First job out of college (part 10)

This is what recruiters do. They try to pump up and excite the target and downplay all the hard work that is required. You can be your own boss, set your own hours, go travel and meet interesting people. They don’t tell you that you will have to work more than 40 hours a week to be successful and you might not make any money for the first few weeks or months. They don’t tell you that 90% of recruited people can’t make sales and quit within a few weeks or months. What they do is they try to sell you dreams of taking vacations in Hawaii or Europe and they talk about how the most successful agents make six figure salaries. They do this, not out of devious intent, but because there is no better way.

From what I learned during job hunting, there is only one type of job that a person with a high school degree can make a six figure salary right out of high school. That job is sales. The sort of sales position that turns a man into an independent business owner is the only way to make a six figure salary with a mere high school diploma. In fact, the high school diploma isn’t even required. When a man goes into business for himself, his salary is not fixed. It is purely dependent on how much stuff he can sell. When a man goes into business for himself, his hours aren’t limited to merely 40 hours a week. If he really wants to become a success, he is going to have to work, struggle, and obsess over making sales and earning money. His drive and ambition are the biggest factors that contribute towards his success.

Companies that recruit salesmen know this. Companies that operate this way want to get the highest driven and highest motivated salesmen to drive up the most amount of sales and profit. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no real test that can measure a man’s ambition and drive. No high school diploma, undergraduate degree, graduate degree, MBA, PHD, or assessment can measure a man’s ambition and drive. So in order to find the star employees, the company has to try to recruit as many people as possible and find out in the field who is the star performer. This is their assessment. Unfortunately, this leaves a majority of people that sign up incredibly angry, dissatisfied, and cheated once they realize they cannot achieve the dreams they were sold. However, Faye was persistent and I said that I might consider joining the company if I ever found myself out of work.

By the Summer of 2011, I had saved up about $15000. One contributing factor that helped me save $1000 each month was that I had no girlfriend, did not date, and spent no time looking for women. I knew all of the efforts and maintenance of relationships costed money. There was an instance at church when I asked a friend questions about how often she and her boyfriend went out to dinner, watched movies together, and drove to see each other. I calculated that she costed her boyfriend roughly $120 to $150 each month. I also didn’t have a lot of options. I didn’t keep in touch with many people from high school or college and my social life was incredibly limited due to the fact that I didn’t get a car until after college. After college, there were only three places I would interact with people regularly. I went to work, church, and the skatepark. None of those places had a lot of women to interact with. Also, the place where I live doesn’t have a large Asian population so I wasn’t motivated to go out looking. On top of that, I still lived with my parents so taking a girl home would have been more challenging than if I had my own place. Looking for a woman just didn’t seem worth it. By pure coincidence a girl I knew was having a homecoming party for college and asked me to come along.

July 2011

For July 2011, I spent a total of $641.38. I was disappointed I exceeded $600 again for this month. My insurance premium was $166.40. I spent a total of $183 on gas by filling up 6 times. I only filled my tank up 5 times. I filled up my friend’s tank once. One of my friend’s wanted to go to the beach before the summer ended however he didn’t want to spend a lot of money by paying for lodging. I decided to tag along and we spent 6 hours driving one way. We enjoyed the beach for the day and then we spent 6 hours driving home all in one day. Since we took his car, I offered to pay for his gas on the way back. I spent $100.77 on 14 visits to fast food restaurants. I spent $42.45 on groceries. I spent $38.42 eating meals with my friends on two different occasions. Lastly, I spent $38.42 on a pair of skate shoes.