Want to buy a pencil is a story I have told a thousand times.
It’s a story about an IBM executive who passed a young man standing on a street corner in the city and asked every person whose attention he could catch, “Want to buy a pencil?”
The IBM executive is impressed with the young man’s persistence in trying to sell him a pencil daily on his way to work. He believes that anyone with that degree of perseverance would have been successful if only he had been given the proper training and product to sell.
When asked the following morning if he wanted to buy a pencil, the IBM executive asked the young man if he was interested in working for IBM.
The young man asked in response how much would a job like this pay, to which the IBM executive said a starting salary would be between $75,000 and $85,000 a year and could if he demonstrated the same perseverance, allow you to earn over $200,000, a year with bonuses.
The young man asked if he could have a day to consider the offer, and the IBM executive agreed.
The next day, at the usual time, the IBM executive was greeted with the same question: “Want to buy a pencil?” The IBM executive asked the young man if he had considered a job offer they had discussed.
The young man paused for a minute, thanked the IBM executive for the job offer, and gave him the following response.
Firstly, I would like to thank you for your very generous offer. I have given it considerable thought. I even ran the numbers through an Excel spreadsheet, factoring in all the possible tax advantages, and I concluded that I just could not afford to take that bigger pay cut. Want to Buy a Pencil?
The story’s moral is that perseverance is essential to achieving your goals and ambitions.
This story came to me after reading a book by Jia Jiang called Rejection Proof.
In the book, Jia overcomes his fear of rejection by setting himself the task of approaching people with a request or proposition that will result in rejection. The book details several of his attempts to solicit rejection over 100 days.
Jia’s journey resulted in a manager for a Crispy Cream outlet being asked if they would make a special order of doughnuts in the shape and colour of the Olympic Rings. He recorded the request and posted it on a blog he was writing to record this 100-day journey.
The recording went viral, resulting in Jia being approached by most of the major networks for interviews and the value of Crispy Cream shares increasing.
In another attempt at rejection, Jia visited his local airport and approached a pilot, asking if he would allow Jia to fly his plane, given that he did not have a pilot’s license or any experience in flying. By the way, the pilot said yes rather than reject the request.
These are just two examples from his 100 Days of Rejection explicitly designed to solicit rejection; the insights he gained into understanding rejection and how all of us struggle with it are fundamental lessons for people from all walks of life, but salespeople, the lessons stand out like stars on a dark moonless night.
The book available to be read online Free of Charge.