.

So now with these two big big things in my head I converted it to something that I could touch, is actionable and ever present in my awareness. I wanted to transform myself and I wanted to own that improvement.

I have always kept a daily planner that is the mundane, simple hourly diagram of the day and how I filled it and misc.

I innovated a ‘Page 2’ as a tool to observe my behavior and habits and to self-correct.

I devised the thing as an amalgamation of the things I was learning.

So with all that – I concocted the daily planner page 2,

I update the schema of the planner fairly frequently depending on what I am trying to observe about myself. Some items are recurring, like when I went to sleep, woke up, got out of bed, did I deceive myself, did I talk too much, how was my listening and so on. I have this set as ‘perma’ although sometimes I change the way I word it.

This is a very handy tool that I had to figure this out for myself, so I wrote this because if you’re trying to figure it out yourself I wanted you to have what works for me as part of your consideration.

The one I am showing you here I wrote in 2012, I was very depressed, but couldn’t figure out why. I finally had time to be depressed, which I suppose I always was – but had converted that energy to something productive. As such decades pile up and I spent a lot of time ‘away from myself’

I got ripped and healthy – because you can’t buy your way out of depression

Right before we begin on my Page 2, watch this video, it’s how I went from Fat to Lean, the Startup of Me.

YouTube player

That was a good clip right?

Page 2, the daily planner that I use to observe and self-correct

Take and change it for yourself, maybe it’s a temper or impatience issue, maybe it’s gossiping, or using foul language or reverse engineering anxiety, and so on.

  • Why do I have sleep stuff in it? Because I found that for me there was a relationship between the time I woke up and the time I got out of bed.
  • Why do I mark certain times with ‘what am I doing’? Well, it was actually my cue to take 5 minutes and just relax and meditate, a post in itself that I will write one day. I am not an expert at it but I can tell you about me and what I have learned. 

Other than that I have nothing else to say, it all speaks for itself and I don’t want to get in the way.

I hope this post has been helpful to you. I know it is incomplete but it is my attempt to offer you the advice I did not have.

Be well and be happy

Daily Planner