To Sell is Human – Part 2: The Call to Adventure

The ancient echoes of adventure reverberate through the ages. Just as Odysseus heard the call to leave the familiar shores of Ithaca and brave the wine-dark sea, facing monstrous challenges and seductive temptations in pursuit of his long-lost home, so too does each of us experience a distinct summons. This isn’t always a voyage across mythical waters, but rather a call to navigate the intricate currents of human connection and exchange – a journey that inherently involves influence, collaboration, and, yes, even the art of selling. For within that universal urge to answer life’s adventurous call lies the very essence of what it means to be human.

There are three primary modes of being in life: negotiation, tyranny, or enslavement.(Jordan Peterson, Negotiation Series). While all three paths are human, only negotiation is humane. Broadly, the life of negotiation is the life of adventure. We can sit back helplessly and take what life gives us; we can get what we think we want through force; or we can build a life based on the win-win. To live a life of adventure is to negotiate—to influence the world around us—to shape, build, and reach for the highest possible good in collaboration with others. Every soul hears a distinctly human summons to embark on a journey, navigating the seas of human connection and exchange. Thus, sales is inherently human, as it flows from that universal urge to answer life’s adventurous call. 

As I write this entry, my dog is lying in a sun spot next to me. He doesn’t ponder such things; his floppy ears don’t hear the call. But you are here for a reason; you have unique talents and live in a unique context. You have been given the gift of self-awareness, personal agency and a deep yearning for something more.  You are not here to just suck air and burn calories. We are given this life to pursue the great adventure. We are called to a hero’s journey in pursuit of what the Greeks named and the early Christian Church expanded on—the “Summum Bonum,” or highest good. To lay hold of this Summum Bonum, one must negotiate, sell to the world around us.

I’ve been reading Jordan Peterson’s book “We Who Wrestle with God” and am leveraging a lot of his ideas in this entry. He writes extensively about man’s call to adventure and the pursuit of the highest good. If you want to go deep into these concepts, he is the man. As I read his book and ponder the topic at hand, it is striking to me how these themes connect to the sapient nature of sales.

There is a question before all of us: Will we dare pursue our highest aim, or will we stay home looking out the window, waiting for the good life to come calling? The Summum Bonum will not just come to me because I am a good person, nor will it come by force—we get what we negotiate. We are each called to go out and build a life, to take territory, to take what is wild and move it in a productive direction, beckoned to go to where there is darkness and bring light, to slay dragons, to create, to bring beauty and goodness.

Certainly I’m not claiming that making cold calls is the same as Odysseus’s epic journey home after the Trojan war. Or am I? You see, the epic journey is embarked upon one simple, bold step at a time, over a long period of time. Leaving the familiarity of Ithica, defying the lotus fruit of disempowered distraction, resisting the siren song of immediate gratification, and facing the monsters of disagreement and rejection in order to secure the income your family needs and ultimately add value to the business you are calling on, is the adventurous choice. Every adventurous action, like knocking on that door, opening your heart to love, being authentic, telling the truth, doing what you know is right even when it is costly, stacked up over decades, amounts to an adventurous odyssey.

Be fruitful and subdue the earth. Your career, your dreams, your aspirations must be braved like the wine-dark sea. Whether it is building teams, creating systems, inventing solutions, inspiring followers, or influencing customers, these all require us to step out boldly and sell. Being a nice, good person is not enough.  We must sacrifice what is comfortable and familiar and heed the voice calling us to adventure.

The beauty of this call to a life of adventure is that it is not a zero-sum game, it is quite the opposite. This profound truth is illuminated by Peterson in We Who Wrestle with God (page 343): “The world is apparently constituted in such a way that each participant in it could and should play a central role. The exemplary action on the part of one does nothing but increase the opportunity for others.”   Did you get that? Your success aiming upward and living out your story well only serves to improve the story of the people around you.

To sell well is not an attempt to extract money from the object of our influence. If we are pursuing the highest aim at work, we are offering the customer a rich exchange of value.  They spend a million with us, and the service and talent we provide helps to drive a hundredfold of that in production. At Onin, when we fill that additional job order with a new Teammate, not only are we creating a job opportunity and helping to move our client’s business forward, but because we offer unique, life-changing benefits, that worker is far better off—healthier and wealthier as a result. Our best and highest good enhances the stories of others.  If you want to claim that you are living a life worth living, you owe it to that customer and teammate to ask for that order—to sell. 

We each have a corner of the world to bring life and beauty to. Influence is the only way this happens. To sell is human, because the call to adventure is human. The wine-dark sea summons, will you answer the call?