Tunnel Vision

This week we sold for FC Dallas. On Friday evening, 3-5 people will be told that they have graduated the training and will soon be interviewed by MLS teams. I, in all likelihood, will not be one of them this time around.

                It’s easy to sit at a cubicle surrounded by fragmented phone conversations and forget about everything outside the office. The broken conversations around me make it impossible to ignore the dance with the disembodied voice that I will soon initiate. In this environment, only two topics exist, soccer and sales, and everything else gets lost somewhere in the fray. 

                After almost 5 full weeks, I find myself occasionally pinching my arm to remember how young and relatively insignificant Major League Soccer is. By immersing myself in the league for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, I have mentally transformed it from a gentle sideshow into a monster of the professional sports world. All of these players, most of whom the world has never heard of before, have become larger-than-life celebrities to me. For instance, do you know of FC Dallas’ Brek Shea? He is, no doubt, a very good soccer player, but, in the end, only soccer fans or Dallas area natives with a sports interest have ever heard of him. In my mind, players like him have risen to the very top of the social pyramid. I am convinced that they will soon run for president. I’m so focused on MLS and star players that I often lose perspective on who is what and what is who on a larger scale.

                It’s the same thing with sales. Call, contemplate, share with someone else who is barely listening, settle down, and call again. That’s the arrangement, that’s the rhythm. In the office, each call of substance means so much to me. Yet an outsider who glanced into the room would probably give the most practical and polite advice of all: Try not dwelling on it and just making another call. What grand perspective. Each phone conversation is between 2 people and lasts between 5 and 10 minutes, and is pretty soon forgotten by both parties. But by being involved in it each and every day, I tend to forget this, and, more to the point, I forget how small and insignificant our little operation in Blaine, Minnesota really is.

                Have you ever been so obsessed with something that you forget to live sensibly? That has started to be the case for me here. It shouldn’t matter to me that someone on the other end of the line didn’t want tickets to an FC Dallas game right then, yet I often hang up the phone in a rage, cursing under my breath at how stupid that particular person was. Basically, I’m saying that the person on the other end of the line is completely irrational for not being interested enough in me and my team to give me their credit card number and charge it a lot of money a month and a half before the season even begins. Hmmm… Who’s being irrational here?