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In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

My wayward months as the best telemarketer in America.

Your very first day, you understood that this was the culmination of a long series of bad decisions, the consequences of which you thought you’d escaped—but no, you realized as you walked past the cars in the parking lot with trash bags duct-taped over shattered windows and avoided eye contact with the loiterers in the break room who checked the change slot after you bought a drink from the Coke machine—you’d only put them off until right now. Fortune magazine observed, in the mid-20 th century, “Mass production would be a shadow of what it is today if it had waited for the consumer to make up his mind.” But because of what scholars call “supply-side bias,” we regard 19 th-century tycoons like Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt as Übermensch, while erasing the accomplishments of the legions of lowly salesmen. Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.” As soon as I heard a yes, I said, “Great choice!” and transferred them to confirmation.

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