I did not know any better. I stood. I entered the room and did the meeting. There is no need to panic when you have no choice. Panic adds nothing but risk, and no one likes putting risk into a project. The ultimate distorter of reality is fear. Fear of not knowing. Fear of not fitting in. Fear of peer rejection.
Fear of any rejection.
Fear of uncertainty.
If you are in sales and fear rejection, get a new job. Walk away. Now.
In sales, you need to accept rejection. Sure, you can claim to be as Trumpian as you’d like, a winner in every way, a person who can’t say the word “lose.” That’s called being delusional.
Rejection and sales have always gone hand in hand, they are inseparable. In baseball and sales, no one bats 1.000 – the best of us are .300 hitters. No one hits every free throw in basketball. Chose your sports analogy — dealing with rejection matters, especially in the context of success.
In some instances, fear is good. It’s kept me out of cars with drunk people and precluded me from juggling chainsaws. As a rule, anything which extends your life tends to be good. That’s the type of fear you need to recognize and harness.
Fear should be your inner governor, what keeps your conscience, your code, whatever you call your morality — intact. You need only fear yourself. That’s enough of a demon to overcome. Focus on that and the rest falls into place. Your own fool self.
Fear also plays into competition and your role competing.
Fearing yourself doesn’t mean competing against yourself. You compete against the piece of you that wants to quit.
If you don’t work to make yourself better in whatever way you know-how, you have no business competing against anyone. Be the best. Compete against the best.
Compete with yourself
It’s the only way to get better. Need that class? Take it. Need a degree to be taken seriously in your job? Fantasize without fear. Plan for it.
Don’t talk about it, plan it and do it, or die trying. When I went back to law school at the age of 45, my company tried to fire me on the theory that I could not possibly do my job and go to law school at night while being a successful salesman. Bullshit. I received my JD at 51.
Even in the lowest of lows, you must show no fear. You can’t leave the scent of your urine on the field. The minute you show fear, the minute your blood is in the water, you are done. Every good executive I’ve worked with has this skill — they can sense and smell things mortals cannot — there’s no need to make it easy for them.
Show no fear and keep things in perspective. You have to live your life knowing that if you or your immediate family is not at risk, it just doesn’t matter. This is true now more than ever after the pandemic. The world was turned upside down, or shut down, overnight. We are just now emerging.
People deal with serious, existential threats every day. Odds are that if you are reading this book, you likely know where your next meal is coming from.
If you are in the business of licensing technology, you are always trying to do the impossible, add cost of goods sold to a client’s product. There are few better nirvanas in the business world than a healthy gross margin. Cost of goods is one reason you see so few true hardware companies today. Large companies, such as IBM, have run away from hardware and its cost of manufacturing and cost of goods.
The move away from the Motorola platform, which then had a healthy market share in the high-end workstation business, gave NeXT a new lease on life with Intel.
But Japan posed a different issue. By contract, anyone shipping Adobe Postscript into the Japanese market at the time had to bundle at least two Morisawa fonts with each copy of the operating system. The cost, while not germane to this conversation, was certainly a big deal to Steve, and I had to present a counter to his argument that he might as well substitute Adobe Postscript with an Open Source clone like Ghostscript. This was in the early days of the open source movement, and clones were emerging where they made economic sense. Adobe’s PostScript price per license invited cloning. No one wanted to pay for it, but everyone needed it.
HP became the first big company to differ. At the time, HP was weaning itself from Adobe Postscript, removing it from all of its Laserjet printer line, replacing it with a less powerful, yet “good enough” technology. This threatened Adobe’s brand, which in the publishing world, bled quality.
This was an issue at Adobe. If people don’t value the jewels of your IP portfolio, you could be playing in the NFL, the Not For Long League made up of technology also-rans. If you are not your brand, what are you? Cultivation of brand, especially in desktop publishing, was key, and in the Japanese market, it meant everything. NeXT had to maintain a patina of quality, especially in a market where quality was an expectation. At the time, Adobe would have suffered greatly if Steve had decided to use a clone postscript engine for NeXTSTEP.
Steve was not impressed by what he considered to be a tax on his product in the Japanese market. Steve wanted to save money. He wanted relief. And as we introduced ourselves, he made that clear.
“I want it now. “
and
“I want it today.”
Which brings us back to fear.
Fear is a fart of an emotion, especially to people like Steve, who have practiced noses.
Steve smells everything around him. He knows! Stray from the path? He knows. White lie? Death. Outright lie? Death by a thousand cuts and banishment from the RDF!
Compete against yourself
When you compete, make it against yourself first, and then worry about what others think, or how they stand against you. Slow and steady eventually does win the race. Every piece of money you will make in your career you will pay for in some karmic and equitable way. Nothing comes for free.
Pride always comes before the fall, but hopefully, redemption follows. There will always be someone “better” and someone “worse off” than you. Until you are the best or the worst, this will remain true.
Being born means you are going to have to die. Accept it and live your life accordingly. Steve did.
Fear drives all evil in the world and reinforces itself, often violently. You have to tell yourself bravery starts with you. Take a chance and live before a higher power sends you on your way.
It’s hard to talk about fear without talking about honesty. Be honest, especially with yourself. Some think themselves immune to the karmic justice often wreaked by the fruits of dishonesty. Like fear, dishonesty has a dank smell, which never goes away.
You have to live with yourself and your conscience, which is only relieved, by dementia or death. So don’t worry about fear. Fear yourself, what you might or might not do, and no one else.
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