So, what to write about today. Today was a day to get back on the exercise track. I’ve been playing around with switching up the lat-machine and barbell patterns and reintroducing the rower. The rower tends to aggravate my back so I dropped it about six months ago but I have a theory that if I improve my form then it won’t tweak my back. Today my back’s a little sore but I’m telling myself that it’s not bad enough to shut down the experiment. Well, we’ll see. I’m mixing high rep, low weight with high weight, low rep sets with the rower in between for aerobic balance.
And I know nothing about exercise or how it should be done but after starting the weights a few years ago I haven’t managed to injure myself so I’m pretty satisfied that the benefits I’ve seen justify the effort and that I should continue to do it by trial and error.
Yesterday’s red pill about the truth of the regime we’re living under was a bit of a downer. So today I want something more upbeat. But what?
I was thinking of reviewing the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” that I was watching last night. It’s a movie that I watch every few years because I once worked in a boiler room sales operation that was similar to the one in the movie and I can attest to the accuracy of the portrayal but it’s such a bleak, black comedy that it would just continue the black mood I was in. But surprisingly, the movie and my real-life experience with the dark side of the marketplace ended up having the opposite effect on me. So instead of reviewing the movie I wanted to think about the basis of the movie. Selling.
And this positive outlook appeared because I remembered what it was like dealing with an insane workplace reality and I remembered that the lesson I learned was that these dysfunctional places were fake. They were diseased simulations of real things that functioned correctly. And so, the trick was to distinguish the differences and avoid the fake. In the film, the salesmen are selling worthless real estate to unsophisticated people. The various salesmen use slightly different variations on a hard sales pitch that attempts to get the buyers to believe that an incredible investment opportunity existed if they would buy this land immediately. Otherwise, the opportunity would disappear forever.
The reality of course, is that the opportunity would exist indefinitely because the supply of worthless land was inexhaustible and the value of the property was completely imaginary. So, these salesmen had an impossible job. They were essentially robbing people of their hard-earned savings. And every day they had to start again from scratch because none of their buyers would ever be return customers or provide testimonials as satisfied customers. And that is the tension in the movie. There is a mandate to increase sales and the only difference between the successful and unsuccessful salesmen is their skill at lying. Al Pacino’s character has an innate sense of the psychological tendencies of his “marks.” He knows how to make buying his product an exciting experience. He is selling himself. The other salesmen are not as gifted. Their patter sounds hackneyed and unconvincing. Their appearance belies their claims that they are highly successful and providing a valuable service. The movie shows us the evil side of selling.
But experience with the marketplace will show you that there are also people that provide the real thing. These are people who have products that have real value. If you need a manufactured product and must pay a large sum to have something custom made, you need to know that the manufacturer is competent and, just as important, honest. And truth be told, the only way to know the difference between the real and the fake is by long painful experience with the marketplace.
You have to know who’s out there. You have to have dealt with the whole gamut of vendors and manufacturers and know who now has the quality craftsmen working for him and who is no longer spending the money to keep up his quality either in terms of components or craftsmen. And the same goes for almost any product. There is real and fake. And the only way to learn the difference is by knowing your craft and sometimes by painful experience. But a part of it is knowing people. It’s funny, but the stereotypes about the dishonest salesmen are actually true. Most of the time you can read the conman by his patter and his facial expression. But that’s assuming you know enough about the product you’re buying to force him to lie.
And that raises another truth. Caveat emptor. Don’t buy things that you can’t rate. Understand the qualities that define the thing you’re buying. Educate yourself. Don’t tempt a merchant by your ignorance.
But the encouraging thing is that there are still a lot of decent people selling their products and services. And if you do your homework, you’ll find them. And if you don’t, you’ll get sold some underwater real estate in Florida by Al Pacino. And you’ll deserve it.
I’ll save that review of the movie for another day.