(2/2) You're spiraling again.
200 cold calls a day won't make the depression go away.
A stray wolf of the steppes, now part of the herd of city-dwellers — there could be no more compelling way of picturing him, his wary isolation, his wildness, his restlessness, his homelessness, and his yearning for a home.
— Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf (1927)
You’re either spiraling up or spiraling down.
On a particularly humid summer day in New York — about a year and 40,000 cold calls after first hearing Max’s maxim about the spirals — I lazily dialed a restaurant from the newest pack of sales leads to the familiar sound of an owner yelling at me in a language I didn’t speak. Despite not knowing the language, I still knew the message.
When you talk to thousands of strangers over the phone per week, you learn a thing or two about the universal threads of human nature.
You learn to recognize when a conversation is going well. You learn to recognize when it’s going south. You learn to recognize when someone is a serious buyer and when someone’s just happy to talk in circles for hours (there are a lot of lonely folks out there). Mostly though, you learn to recognize the sound of “what the f*ck do you want!?” in every language. This time, it was Mandarin!
Between my latest victim’s repeated demands for a reason as to my call, I ignored the language barrier and marched on with the usual script:
“We’re making a list of the best restaurants in…”
I heard my voice trail off, followed by yelling in Chinese.
I cleared my throat and tried again.
“We’re making a list of…”
Again, the words stopped.
Again, the yelling in Chinese.
I tried one more time to the same result. My voice withered on the vine. My mouth was unable to form words. The phone started to feel heavy in my hand. The more he yelled, the more unwilling my voice to cooperate.
Eventually, I stopped being able his voice at all. I just stared blankly at the endless list of leads on my screen — hundreds of meaningless names blurring into one another — vaguely aware of a distant echo in my ears asking me just what the f*ck I wanted.
What the f*ck do you want?
What a question, I thought.
Not this. Certainly not this.
The voice on the line was still yelling at me — or to me? — when I sort of mumbled that I was sorry, hung up the phone, walked into my manager’s office, and told her I was done.
No, I didn’t want to talk about it.
No, I didn’t have a another job offer.
No, I didn’t have a plan.
In my dissociative state on that call, I’d glimpsed what the path I was on offered:
Sales guy →
→ Manager of sales guys
→ Manager of those who manage sales guys
→ Manager of those who manage those who manage sales guys
I decided I’d sooner set myself on fire.
I had nothing left to give this job, no more gusto for the gig, no more silver-tongued devilry to unleash upon the latest unsuspecting business owner just trying to get the health inspector off their back. They didn’t need to be tricked into a sales pitch via some pretend list of the best restaurants in the area, didn’t need to be manipulated into signing up for something of questionable value, didn’t need to be bullied into making on-the-spot decisions. And they especially didn’t need this from someone who cared less about the sh*t he was shilling than they did.
I was done.1
Max’s maxim, part II.
As I walked out of the lobby of our building on Wall St., it suddenly made sense to me why Max’s maxim — you’re either spiraling down or spiraling up — had made such an impact on me.
The truth was that this wasn’t the first time I’d blanked out in the middle of a call, staring at a script, numbly repeating words, pretending to be present while feeling detached from my body. This wasn’t the first time I’d felt an utter lack of purpose in my day-to-day work. This wasn’t my first time feeling completely removed from my dreams of working with artists — of being an artist — watching them fade further and further away.
The reason Max’s maxim had stuck with me was because I’d been spiraling for months.
At 22 years old, this was four years before therapy would give me the vocabulary to understand what going on, and even longer before I’d start to accept that I wasn’t just this terminally broken and “chemically-imbalanced,” kid, but a healing work-in-progress whose mental and emotional spirals were rooted in childhood experiences.
At the time, though, all I knew was I felt alone in those spirals.
You’re either spiraling up or spiraling down.
I never sat down with Max to ask if his pithy little maxim was anything more than another example of his uncanny ability to maximize sales, but I’ve always sort of doubted it.
In reality, it probably wasn’t that all that deep for him.
You’re either gaining momentum (making calls) or losing it. You’re either gaining confidence (on those calls) or losing it. You’re either making sales or losing them.
More momentum ⇒ more confidence ⇒ more sales.
End of story.
But it was deeper than mere motivational fuel for me.
I felt seen in those words — and a bit exposed.
Let’s figure this sh*t out together.
If you’ve spent too much of your life raging at the world for not understanding you — while raging at yourself for not letting it — subscribe and let’s figure this out together.
Thank you for reading,
Daniel
Plenty of my friends from work chose that path and made out well — one now owns a Brazilian soccer team, another brings in $500k per year selling dental equipment, a third founded a successful sales start-up — but I wouldn’t have made it out alive.