An acquaintance in College once told me this quote he’d heard from his parents: “Wealthy people don’t become wealthy by being generous.” To him, selfishness and prosperity were linked.
My daily life as a 9 to 6 wage slave made me realize the truth in that. To succeed at sales, or any job really, you are selling to people dumber than you, products they don’t need, products they can’t truly afford. You are tricking them, manipulating them, lying to them. As a hiring manager, you give false hope of unlimited upward momentum to your potential employees, essentially selling them an idea that won’t hold to be true.
We’ve been spoiled since childhood. Let me explain. Our parents, since birth to the age of 18, have provided for us-shelter, food, love, and other necessities. We didn’t have to learn to hustle, to lie, to manipulate at the levels adults do. (In other countries, it may be different for children.) So when we, the educated and aware, jump into adulthood and the workforce, it’s quite a culture shock.
The difference in poker is that everyone sitting at your poker table is aware of this. People may smile, joke, converse with each other, but if you have taken a seat at the table, the main goal is to take other peoples money.
When you walk into a department store to browse, you’ve come to browse, possibly buy something. But for the salespeople, it’s a different story: they’ve come to prey on your unsuspecting soul. The weakest prey of them all leaves the store with 4 bottles of perfume, and $500 dollars in credit card debt. At the bank, you walk in to deposit that $50 check you got from your grandmother for your birthday, and a banker sits you down, charms you, and you end up tying you your $30,000 savings into an account you may or may not need. This issue is, it just wasn’t your choice.
Category A, Category B
There are strong people and there are weak people.
There are Manipulators, and there are the Manipulated.
There are the wolves, and there are the sheep.
There are the fish, and there are the sharks.
There are the mean, and there are the nice.
There are the selfish, and there are the selfless.
It’s unfortunate that the kind people are the ones that get taken advantage of. The world rewards the wolves. I haven’t figured myself out yet. Which one are you?