Napoleon Hill
The human mind, if you will pardon repetition, may be likened to an
electric battery. It may be positive or it may be negative. Selfconfidence
is the quality with which the mind is re-charged and made
positive.
Let us apply this line of reasoning to salesmanship and see what part
Self-confidence plays in this great field of endeavor.
One of the greatest salesmen this country has ever seen was once a clerk in a newspaper office. It will be worth your while to analyze the method through which he gained his title as "the world's leading salesman."
He was a timid young man with a more or less retiring sort of nature. He was one of those who believe it best to slip in by the back door and take a seat at the rear of the stage of life. One evening he heard a lecture on the subject of this lesson, Self-confidence, and that lecture so impressed him that he left the lecture hall with a firm determination to pull himself out of the rut into which he had drifted.
He went to the Business Manager of the paper and asked
for a position as solicitor of advertising and was put to work on a
commission basis. Everyone in the office expected to see him fail, as this
sort of salesmanship calls for the most positive type of sales ability. He
went to his room and made out a list of a certain type of merchants on whom
he intended to call.
One would think that he would naturally have made up his list of the names of those whom he believed he could sell with the least effort, but he did nothing of the sort. He placed on his list only the names of the merchants on whom other advertising solicitors had called without making a sale. His list consisted of only twelve names. Before he made a single call he went out to the city park, took out his list of twelve names, read it over a hundred times, saying to himself as he did so,
"You will purchase advertising space from me before the end of the month."
Then he began to make his calls. The first day he closed sales with three of the twelve "impossibilities."