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

Chapter 2

The Million-Dollar Accident

Luck is the residue of design.

—Branch Rickey

 

Everybody gets into sales by accident. In 30-plus years as a salesman, I've never met anybody, ever, who said they took a sales job because they wanted to be a salesperson, much less because they saw sales as their first step toward making a million dollars. Very few, too few, people see the wealth-building potential of a career in sales. I'd estimate that fully half the people who ever take a sales job do so out of sheer desperation, only to perform poorly and get out of the field fast and forever. Things were different with me.

In my case, I couldn't get a job as a gym teacher (as I'll explain, I managed to earn a college degree in Physical Education), so I took a job selling life insurance, you know, just to tide me over. My brother-in-law had bought a policy from a broker he liked who'd mentioned the company was looking for people, so I called and arranged for an interview. When I took that job with MetLife, I certainly had no idea that I'd changed my career trajectory forever and for the better. But before too long, I began to notice that I was better at selling life insurance than my middle-class counterparts, who often complained of having trouble “reading” their prospects. I, on the other hand, was dealing very effectively with my clients, making good use of my self-styled “ghetto radar”—I sold a million dollars worth of insurance in my first year!

A lifetime of navigating favors and figuring ...