The Prestige Trap

Two weeks ago, I posted on LinkedIn that "it's a huge miss that elite schools don't teach sales."

It was a complete spur-of-the-moment, stream-of-consciousness blurb, but to my surprise, it got a fair bit of traction (21,000+ impressions and 149 likes).

Clearly, something had struck a chord with people.

Now, I won't speculate as to what exactly resonated with everyone that reacted to the post, but I CAN tell you what motivated me to write it in the first place.

When I graduated from college in 2019, there were three career paths available to me that I was aware of: finance, consulting, big tech. That was it. Those were the paths that people followed.

Talking with other folks who graduated well before me, this is not a new trend. For decades, new grads from elite universities have been funneled out of school and into large corporations who are more than happy to grant prestige, safety, and structure in exchange for basically everything else.

What I wish I had seen back then, that I realize now, is that oftentimes these large companies with their prestigious reputations and flashy brand names are just capitalizing on the crippling insecurity that so many of us feel when we come out of college.

Deep down, every one of us knows that we don't really know that much, but we've been so successful our whole lives that we're afraid of shattering the veneer that we've so carefully created.

As a result, we take these jobs that allow the veneer to stay intact, but the tradeoff is that we end up playing someone else's game.

This is where sales comes in. What I love about sales is that it forces you to face this insecurity head-on.

You can have all the titles, accolades, and degrees in the world, but none of that matters when you have 12 seconds to convince someone on the other end of the phone not to hang up on you.

And here's the thing: more often than not, that person on the other end of the phone—they're going to hang up on you.

And you just have to let it go and move on.

It sucks in the moment, but if you can learn how to fail 95% of the time and continue pushing, you can pretty much do anything.