20 years ago - Joshua Tree
Yeah, I was a 20-something — about 20 years ago.
I just got a big flashback reminder of those “golden years” earlier today with the announcement of U2 remastering Joshua Tree - a quintessential masterpiece I rocked out to in my first (and hopefully not last) IPO, Good Guys.
Those summer days in the late 80’s were where I refined the fine craft of salesmanship: greeting, establishing rapport, qualifying (today known as being an active listener and asking great questions), presenting, proving value, overcoming objections, and closing the sale. We’d have a chance to do 20-30 transactions a day. The sales cycles are longer now — 2-5 months, not 20-50 minutes, and the value of each sale is substantially higher. In my 22 years of selling, I’ve come to realize zeros are just placeholders, and at the end of the day we are rewarded for solving a problem or meeting a need.
There still is a great need to end world hunger. Have a look at freerice.com. It is a very clever site that will donate grains of rice for each successful word definition you answer correctly. You will have a chance to stretch your mind, learn new words and word meanings, and I think you will be amazed at how fast you can fill a bowl up to feed a starving person somewhere in the world.
Here’s is a great clip from iLike with Bono singing “Wave of Sorrow”, which was conceived during the recording of Joshua Tree, but was just recently completed, and will be included in the remastered Joshua Tree. It is an incredible story of Bono’s first hand experience of Ethiopia during the famine of 1984-85. Have a listen:
on December 21st, 2007 at 11:25 am
State of Play dinner report
I arrived in time for registration at the Marina Mandarin hotel, but learnt that members of the press, as well as ‘locals’, would only get their name tags tomorrow. That felt strange, some of us going around without name tags….
on February 16th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
State of Play - people to meet
Just to keep track of the buzz building up ahead of State of Play, these are the people I’d like to meet / am scheduled to meet: Joshua Fouts, Director of the Center for Public Diplomacy, University of Southern California….