To sell is to lie

I’m a bit on the spectrum, so when I am asked direct questions, sometimes I just blurt out uncomfortable answers.

My wife and I were dining with a gentleman in Burlingame, CA recently. He was retired from a life of sales, and I had invited him out in order to get some feedback on a matter close to my heart.

Now, this man was almost a complete stranger to me, but we had connected all the same, and he was good enough to indulge me on this outting.

After the typical niceties, hellos, and such, he came out and asked: ‘Why are you broke? Why do you have no money?’

To him, everyone probably was pretty broke, but I wasn’t offended. However, I did take his question serious, and I pondered it while I ate my chips for a good long minute.

I answered: ‘To sell, is to lie.’

He rumpled his cloth napkin into a ball, and threw it hard right into my face.

I had struck a chord. I had pissed this stranger off gloriously.

Lies

When I was growing up, I went through a phase where lying seemed like the best course of action. Moreover, it made me feel clever, and it got me out of all kinds of pickles.

I grew out of it. In large part, it all ended when a truly sweet girl — probably someone who had been groomed by a lying parent, friend, other — called me out on it. She told be straight to my face that she knew every time I was lying. Whoa! This really stung, and it threw a wrench into gears.

After that moment, I suppose instead of wanting to become a better lier, I just got bored with the whole lying shtick. Heck, maybe this lying business was the easy way out and I was using it as a crutch all these years.

Glen and Glenn

The night before my dinner with the napkin thrower, I put on ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ for the millionth time. I love that movie, even though I know it by heart and don’t need to see it to remember all the lines. There is something about the performances that never seem stale.

For anyone in sales (and I sold things door-to-door one summer myself), this film is still a touchstone in how to get it done. The hustle, the BS, the stress to close: it’s all in there.

Perhaps it was fresh in my mind when I was asked: ‘Why are you broke? Why do you have no money?’ You see, this gentleman was providing a service! In actuality, this gentleman was asking: ‘What is sales?’

My answer wasn’t supposed to be expressed.

Truth

What I love to do is build. There is nothing more satisfying. When you have code that doesn’t run, you have to find the bugs, and when it’s all humming along nicely, you have a piece of technology that can bring a good deal of harmony to the world.

Happily, I have been a merry little worker ant crafting and building for decades now. So, I am very accustomed to dealing with systems that need truth as the measuring stick in order for these systems to be ‘correct.’

Needless to say, I am stale at the lying game. And now that I am mature beyond what I was when I was a lying kid, it’s strange to me to deal with people who make lying their trade. Am I jaded now? Am I over-exposed to life? Should I apologize for being interested in finding truth in things, rather than how I can lie in order to get by?

Digestif

After handing the gentleman’s napkin back, he went into a tirade of how I was wrong, how sales is about stretching the truth in order to meet your goal. He even told me, yes lying is ok, as the outcome justifies it.

None of this was new to me. As an old-hat lier, there was nothing he could say that I hadn’t already mulled over.

To sell is to lie. Sure, life is too short, and for most, you got to do what you got to do in order to hold on to that little edge with your fingertips as your body hangs over a gaping oblivion. Perhaps it’s just the romantic in me that sees that truth wins every time, because it is hard as hell, and you can’t fake it.