The Myth of the Cave by Kim Michael

The Myth of the Cave

By Kim Michael

September 1940--four teenagers looking for a lost dog stumble into a cave in the south of France and what they find there will forever change how we look at our own past.  The cave is known as La Grotte de Lascaux and what made the discovery so unusual was that the walls extending the entire length of the massive chamber were covered with more than 600 drawings; extraordinary drawings in both detail and beauty, drawings that would easily compete with those of the most highly skilled artesians of today.  And yet amazingly, the drawings were not only old, even by today’s standards of what we consider old to be, these drawings were “ancient”.  They predated the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Pyramids of Egypt by literally thousands upon thousands of years.  In fact most experts now believe the drawings to be no less than 17,000 years old.  So who made the drawings and why?   

Anthropologists wrestling with this question for the last sixty plus years now believe that the creators of these amazing artworks were actually the early Paleolithic inhabitants of the area, a race of people that before the stone age.  Based on artifacts that were left behind it has even been suggested that the early dwellers may have considered the cave to be a sacred place; perhaps even a “magical” place. 

When I saw the pictures the thought occurred to me, “What would make a cave, or for that matter, a wall of drawings--“magical”?  Art that commemorates historical events is not magical.  If the intention of this art was to memorialize events of a people who had no written language, the cave and its drawings may have had a special significance, but it would not be considered magic. 

Another theory that has been put forth through the years is that when fires were used to light the chamber that the drawings on the walls would appear to move, or more to the point, come alive.  As interesting as the premise sounds, it is hard for me to believe that these accomplished artisans would really have mistaken the shifting light of a fire for anything but what it was.  That coupled with the fact that the drawings were in caves to begin with, meaning many were probably created by firelight would alone suggest to me that their creators probably had more than a passing understanding of flickering light and stationary pictures.    

No, for me to believe these early inhabitants thought something about the cave was magic, something more sophisticated had to be involved.  Then while looking over one of the many pictures depicting a tribal hunt, the light suddenly went on in my brain and in that moment, I saw it…the magic. 

Now, to understand this, you do not need to see the picture I saw, or the cave that it is in for that matter, but you do need to imagine yourself, seventeen thousand years ago, standing in front of the picture and looking at it.  The first thing you would notice is the amazing detail.  You can literally see everything, what the terrain looked like, the warriors crouching at their stations as a stampede of animals rush between them.  And then the kill, every detail frozen in a single moment so deftly displayed that you actually see the actual methodology they used; and then the successful outcome, the animals as they are field-dressed and carried back to the village. 

But where is the magic you may ask?

Consider now, as you stand looking at the drawing, that it is not the day after the great hunt, but the day before!  The great “magic” of the cave, I believe, was the belief that anything drawn on the walls would become “real”.  But the great magic of the cave was also the great myth of the cave; in that the magic was not in the walls, or the paint, or even in the cave itself, but rather, in the hearts and minds of those who had made the drawings.  The magic was the “planning” of the picture, and the more thorough that process became the more likely it would be that the magic would happen.  That same magic exists today though we call it by other names, “business plans” and “goal setting” or mapping out our dreams. 

Until we take an idea to the next stage and remove it from the medium of our mind and give it life by committing it to paper, mapping out the details and making it real, an idea will remain only that, an idea.  But when we take the magic next step, the magic of the cave will begin to happen and "The Myth of the Cave" will cease to be a myth.

Sales: The Noble Profession... By Kim Michael

By Kim Michael  Published The American Salesman 2013.

Some years ago I attended a business leadership meeting of a medical collections company.  In that meeting one of the operations directors stood up and asked a question about a pending sales contract, and she prefaced her remarks by saying, “I’m not a salesperson and I don’t want to be.”

Bob (not his real name), an older man who reputedly had been the CFO of a local hospital system and newly hired to the sales staff, shook his head and flippantly said, ‘’Yea, well who does?”

Everyone laughed…except me.  My immediate impulse was one of anger and my first thought was, “If you don’t want to be salesman, you don’t need to be in sales”.  But confronting him would not have benefited either of us, not to mention that it goes against one of my own cardinal rules and that is to never to react out of anger.

Even so, I find it interesting, and actually more than a little frustrating, that many people are reluctant to admit that they are in sales, as if it was a profession to be looked down on.  I also find it interesting that people who are not in sales, often believe that sales is a catch all profession for those who can’t succeed at doing anything else.  And of course the greatest curiosity of all are “those” individuals who consider themselves experts in a particular field and think that it automatically makes them experts in selling products or services in that field.

In all three cases they are wrong.  Professional Sales is a discipline as complex and demanding as law, or medicine, or any other professional career.  Certainly it requires a thorough knowledge of the product or service that is being sold, but that is just the beginning and not the end.  A true sales professional is a consultant, a physiologist, a business strategist, a teacher, a negotiator, a magician, and so much more.

From the first moment mankind realized that he had to rely on the products and skills of others to survive, and the idea of universal currency came along, sales (and salespeople) have been the great intersection of human need and satisfaction of that need.
 
The great wheels of industry do not even begin to turn until something is sold.  The greatest developments in civilization have come, not from the innovators who made those discoveries, but by those who followed; the pioneers of sales, who, in their own right, turned those discoveries into goods and services that everyone could enjoy.  Technology, food, spices, hard and soft commodities, culture; everything that has taken our civilization to the next level, is in part, the result of a salesperson somewhere along the line.  These are history’s true unspoken heroes for they have transformed our lives by making the greatest discoveries accessible and attainable to the common man.  

Given that fact, it still surprises me how few people respect people in sales and yet, truth be known, without salespeople, most of them would wake up tomorrow and not have jobs.

The one demise of great salespeople, unlike any other professional discipline, is they make what they do look easy.  Business owners and managers often undervalue their sales people because they think that any one can do it.  It seems the people who benefit the most from having successful salespeople are often the ones who appreciate them the least, and when management begins undervaluing its sales force, the first to go in the downward spiral is their best salespeople.  True, they may be able to struggle by with only marginal people, but the true metric of business (and of failure) is not where you are, but where you could have been.  Some of the greatest losses in the commercial history are footnoted by the simple reality that there will always be those who think you can kill the goose and still get the golden eggs.

So returning to the story of the CFO who made the comment “So who does?”  That one comment capsulated everything that he was, and moreover, everything he was not.

I watched him arrogantly make call after call without success sometimes forty or fifty in a day.  All his experience in the medical industry and in finance foundered miserably on the rocks and after six months, he had only set one meeting and after eight months had still sold nothing.

His four word comment, “Yea, well who does?” defined him adequately.  He did not want to be a salesperson and he found out, as did everyone else did, that he wasn’t one.

Another month went by and he was let go.  I happened to pass by his office as he packed up his things, slamming them into a card board box, still arrogantly blaming everyone but himself.     
It is not surprising.  Less than a few percentage points of the people who are experts in any given field, even those who create the new frontiers in products or services, will actually benefit from them.  The reason is simple.  Selling is not product driven, but people driven.  The best product in the world in the hands of someone who does not know how to interact and influence people, will go no where, which only goes to prove that the most important element in the sales process is not the product or service that is being sold, it is the salesperson who is selling it.

As we begin the journey into understanding sales and more importantly the fundamental elements that make up the Quintessential Salesman, you will begin to see beyond the moment of a sales event and see it rather as an intersection of many different converging pathways.  Success or failure does not begin with the sale...it begins with the salesperson.