(Excerpt from How to Sell Anything to Anybody by Joe Girard)
But I’ll tell you right now that feeling sorry for yourself is a trap. It guarantees that you’ll keep on losing. It kills everything that it takes to be a winner in the war of life and of selling.
… Then one night I came home and June, my wife, asked me for money for groceries. I didn’t have any. “What are the kids going to eat?” she asked.
How about that for a question: What are the kids going to eat? Here I was a home builder who allowed himself to be conned to the point where everything was gone. Creditors were on my tail. The bank was after my house and car. Bad enough, but now nothing to eat. I sat up the whole night wondering what to do. For a while the old feelings kept coming back. I was no good, like my father always said. No matter how hard I tried to straighten out my life, it came back to that. But I couldn’t forget that question my wife had asked. There was no time to feel sorry for myself. I had responsibilities to other people, to my wife and children, besides the money I owed to my subcontractors and suppliers for work that they had done in good faith. But I wasn’t worried at that moment about debts or bankruptcy or my car. Pretty soon all I could think about was getting enough money to feed my family the next day. That was all. Just keeping them from being hungry another day.
… The other thing I remember was the feeling I had from the first time I saw the guy that there was no way he was going to get out without buying a car from me. To this day I cannot remember his face, and for a very simple reason: Whenever I looked at him, all I saw was what I wanted from him. And my want was a bag of groceries to feed my family.