Where You Point It

Dev is twenty-six and sells for Ninefold. He has a list of twelve prospects and he can explain, with dates, why nine of them will never buy.

Ray, who runs operations, asks him why one of them would. Dev has no information on that subject.

Ray sends him to a thing on Tuesdays at the public library. Dev goes, twelve minutes late, and keeps his coat on.

Walt, who has kept the Tuesday table for eight winters, asks the table one question: what do you want?

Carla says a second location. Hal says sixty-two, sell the truck, done. Dez says someday, furniture, full time. Dev says: to be rich.

Four answers, five with Dev’s. Not one has a number in it, a date, or a price. Nobody at the table notices.

Where you point your attention is where you end up. That is the whole of Chapter 1.

Your mind runs on what you feed it. Whatever thought you rehearse most often becomes the lens, and the lens decides what you see. Feed it reasons things cannot work and you will become an expert on obstacles. Feed it a clear picture of what you want and you start noticing doors.

Every sales floor has the man who can tell you, with total authority, why the territory is dead. He is usually right about the details. What he cannot tell you is how anything gets done. He stopped collecting that information a long time ago.

Three patterns show up in almost every story of someone getting what they wanted. They took a risk with no guarantee. They stayed in a humble position until the opening came, through months and sometimes years of work nobody noticed. They did not take no for an answer: not rudely, just steadily. And one pattern shows up in almost every story of failure: quitting a little too soon. Nobody quits at the finish line. They quit a few steps short of it, where it looks exactly like the rest of the road.

Two things make the pointing harder than it sounds. The first is the factory setting: an untended mind drifts toward what is wrong, because bad information weighs more than good. That is not a character flaw. It is the default. The second is the feed. For most of history your dominant thoughts came from the people around you and your own head. Now a large share come from a screen built to keep you looking, and it is tuned to the factory setting. If you have not chosen what you rehearse, something else has chosen it for you.

Before the first chapter, the book lists twelve kinds of wealth. Money is last. Not because it does not matter. Because it is the one most people chase first and find hollow when it arrives alone.

The pattern is tempting because it is true. The obstacles are real, the reasons are real, and being right about them earns respect from everyone around you. Being right also feels like being done. You can spend a whole career collecting reasons things will not work, be correct about nearly all of them, and never once find out how anything gets done. The name is for you. The person at work who knows why everything fails does not need it from you. Odds are you have been that person.

Same list, next morning. Dev picks the name he had written off hardest and walks in looking for the opening instead of the wall. He does not go in to close. He goes in to find out. He does not close it. What he walks out with is the real reason they left, which nobody at Ninefold knew: three handoffs in one year and a last rep who did not know they had been a customer for six. That is the information he had stopped collecting. And he comes back to the table the next Tuesday.

What it cost: a morning, some pride, and the comfort of being right about Dunmore.