The Hunter-Gatherers of the 21st Century

I was with a friend of mine. We were chatting over coffee at Starbucks, one of my favorite places... the one inside of the Barnes and Noble Bookstore in a shopping center near my house. He had just gotten a new job as an outside saleman for a lighting showroom. He told me all about the company and his boss... and that he was very confident that he was going to do very well in the new job.

I listened attentively to everything he said.

He looked up from his coffee. "Do you want to know the best part of the job. There are no territories. It is every man for himself. The entire city of Houston is the territory so that whoever gets to the job site first, gets the order."

I thought to myself that it takes a special type of person to do well in this kind of job. And in a way, this special type of person was almost a throwback to what mankind did before the first human settlements were established.

Back then, life offered the human species no guarantees of survival. People were essentially nomads who wandered from place to place hunting for food and a safe place to bed down for the night. If they were lucky, they had some kind of structure they could put up to protect themselves from the elements. These early generations of the human race never knew if there would be food on any given day. With some pretty fierce and dangerous animals out there, there were no guarantee that these nomadic humans would not be hunted by the very creatures that they themselves were tracking and hunting. Life for them was short, dangerous and very uncertain at best.

I looked at my friend. I suspected that his existence as an outside salesman, going after business accounts in the volatile housing market wasn't that much different than the lives of the nomads I was just describing. My friend would always be hunting for another house that was being built. He may or may not get authorization to get the job from the builder or the buyer of the house. There would be other lighting salesmen who would be competing with him, to supply the lighting for a particular construction project. And in the course of making cold calls and trying to stir up business with builders with whom he had worked in the past, he would encounter competing sales reps who were the sharks who would do anything to cut him out of a deal. In sales it is always a numbers game and the numbers would not always be in his favor.

A long time ago, when I was working at a brokerage firm, I became good friends with Lee, one of the very successful brokers in the firm.

One day when we were talking at the water cooler, he commented, "You know, Howard, in this business, it is either chickens or feathers." Even then, I realized that was very true, and not just for stock brokers. It was equally true for all of us as we try to do anything in life and even as we just try to make it from day to day. Sometimes it is chickens and sometimes feathers... sometimes things go our way and sometimes not.

To my friend who was entering the somewhat dicey profession of outside sales, I said, "Well, I really hope you do well and make a lot of money." I chose not to share with him my other thoughts on the subject. I didn't want to discourage him. Who knows? He may do very well and prove my concerns to be irrelevant in his case.

But having been there and done that, I was fully aware of all the problems he could potentially be facing. He was choosing to take a path that mankind had travelled thousands of years ago, in a world without cities, roads, convenience stores, gas stations, television or grocery stores. Just broad plains and virgin forests that stretched far into the horizon... a world with no guarantees of having food and shelter... a world in which survival was never assured. My friend had become one of the hunter-gatherers of the 21st century and I wished him well.