I Could Never Sell

Thinking about the best salespeople I have known…

Caution: If didn’t much like them, I stored them wrong in memory.

If I disapprove, do I toss away my chance to learn from the memory later? Do I store my view in place of them, so memory can’t give me back these guys, can only give me back my own view? So memory stores me, not them?

I’m trying to look past me. Can memory do that, or was memory designed to keep me inside myself?

Trungpa shows how to take a sword to our illusions. But I wonder if we can perform that operation on ourselves?

I once had surgery to my neck. The surgeon explained why one lump might take two or three hours. It might be more lumps than we thought, he said, once we cut the skin and poke inside. And the neck has nerves and blood supply to the brain. One wrong cut could be catastrophic.

I write training simulations now. Anatomy for surgeons is toughest. We are soup inside. Stew. How do you diagram stew? One thing melts into another, into gravy. Well, sure, you can diagram stew. Clean it up. Separate things, color-code them. But the better you do, the worse you do. When the surgeon opens your neck and stirs the stew inside, he could get lost following your cute comic-book map.

Memory is that same stew. What’s me, what’s them? What do you cut? What do you push aside, what do you put your light on?

I joined the IBM sales force long ago, and stayed less than four years. I won awards and bonuses, and took the IBM Presidents Class by nomination. Top IBM salespeople from around the world got two weeks away with teachers from the Harvard Business School. We learned to see our customers as they saw themselves (at the top, that is). I loved those two weeks, every minute. Then I left IBM and got an MFA in writing in New York City.

This is not me, I told myself at IBM. I don’t want to be one of these people. But before I leave, I want to prove I can do this. I want to leave in victory, not defeat.

What’s all that? “This is me, this is not me…”

In my position I was not the salesman, they told me, but the technical conscience of the salesman. Warn the salesman not to overpromise. Or, as we laughed among ourselves: she promises and I deliver.

“I am this, not that.” Who says? We diagram the stew, separate and color-code everyone. But maybe our comic-book map just get us lost faster?

We are stew. We pick through the stew: Hmmm, no… Ummm, yes… From the mix in the pot we make a different mix in our bowl…. I am IBM, but different. IBM with a difference. Stew.

The best salespeople, as I recall, believed in nothing. Only money, as I saw it then. I was different.

One big customer was the wealthy heir to a family business. His name (his father’s name) was written in glowing letters all over our skyline. I clipped a picture of him from newspaper. He wore fatigues and waved an M16 in a jungle somewhere, roaring with laughter. All around him that jungle was pocked with mass graves, graves of peasant women and children in heaps, casualties of a guerrilla war manipulated from Moscow and Washington DC thousands of miles away. Our hero had donated heavily to the cause, and won himself a four-day adventure as a real-life jungle warrior and champion of light against darkness.

I turned down his account, asked to be assigned elsewhere. Are you crazy, the others said? Big money! What are you doing?

I explained. When our country voted to end our support for that war, our President turned to private donors. Private: not bound by such votes. Private: kept secret from voters.

Donors like our local heir and hero. Or various sultans and sheiks and self-declared Supreme Lords for Life around the world. These Supreme Lords kindly agreed to divert American aid money to our jungle war. An increase ensured that diversions to their secret Swiss bank accounts would not suffer meanwhile. They understood money laundering, if not the struggle of light against darkness.

Nevermind the secret ballot, give me the secret buck, laughed our cheerful grandfatherly President. The buck beats the ballot while I’m in charge. The jungle sprouted mass graves for years to come. We buried our constitution there too.

Guess how much of this my IBM colleagues wanted to hear? Are you crazy? they said. Big money! Don’t miss out!

Now let’s turn everything upside down.

The best salesmen care for nothing but money?

Try this instead: The best salesmen put your concerns ahead of their own. They set aside theirs, take on yours. Now we have the selfless saint. The bodhisattva.

The salesman believes in nothing? Has no causes, convictions, principles? Doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know?

Try this instead: Easier to set aside your causes if you never take up causes. Or, as a wise rabbi once taught, be like the sun and rain from the sky. The sun and rain don’t ask who deserves.

…be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

–Yeshua, as quoted by Matthew 5.45

The best salespeople I have known were cheerful. They laughed a lot, in blissful ignorance. If they pursued grievances, they pursued yours, not their own. They did not ask who was evil and who was good, or who deserves. No, simply this: Who pays?

When all other defenses fail, the hognose snake vomits and poops for all he’s worth, coating himself instantly. The coyote (or whatever) spits him out and never chases another hognose. I just saw a hognose snake at my third-grader’s school. A reptile rescue group showed misunderstood reptiles in the cafeteria. The kids sat on the floor in a half-circle, and got to touch each one. The turtle was deformed because it had been a pet, and the owner, meaning well, and doing unto others as he would have done unto himself, fed it hot dogs instead of leaves.

Why does this hognose not stink himself, and you, and us, I asked the lecturer? This is the California variety, she explained. Not the New Jersey variety. Ah, I nodded. Sounds like my wife and me.

But I was the New Jersey hognose at IBM. Stinking so I wouldn’t be swallowed up.

That’s why we can’t take Trungpa’s scalpel to our own illusions. We are a stew inside. What do we cut, what do we keep? And like the hognose, we have coated ourselves with the stink of our own excretions. To the hognose, that stink is life, and strength, and victory. We pick through our stew of illusions with a scalpel, and spare that life, and strength, and victory, glad to stink our way through another day.