Whether you know it or not, everyone on earth is selling something. If you believe that your life has any value at all, you are innately a salesman. The difference between one human being who is significantly succeeding and the one who is consistently failing is their ability to sell. It took me a long time to know this and that is why I want to share with you what you must do to recover lost ground, so that you can avoid making the same mistakes I made and which cost me several years. You cannot learn any meaningful lesson from an infallible person. If your mentor has never shared with you the stories of his errors and how he was able to confront and deal with them, he is an actor, not a mentor.
When they graduated from the university, I tried to teach this lesson of being a salesman to my children by giving them products to sell. None of them was interested, and of course, they didn’t sell one single item. Why? They thought that I was overbearing and trying to impose my desires on them. Secondly, they felt that they were not cut out for selling, mostly because they could not stomach the possibility of rejection and because their fields of study had “nothing” to do with selling. They all wanted to get a job, become independent of us their parents, settle down and enjoy life. I knew what would eventually happen. What they failed to learn with ease, they would later learn in the school of hard knocks called experience. Unfortunately, experience may be the best teacher, but the tuition fees are usually very high.
The average person around you feels very entitled. Most people simply want to enjoy the prize of what somebody else paid the price for. The average person will remain that way until something in him stirs up the reality that I am sharing with you now. Greatness is not served a la carte or like a buffet where you heap all you can eat on your plate. It must be negotiated. Life yields its dividends to you based on your ability to project and connect your contribution to it. QED! Disciplines dictate direction. Nobody can walk in the light of a lamp that is not lit. There is so much vacancy at the top, but you must negotiate your space there. Nobody with an entitlement mentality will have space at the top. At best, you will only occupy the space in life that those at the top concede to you, as their strategy for assuaging your mindset while deliberately ensuring that you never rise to challenge them at their level. This can be in the form of wages, allowances, gifts, and other incentives that keep you at the level of dependence. No entitled person ever controls his rewards because he always expects it from another person’s benevolence. When he feels he is not getting his “entitlement”, he resorts to violence, stealing, kidnapping, and other forms of criminality. When caught and punished, he tries to make everyone else except himself feel guilty for his dysfunction by blaming his parents, the government, or the rest of productive society for his predicament. This is the tragedy of many lives and the collective catastrophe of the developing world. Donor nations still control the economy, the outcomes, and the legislation of the recipient nations. It’s a given!
If other people’s benevolence sets the limits of your access to life’s field of play, the game can never end in your favour. The entitled person always dies as a victim of the “system”, even if the same system is full of opportunities that promote others of lesser talent but who were able to sell their value. Can you now see why the most brilliant and highly educated eggheads are employed by people of lower academic intelligence or accomplishment. Life is wired to make those who only know HOW become the employees of those who know WHY.
Success in life is not about whether you were born with the salesman’s ability or not. We all are. It is about whether you have discovered and developed your own value code or proposition, and you are willing and capable of letting the world know about it and how it is going to make life better for its recipients!
In my study of people who are significantly and genuinely successful, one common trend is their capacity for selling. Even when they live a very private life, they ensure that their value proposition is known by all and sundry. I have never met any of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But I constantly engage with Amazon, Meta, X (formerly Twitter) and Google, the value propositions that these men offer. And so do you and billions of other people globally who frequent the digital space that has helped us to shrink boundaries.
Who is a salesman and what abilities make him successful? We will define a salesman with the acronym, S.A.L.E.S.M.A.N. First and foremost, a good salesman is a SOLUTION provider. All of us would recall an encounter with a glib-tongue salesman who simply rattles on and on about a product that makes absolutely no sense to you. He may have got you interested in his pitch, but he was not able to get you to buy anything, not because he didn’t sell it well, but because you didn’t see its value to you! Whenever we feel that we are spending money on something that solves a significant problem for us in a significant way, the value is primary, and the cost is secondary. Your current employer pays you for what he believes you are worth, expertise, education, exposure and all. When you outgrow your present level by the value you add to yourself on the job and to the job, you can renegotiate your wages or take your services to a more discerning employer who can pay what is commensurate with your new value. That is how life is wired. To get princely rewards, start making princely contributions.
There is no barren land, only people with barren minds. The world is never short of rewards for people who can solve problems. Money is a reward system, not a goal to pursue. Money follows value created. Any shortage of money is a sign of a deficiency in the value connection chain. There is no recession where there are problems to solve. The entitlement mindset of the consumer is the harvest field of the producer of value. The landlord is enriched by his tenants. The fashion designer is enriched by everyone who loves to look good but doesn’t have the capacity to make what they wear. Those who are sick are the harvest field of the doctor. Certain illnesses can only be meaningfully handled by a certain area of specialization in medicine. The more knowledge is specialized, the more the reward is magnified when there is a need for it. Like it or not, it is a law!… continued.
Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!
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