Wisdom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

January 17, 2024

By Dan Zankman

Strategic Dealmaking, LLC

Gaining wisdom is a lifelong journey achieved from both personal and business experiences. Wisdom can spark early in your career when you feel desperate to succeed, and that feeling causes you to become ultra-creative. Wisdom can also evolve from a feeling of fulfillment later in your career when all you have left to accomplish is to help other people. Let’s look at how achieving, realizing, and imparting wisdom can help us in our sales careers during the early and later stages.

Early Career Wisdom

In the triumphant “Me and Bobby Magee” song (1971), by Janis Joplin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cg-j0X09Ag), she expresses that if you have lost everything and have nothing left that you can lose, you no longer must worry about the consequence of your actions. So how does the youthful freedom referenced in the song allow us to become creative, let loose, and do something important in our lives as young salespeople?

Young wisdom comes not just from experience and discovery, but also from fear and desperation. When Joplin sings “I pulled my harpoon out of my dirty red bandanna / I was playin' soft while Bobby sang the blues,” she is expressing a rebellious creativity driven by a desperate need for self-expression. Her use of the word “harpoon” to represent a harmonica (representing creativity) and her “dirty red bandana” illusion (showing non-conformity).?

Non-conformity is a great driver in the beginning of a career — it creates energy and motivates people to think freely. Sometimes the greatest creative sales value comes from a younger salesperson, whose instincts cause them to recognize an opportunity to connect his or her company to a client with a need.

Also motivating young people is often early economic instability, which can catapult them toward achievement and success in selling.?A singular concentration on a deal that can change the economic well-being of a young salesperson can serve to differentiate that person as they listen intently to the client, identify key needs, effect, and refine the thinking of their own organization, and intensively lead their sales team. Their energy and focus overwhelm their lack of experience.

Late Career Wisdom

A separate way in which we impart wisdom is to have “nothing left to lose” at the later stages of our career. At this point, the sales leader has built the kind of economic security that ramps toward retirement. Often, such achievement can allow a person to begin to think about what they can contribute to their broader selling community. In the sales world, this can lead to a passion for coaching, training, and facilitating the success of the next generation of sellers.

Imparting sales wisdom is a specific craft… can lessons learned from the arc of a lengthy career resonate with a younger generation of salespeople? Let’s examine the impact of sales mentorship and see how wisdom passes between generations.

Mature wisdom comes from experience and the ability to articulate previous experience and infuse it into future opportunities. The art of storytelling is an example of this. The mentor tells a story to the mentee about a past situation in which they have resolved a problem. They discuss together how that experience applies to a situation for which the mentee is experiencing challenge or an inability to move to the next step. The act of telling the story allows the younger person room for interpretation and application of the lesson to their own situation.

The dialog not only passes wisdom down, but also imparts strength and support. As Joplin’s song concludes,

?“Through all kinds of weather, through everything we done…Bobby kept me from the cold.”

…the benefit of another person’s experience can shelter us from current risks and help avoid pitfalls that occur in every client pursuit.

Wisdom as a Function of Human Needs

In terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html), wisdom frequently emerges both at the lowest level of the pyramid…

1)????? when we are not meeting our basic need for food, clothing, and shelter

2)????? and we do not yet fully acknowledge the value of conformity

3)????? and we use our creative instincts and intermingled fears to drive us toward creating a better place for ourselves

4)????? which allows us to innovate to succeed

…and at the highest level of the Maslow pyramid, which happens typically later in one’s career:

1)????? the driver is self-actualization

2)????? a person is attempting to feel more attuned to the greater good

3)????? this leads to a sense of freedom of expression

4)????? which allows us to share our wisdom and better contribute to society

Reference:?(https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html)

This view of the Maslow model would lead us to believe that improvisation and creativity early in one’s career can generate something new! If we look at every number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1958 through 2020, we see that 95% of those songs topped the charts by artists before they reached?30 years of age.?In sales we often see significant innovation from brilliant young salespeople who reinvent thinking to accommodate their own needs to accel and are less affected by bureaucracy.

And Maslow would also predict that as we move up the hierarchical pyramid, we become more interested in having a broader influence. Though that could happen in mid-career, mentors more often coach salespeople and impart wisdom in the later stages of their careers.

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Maslow, Joplin, and Sales Wisdom?

So, what could Abraham Maslow and Janis Joplin have in common and how does that relate to sales wisdom? Maslow and Joplin both understood what drives us to create something greater than ourselves. The motivation to establish and/or impart wisdom can often become profound when our creativity and fear is most acute early in our careers or when, toward the end of a career, we want to give back by imparting wisdom realized over our career journey.