Eastern wisdom and tech sales: the collab you didn’t know you needed.
Closing deals in tech sales takes grit. From carrying out effective discovery, to doing demos of the product, to really earning someone’s trust, to telling stories effectively, to negotiating price, to handling contract language objections, to making sure the pen gets put to paper, so much goes into it. Additionally, people telling you yes when they really mean no and vice versa can drive you crazy. People telling you they’re going to sign the contract and then taking their sweet time to do it can drive you crazy. People showing interest and then ghosting you without any explanation can drive you crazy. Key word: can. The primary reason I manage to not let it (most of the time) is all of the Eastern wisdom I’ve read—the Dhammapada, the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, and more, like Hermann Hesse’s great work of fiction Siddhartha. If I weren’t able to cultivate a certain level of detachment from the outcomes of deals, if I weren’t able to feel superior to the process, if I weren’t able to have a proper perspective on it in the sense of knowing self-worth does not rely on deals going well, I’d probably be miserable, because so much of it is out of my control. To risk stating the obvious, the wisdom in these books is applicable to far more than tech sales, and the authors would probably look at the very job itself as a selfish, greedy pursuit anyway. Sorry, guys. Ambitious 21st-century American capitalist here! In any case, I find myself thinking more and more about the wisdom in these books when a prospective client is particularly frustrating to work with.
The miracle of compound interest.
One of my favorite stories goes something like this: a man invented chess and demonstrated his new game to the king. The king was so pleased with it that he asked the man what he wanted in return. The man said, “Simple: one grain of rice on the first square on the board, double every square after.” The king scoffed at such a minimal request and granted it. The thing is, that number ends up being 18.4 quintillion, which even all the reserves in the entire kingdom could not supply. In some versions of the story the king ends up killing the guy, but let’s ignore that here. Let’s instead focus on how it is a remarkable example of the power of compounding. When you think about this from a wealth-building, bodybuilding, and overall knowledge-building perspective, it’s deeply inspiring to see the incredible power of compound interest.
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos.
“One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge. It may be frustrating to acknowledge, but we are simply at the point in the history of human thought at which we find ourselves, and our successors will make discoveries and develop forms of understanding of which we have not dreamt. Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”
