When I was working part-time at Sears in Dallas, I remember one salesman who occupied a small section near the hardware department. He sold some kind of multifunctional knife special for peeling potatoes, apples, cucumbers, or scraping off carrots, radish or beetroots. He used a small microphone attached to his collar, and when he started his demonstration, people gathered around his stand to listen to his charming voice and easy-going peeling, at the same time he cut those vegetables in thin slides ready to fry or cook. He was very good at his job, as he was able to persuade his audience of the
marvelous and almost miraculous knife. At the end of one of those sessions he sold knives by the dozens. He was about forty years old, and when he took his coffee break he went to the lounge room where most Sears's stuff had their coffee or ate their brief lunch.
We
sometimes coincided in our coffee break and exchange casual conversation. He
was curious about my being a foreigner and still young and probably a little naïf
about life. Talking about American life and my ideas for the future, he somehow
realized I didn't know the American way of doing things, and the lack of
realism I betrayed with my optimism with people and life in general. Too much
idealism, he thought. And he gave me a strong lesson of pragmatism and
grass-roots psychology based on his own experience in life as a man of many
trades. People wasn't what I thought they were, people's main interests were
almost always grounded in accommodation and survival. Smart people had to know
that basic truth in order to succeed in whatever endeavor they try to achieve
in life. Having the wrong ideas about human motivation could be the path to
endless frustration.
In successive coffee breaks he told me about his many experiences around the United States and his way of planning his working hours to have the freest time possible so he could spend his life in what he liked most: art, sports, hitting the bars at night and traveling. He told me his present job was something he enjoyed and it only "robbed" him six hours a day instead of eight or ten, as most people did. It allowed him to travel to different states and get to know new people and new opportunities too.
He really
was a nice person. For being still young he already had accumulated quite a lot
of sound wisdom and pragmatism. He did what he could to show me my life could
be different if I started seen things with more down to earth realism, instead
of wasting my energies thinking about changing a world beyond my scope and
reach; or having the wrong ideas of people's main motivations in life.
I don't
remember his name. It's been a long time since those conversations took place,
but I can certainly be sure he somehow changed my perception of life from then
on. I can even say he was one of the wisest persons I've ever met in my life.
