Every once in a great while I get disconsolate about these here Intertunnels. A contest to see who can be the stupidest gets old fast. Nothing much seems genuine. I have every expectation that this video is genuine, don’t get me wrong; but the Intertunnel’s interest in it will not be because it’s good. It’s because it’s very, very, bad.
When you worship the gods of bad and stupid, this sort of thing is what emerges from the tail end of pop culture’s alimentary canal. Either you’re savvy, and understand that your employees won’t respond to anything serious if it’s presented in a serious way, or you’re a dullard, and think you’re hip because you’re immune to just how lame-o you appear. Either way, you’re not Dale Carnegie.
Or maybe you are. Fish don’t get to swim in the water they desire. They must swim in the water they’re in, or perish. I imagine that it’s deuced difficult to make a living these days selling trinkets to the natives anywhere in the US. There is, literally, not one item in that store that I’d keep if it was given to me. Purchasing anything is out of the question. The owner of the store has to figure out how to get his employees on board with his scheme to sell this dreck or they’ll all starve. His scheme is being pleasant to the customers. That’s it. Nothing fancy. The video will be hooted at much farther and wider than when it was conceptualized, that’s for sure, but the point was made, moronically, perhaps, but no one that watches it would be struck by the idea that there were unpleasant people anywhere near it. Many nice people don’t summer in Cannes, and dress in couture. I said nice people, not Nice people.
If you had produced the best customer service video ever made, flashy and full of sober and sage advice to the retail worker, you’d get maybe five thousand hits on YouTube. I guarantee this one will get five million. Therein lies a lesson. My only problem is I have no idea what that lesson might be.
When I was young my father would take me to an MDC skating rink. The MDC was the “Metropolitan Disctrict Commission.” It was a layer of government in Massachusetts that allowed the corrupt mayor of Boston to be corrupt outside the city proper. The MDC had its own police force, and ran all sorts of public parks and such. They constructed skating rinks here and there around Boston.
They were spartan affairs, but didn’t seem so to us, because all we had was the corrugated ice on the local pond, and we had to shovel that first. Some people think that sort of activity, born of privation, builds character. People that think that have never met me. I don’t have a trace of character, and I went through all sorts of inconveniences.
The MDC rink we frequented was on the banks of the Charles River, on the Jamaicaway, I think, and it was simply a roof over a patch of ice, with a chain link fence for walls around it, and a blockhouse where you could rent someone else’s athlete’s foot by the hour. They threw in the skates for free. They also sold hot chocolate that wasn’t either of those things. It was a long car ride from where we lived, and it seemed very cold, but we loved it.
During public skating hours, they’d play organ music over loudspeakers they had borrowed from a defunct prison camp or something. It transmogrified the music into something not quite musical. It was the same hoary old stuff the organist at Fenway Park used to play, only recorded.
There were usually a lot of people. There were all sorts of rules posted, all ignored, mostly, except by custom, but there was one, big, hairy rule that everyone followed uniformly: Everyone skated the same direction at the same time. You’d skate counterclockwise for 15 minutes or so, and then a voice would break into the groaning organ music and bellow: SKATE TO THE RIGHT!, and everyone would immediately stop and go clockwise. To this day, whenever I hear any sort of Hammond organ music, I still mutter skate to the right to myself.
I was little and in awe of my father. He could skate pretty well. I had a problem. I could only skate to the left. When the direction was reversed, I’d have to cross my left leg over my right to make a right turn, and I’d fall down. A lot.
Humans are practical creatures, and devise various strategies for dealing with such failings — almost all of which involve avoiding trying. I’d say I was cold, and sit down on a metal bench the temperature of Neptune, or hang on the boards and lie like a Turk in a bazaar and say I was tired. When the disembodied voice re-appeared and said SKATE TO THE LEFT again, I’d go back at it.
My father gave me some good advice, which I still remember. He said that if I didn’t want to learn to skate that I shouldn’t go skating. It would be a waste of time, and I should simply do something else that I really wanted to do. But I enjoyed my counterclockwise self, so it’s more likely that going clockwise was just a difficulty that I could overcome with effort and intellect. If I was happy fifty percent of the time, why not make it a hundred?
He told me that I had to figure out the aspects of skating I was bad at, and only do them. He told me to sit on the arctic bench and hang on the boards when the direction favored me, and only skate to the right.
It’s counterintuitive to do this. Go with your strength everyone says. There’s an entire school of thought in business called the Hedgehog Strategy. Find one thing you do well, and only do that one thing.
Dad said don’t go with your strength. Take your strength for granted. Work on your weakness. It was marvelous advice, and not just for skating. Businessmen, especially small businessmen, rarely understand the concept. In large organizations, your boss exists to do one thing: make you skate to your right. Left on your own, you’d do whatever was easy and file everything difficult under M for manana.
That’s why most everyone hates their boss; he makes you do things you don’t want to do. If you were wise, you’d realize it’s in your own best interest to learn to skate to the right, but that’s not why he asks you to do it. If you don’t skate to the right, he gets fired and can’t afford to get the GI Joe with the Kung-Fu grip for his kids for Christmas. So he makes you. His boss makes him. And so forth.
When people want to start their own businesses, 99 percent of the time it’s because they think that if they don’t have a boss, no one can make them skate to the right. They’ll go with their strength. Of course their strength is likely not of any use to the public. If you’re in business on your own, you don’t have one or two bosses. The general public is your boss, every man-jack of them. And they’re not interested in the fact that you can really check boxes on forms, or your desk is really clean, or that you’re amazing at leaving witty comments on FARK all day. They want their stuff. They all want you to skate to the right all the time. But they only have one way to make you skate to the right. They starve you out. They go away and never come back. The public is so much more cruel than the worst boss in this regard, because they almost always say nothing to you. They figuratively kill you without telling you why. They would tell you why, but listening to the customers is the A, Number One, Primary, Overarching, Central and Foundational example of skating to the right for almost everyone. That’s why salesman make so much money and do so little heavy lifting.
So my advice, for all you owners and managers and employees of businesses, is simple: Your business should skate to the left, hedgehog style, all the time. Go with your strength. All your employees, and you if you’re an owner or manager, should work on skating to the right all the time, to make it possible for the business to keep that Business Hedgehog fed, so all his spines don’t fall out from inanition. There’s a name for a hedgehog without spines that curls up into a ball and plays dead. That word is “lunch.”
Most managers do not have a deft touch at making demands for clockwise skating. They grab you by the shirt collar and drag you to the right. My father wasn’t like that. He told me why I should try, and I believed him, and I made up my mind to try as hard as I could, because I’m stubborn. I battered my knees with fall after fall, and heard the tittering of everyone wondering who the clumsy kid was, but I eventually learned. I got to be as facile one way as the other.
Filled with a bit of pride, I said, “Dad, I think I can skate to the right better than to my left now.”
You can’t always extrapolate from the example of genial and useful people like Frank Catalfumo. Many other people once worked at the same job as he has all these years, and were wiped out in their turn. His continuing existence is not proof that others could have made it, and should have kept trying.
People who operate businesses that have their name on it act differently than those that don’t, though. It’s personal. There’s the potential of starvation and ruin, of course. That’s pretty personal. But that’s not the end of it. People are amazingly stubborn about businesses that they feel a personal connection to. Many hang in there long after any outside person would counsel them to quit. If you’re a hired hand, you are generally much more ambivalent about the continued existence of a trade or business as long as you get a job at whatever replaces it. The owner feels a sense of pride if he’s hanging in there, and a kind of shame if it goes down the crapper.
Business is predicated on a kind of faith. If I’m useful, someone will use me. But as Nietzsche said, “A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” A man’s dream must become a stranger’s reality, or it’s just daydreaming.
(First offered in 2009. I think I was cranky because I had been pawed over without effect by a bunch of VCs a year or so before that. Venture Capitalists, not Viet Cong. Hard to tell the difference sometimes)
People alternate between revulsion for and adoration of people who make money. There is currently an enormous reliance on style points in choosing between execration and exaltation. A large swath of the public believes that only money that you appear to get by accident, like gambling winnings; salaries for activities others do for free — like sports; passive income like many Internet websites provide without really doing anything; and the wages of idiot celebrity, including, of course, selling autobiographies even though you’ve never done anything, are the only approved methods of getting rich. No matter what, you have to seem like you’re not interested in making money. Persons think that Steve Jobs is less avaricious than Bill Gates, for instance. Sure he is.
The exploitation of quirks in a system in which you do not fully or willingly participate in is another fave. Enough illegality to seem exciting but not exactly criminal is considered THE piquant style point, of course. See Office Space or Trading Places for amusing examples of the genre.
Our weird ideas about whether or not you’re doing it in the approved hipster fashion mask an underlying problem. Making money as an entrepreneur is hard. But somewhat counterintuitively, the hardest way to make money might be to have it handed to you.
This is one of the reasons I encourage entrepreneurs to bootstrap instead of taking outside money. On day one, a bootstrapped company sets out to make money. They have no choice, really. On day one a funded company sets out to spend money. They hire, they buy, they invest, they spend. Making money isn’t important yet. They practice spending, not making.
Bootstrapping puts you in the right mindset as an entrepreneur. You think of money more as something you make than something you spend. That’s the right lesson, that’s the right habit, the right imprint on your business brain. You’re better off as an entrepreneur if you have more practice making money than spending money. Bootstrapping gives you a head start.
The world is rather a harsh place for true entrepreneurs just now, much more so than for people that are gaming some system for money, which has become the Holy Grail of angel investors. I’ve learned everything in this life the hard way, and the hardest lesson to learn is to only borrow money — which includes accepting capital for a piece of the action — to expand on something that already makes money.
Don’t get me wrong; if your business plan is to fleece investors, by all means, take the money. Billy Ray Valentine would.
I am a gregarious sort of person. It’s my name, after all.
But I work alone now. I have no need to seem like anything to anyone unless I feel like it.
I don’t mind it as much as I thought I might. I had a job a decade ago and more, a real office job where I had to talk to a lot of people. It was there I became quiet.
I dressed the same way, every day. It was, more or less, the same uniform I wore in parochial school. White shirt, tie, slacks, plain shoes. Under no circumstances would I ever unbutton the top button on my shirt or loosen my tie. I wouldn’t even do it in the parking lot after work. The office instituted casual Fridays and I wore the same clothes. When I was an underling, everyone near yelled at me for not participating. Eventually I was their boss, and no one yelled at me.
I used to negotiate contracts with very hard-nosed people. Some of those people were way past hard-nosed and were plain criminal. They had all sorts of approaches they’d use to get what they wanted from their employees, and especially from people outside their building. When it was time to meet and negotiate anything with these hardnosed people, I’d always behave the same way with everyone. It almost always worked.
I would arrive early but sit in the parking lot until the exact appointed time. I would warmly greet everyone in the room, and mean it. Then I would sit directly across the table from the other party to the negotiation. If the table was thirty feet long with twenty empty chairs along its edge, I’d still sit at the far end from the person I was talking to. If there were thirty people, I’d figure out who was most important and sit across from them.
I put both feet flat on the floor, directly under their respective knees. I would sit up entirely straight. I would fold my hands in front of me. I would look directly into the eye of the other person. I said “eye.” You cannot look another person in the eyes. You end up flitting back and forth from eye to eye. I would choose one eye and stare right at it. I often place a blank foolscap pad in front of me with a pen atop it. I would never write anything on it, and would never touch the pen. I would not alter this pose for any reason. If my shirt was full of centipedes I wouldn’t budge. A clock in the room might as well be Medusa. No matter what was said to me, I’d just sit there like a basilisk. I wouldn’t smile, or frown, or raise an eyebrow. And no matter what was said to me, I would never say anything.
“Never say anything” is hyperbole, of course. I would answer any direct question. But nine times out of ten, you can answer anything said to you during a negotiation with “I understand.” People generally don’t ask meaningful questions in such cases. Hell, they don’t even ask any sort of question; they just say all sorts of things they think might cut some ice one way or the other, and then they wait for you to say something back out of cowardice or manners or pity or anger. They bluster and yell or entreat and cajole — but mostly just talk to hear themselves talk. If you say nothing, and telegraph nothing with your body language, it would get to them after a while. They’d begin to feel self-conscious. They’d get rattled. Then they’d start giving away the store. They slowly talk themselves out of all sorts of things they brought you there to beat out of you.
I had already offered whatever I was going to offer in meetings such as these. In writing, to the last jot and tittle. Meetings like these do not need to happen. It was all in writing before you were summoned. They figured they were going to use the force of their presence in some way to get what they did not deserve. I felt it was my job to wait it out. I worked for other people and I took that seriously. I have never acted this way while I was working for myself.
If someone rejects your submitted proposal out of hand, you’d be stuck. You’d have to abandon the idea or resubmit. All the work is on your end. That’s nerve-wracking, and people’s motives are inscrutable if all they say is “No.” If someone wants to chat in person, they are already on the lot, as the car dealers say.
All humans are like a pail of water. If you dump them on the floor, they make a big splash, then they run pretty fast all over for a little while, then they coalesce into little puddles and do nothing. You have to wring them up and put them in a bucket and then start over.
That video is the Ohio Association of Realtors, I believe. They are having some sort of convocation. Team-building. Networking. They are being mopped up and wrung back into their Tony Robbins signature bucket, girding their loins for a new year of getting their commissions. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that every single one of them was a nice person. No, really; I mean it. They look pleasant enough to my eye. They are gathering together to feed on each other’s enthusiasm for their chosen walk of life.
For the most part realtors are hired to defend the position of a third party. A buyer, maybe, probably the seller. Now I want you to picture anybody who would willingly attend and participate in that RealtorTubbies freakshow in the video, sitting across a table from a negotiator who acted like I did.
Tag: business
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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