“There is no darkness but ignorance”

“There is no darkness but ignorance”

— William Shakespeare:

“It is often the greatest wisdom to be ignorant”

— Baltasar Gracian

• Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative is now two months old. In large part, the book is about correcting your client's false assumptions and your obligation to ensure they succeed. When you are young, you might believe your clients are not very smart, especially when you watch them repeat the same mistakes multiple times in a row. As you mature, you realize your clients are ignorant, what Shakespeare described as "darkness."

• Ignorance means you don't know what you don't know. It says nothing about a person intelligence and everything about their lack of knowledge and experience. To remove your clients from their ignorance, you must transfer your knowledge and experience to your client to ensure they make the decisions that will produce the better results they need.

• You need to be One-Up to serve your clients.

• At the same time, you might consider the second quote from Baltasar Gracian. In most things, you are One-Down, equally as ignorant as your client in certain areas where they are One-Up. Let's call this intellectual humility, the idea that you are willing to allow others who are One-Up to educate you, preventing you from being perpetually One-Down.

• You must recognize when you are One-Down to become One-Up, or at least a little less One-Down. If you pick up the book, please email me your receipt so we can send you the workbook.

1. Bitcoin falls under 20,000 for the first time since 2020. These kind of insights cause no end of trouble for me, but I add it because it's important. It's a form of Ponzi scheme as the person buying at a higher price than the previous buyer is the only reason the price increases. That said, Blockchain is important, and the Fed is looking at creating a digital currency.

2. 36% of employees earning $100,000 or more say they are living paycheck to paycheck. I am a member of the Cleveland Federal Reserve's Business Advisory Council. Until now, inflation hurt people with lower incomes, but this inflation is different, reaching up to people with double the average of the median income. #uncharted

3. The Millennial Subsidies are over: Many companies like Uber and DoorDash have been using investment money to subsidize the consumer's purchase. If you wonder why your Uber is more expensive, here is your explanation.

• How Europe Became So Dependent on Putin for Its Gas: This is one of the reasons the US now believes energy independence is a strategic initiative.

• The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story: This is only here because of my illness, the one that causes me to acquire many more books than I can read in a lifetime. When I was in grade school, I hated having to give the books back to the public library. Articles like this one is a lead list on future purchases.

• The Misunderstood Art of Mischief: As a life-long nonconformist, this article speaks to me. If you are the type that complies, read this and make a little mischief.

• Make a concerted effort to identify and organize the things your clients would need to know to make the best decision for their company and their results.

• Recognize that one of the primary reasons you see clients making mistakes is because they are missing information, but not the information that most salespeople share.

• Make a little mischief by intervening to correct your client's ignorance, while also allowing them to correct yours by asking questions with answers that improve your ability to One-Up.