Last week I told you about four people I hired who succeeded wildly and looked nothing alike. A few of you wrote back asking to hear more about the cell phone salesman. So let me tell you his whole story, because it is one of my favorites, and because what he did is something almost anyone can copy.
When I met him, he was an undergraduate, working a retail job selling cell phones while carrying a full course load. He was not a finance major with a perfect GPA. He was someone working hard to get through school. But there was one line on his resume that stopped me: “I learned Spanish to become the top salesperson in New England.”
I had to hear that story. So I asked him about it. Here is what he told me.
He had noticed something at the store that nobody else was acting on. Spanish-speaking customers were coming in, and not one employee could speak Spanish. They would walk in, struggle to communicate, and often leave. He thought to himself: if I could learn even a little Spanish, I could actually help these people.
Now, remember, he was already stretched. Full class load, a job, the normal chaos of being in college. And he decided, on his own, with nobody asking him to, to take on the challenge of teaching himself Spanish.
After about a month, he worked up the courage to approach one of those Spanish-speaking customers with what he described as very broken Spanish. And to his surprise, it was enough. It was enough to connect, enough to help, enough to make the sale.
He started helping a couple of Spanish-speaking customers a day. Then something happened that he did not plan for. Those customers started referring their friends. Word spread that there was someone at this store who would take care of you, who would meet you where you were. His little experiment snowballed into a genuinely large book of business. Enough to make him the number one salesperson in New England for that company.
Here is why I hired him, and why I have never regretted it.
I was not looking for the most polished resume. I was looking for someone I could train and who would work hard, and this story told me everything. He saw an opportunity nobody else saw. He did the hard, uncomfortable work to chase it, on his own time, with no guarantee it would pay off. And he stuck with it long enough for it to compound.
You cannot teach that. I can teach almost any skill a job requires. I cannot teach someone to notice an opportunity and go after it when no one is watching. He already had the thing that actually matters.
And here is the part I love most. He has gone on to have a genuinely successful career. He is a CFO now himself. That same instinct, spot the opening, do the work, let it compound, is exactly what builds a career over twenty years, not just a good month at a cell phone store.
So what do you do with this?
You do not need to learn Spanish. You need to find your version of it. Look at wherever you are right now, your job, your campus, your team, and ask: what is the obvious problem nobody is solving? What is the group being underserved, the gap sitting in plain sight? Then do the uncomfortable thing and go solve it, before anyone asks you to.
That is what gets noticed. Not the person who did exactly what was required. The person who saw what was missing and quietly went and fixed it.
That is the whole game. It was true at a cell phone store, and it is true in every job you will ever have.
Talk soon,
Jeff
P.S. Hit reply and tell me: what is one opportunity sitting right in front of you that nobody around you is acting on? I read every response, and sometimes the best next issue comes straight from your replies.