The Very, Very Rich and How They Got That Way by Max Gunther Read Free Book Online Page B

thrown out. He went from office to office. The phrase “Do it now!” kept thundering in his head. Each time he stepped out of one office without a sale to show for his efforts, he found himself scared to hit the next office and face the next rejection. But he forced himself to go to the next office without hesitating. In fact, before the day ended, he had developed the technique of
rushing
to the next office so as to allow no time for panic to arise and defeat him.
    He sold two polices that day. It wasn’t a successful day in those terms, but it was highly successful in terms of what he was beginning to learn about himself and salesmanship.
    A good salesman, as we’ve noted, has the mysterious ability to drive himself. In situations where most people would slow down and stop – indeed, situations many people wouldn’t care to enter at all – the salesman somehow keeps himself going at high speed. From some deep well of optimism or confidence or hope of just plain self-powering mental oomph, the salesman dredges up whatever it is that helps him overcome his fear of the hostility and rejection he may meet at the next office.
    Young Clem Stone sat down at the end of that day, with a few dollars of commissions in his agency account, and decided it hadn’t been such a bad day after all. He knew he had the guts to overcome fear, and he had worked out a technique to help him do it. With luck, he thought, he might one day become a good salesman.
    He sold four policies the next day and six the day after. His career was launched.
    He continued to sell health-and-accident insurance for his mother during that vacation and during subsequent time off from school. He boosted his sale average to ten policies a day, then fifteen, then twenty. And all the time he was analyzing himself. Why was he succeeding? He finally decided it was because he had something called Positive Mental Attitude. He spent the rest of his life trying to explain this PMA to other people. Sometimes he got it across and sometimes he didn’t.
    There came a day in school when he was sent to the principal’s office to discuss some minor infraction of the rules. The principal grumbled that young Stone was wasting a lot of the taxpayers’ money by using up his, the principal’s, high-salaried time.
    It suddenly occurred to Stone that he, a high-school junior, was making more money per day worked than the principal. And so Stone quit school on the spot. (Later in life he completed high school and began, but didn’t finish, a college law course.)
    He roamed all over Michigan selling for his mother’s agency. His sales average edged past 30 policies a day and in some towns topped 40. His PMA, whatever it was, appeared to be working beautifully.
    At the age of 20 he moved to Chicago and set up his own one-man insurance agency. He called it Combined Registry Company. He was determined to make it live up to its grandiose name. He prayed, recited self-needling phrases to himself, stoked up his PMA until it must nearly have blown the top of his head off. And on his first day of business he prospected up and down North Clark Street and sold 54 policies.
    There could hardly have been much doubt in anyone’s mind after that first day that this new agency was going to grow. There was no doubt at all in Stone’s mind. He sold polices around Chicago and then in other Illinois cities, and he grew better at it all the time. In Joliet he averaged more than 70 sales a day and there was one magnificent day in which he reached the almost unbelievable total of 122 sales. On the basis of an eight-hour working day, that figures out to one sale every four minutes.
    Stone was obviously doing something right. He had started by selling two policies on his first day as a salesman. After about four years of self-training and self-needling he had reached totals beyond which it hardly seemed humanly possible to go. Meanwhile, repeat business was flowing in at an ever-faster rate: People