The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich

Chapter 21

Teaching Instincts

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.

—George Bernard Shaw

 

After a professional lifetime as a salesman and a salesforce manager, I know what I'm up against in trying to teach what I learned on the streets to people from solid middle-class backgrounds—like you, probably. I appreciate the challenge I face in teaching what may appear to be instincts (“untaught abilities,” to pluralize the Scottish philosopher/clockmaker, Alexander Bain), and I sure don't shrink from it. But I don't think what I'm teaching here is instinct so much as ways to gather information. Not all instincts are inborn, genetic; neither do they arise out of received wisdom. Instincts like mine—those I want to teach you—are made, fine-tuned through observation, trial and error. It may seem like I'm asking you to develop some kind of magical sixth sense. I'm not. I'm showing you ways to recognize and collect valuable customer-specific information and to give yourself room to operate. You know more than you think you do. You're just not putting your knowledge to the most profitable use because it's been remunerative enough just to go along with the crowd.

When we encourage little children to trust their instincts, we are encouraging them to pay attention to the way things or people make them feel, and in that way to access their inborn sense of right and wrong. As our mental capabilities grow we learn how to override our feelings with various logics. The aspiring Street-Smart ...