Just Don't Eat the Apple. ### The Problem with Apple When you grow up in a traditional family and live in a traditional community, the chances are good that you have a strong connection to that community. You may even know everyone in it. You may live on land owned by relatives. You may be connected through blood and marriage and work in places with ancestors' names. Your religion may be something handed down for generations, passed from parent to child. You might even speak the language of your ancestors. Your connections to the community are important. You are part of the community. #### I Can't Live Without These Things As nice as the connections to the past and the traditional community might be, they also create a lot of potential for tension between people who hold similar views and live closely together. People who do not live in this world, however, see it differently. For them, each community is its own country. They're just passing through—and they have no intention of keeping anyone they meet. Their view of the world is, as we've already seen, very different. They think of it like a big buffet table. If they don't like what's on the menu, they just move on to the next one. So when you say you won't eat the apple, people of this attitude just say, "Oh, sure. Come on in." How do you reconcile your deep sense of place with their lack of one? This is the basic problem with apples. When you are in a real community, it is full of things you can't do without. You need your neighbors and everyone else in the community to feel secure. When you have these feelings of dependence, you give yourself over to them. This makes it easy to be vulnerable. But you can't be vulnerable to the things your neighbors do and say when you're just passing through. It is hard to be vulnerable when you don't even know someone. And it is hard to have connection when you have nothing in common with someone. That makes it hard to be open and vulnerable, and gives a bad name to the people who move through the community with a quickened heartbeat. ### The Reality of Selling This means that your traditional identity is much easier to sell. You don't need to rely on community to feel a sense of connection. You can find other ways to bring in cash and get what you need out of life. In our modern world, especially in the United States, people who have strong identities don't need to be vulnerable to each other. And those who don't have strong identities know that vulnerability is dangerous. They don't see their old way of life as one that they care about anymore. Instead, they are looking for a way out and toward someplace new. As part of this new place, they use their traditional identity as a way to move. This is very different from being vulnerable and sharing. This makes selling one's identity relatively easy. Just say that you have a traditional identity, and people will believe it, and you will be on your way to a new life. When you say this, you are showing others a vulnerability that they aren't used to. This makes people nervous. And it is easy to see the truth in people's insecurity and to know that the deal might fall through. As much as you might try to help them in the beginning, or even at a later stage, you may not be able to help. That's why some people like to tell stories about how everyone in their family is smart and everyone can do anything. Just saying that you are smart and can do anything will make people believe it, because it helps them relax. It helps them relax because it comes from within you and is part of your natural personality. It tells them, "I'm not trying to lie to you." So for you, as a salesperson, the traditional identity is easy to sell. ### The Problem with Other People's Traditions If you've been thinking about selling your identity, you've been thinking about how vulnerable it can be to get a deal done. But there's another side to this: your traditional identity may be vulnerable to others as well. That is, the identity you are selling can't sell itself. You have to talk about it, and to some people that means they might as well go with another person's tradition. Let's talk about an example. When my dad first came to America, he had many traditional ideas about how people work. When he got to his first business office, where people used phones for business communication, he just couldn't believe it. He felt that people should be talking face to face in a different kind of space, just as he did. He didn't have a word for it; he just had this feeling. When he found out that the phone system was very well developed and that almost everyone in business did this, he was in for a shock. There was no way he could talk to his customers face to face; he would look silly if he did that. So for all the traditional reasons he should be talking face to face, he couldn't do it. And the more he learned about this new system, the less he trusted it. Here's where his traditional identity presented a problem: he couldn't talk with the people he wanted to work with—his customers—without feeling that they might reject him. So he couldn't even start the conversation. That's why he was selling me the old way. My dad taught me to think that things were like this: some things work the best for some people and not for others. But no matter what system we're talking about, people need to talk face to face to feel secure in the traditional identity. When they talk face to face, they feel connected to each other. And the more you listen to this idea, the more you realize it's true. When you have a conversation with someone, you can feel it all through your body. You don't just have a conversation. You have a physical relationship with the person, and your body knows this. It knows that a person you trust is right in front of you, and it knows the value of that person. So when you have something like this going on, everything will work. If you don't have it going on, even talking with someone face to face is hard. So the problem isn't just getting the deal to happen. The problem is whether the deal will last, because the deal is so important. ### The Problem with Change In our current market, change is hard. It can be dangerous. Change requires you to feel vulnerable in order to keep doing what you've been doing for a long time, to keep the trust. Once trust is broken, it can take a long time to rebuild it. And when there's so much pressure in the market, any time you change, you will get questioned. So even if your old ways are weak or not working, you may not have much choice, because to talk about change is to make people feel threatened. Just a few days before this book went to print, a company I know decided to make a major change. This has happened before. Companies in the United States and in other parts of the world are changing. This is just a fact of our lives. It was very different this time, though. This was one of the major financial institutions in America, and they decided to make a big change. The change will enable them to do what they need to do in order to grow their business. It will provide growth and opportunities for the companies they invest in. It will provide a real solution to their biggest challenges in the market. So it is going to be very positive. It is going to help them to go through the market smoothly. So this makes it all a very good idea. But this is the point: the reason they are doing it is to help them. This is part of what makes change so hard. If change happens because you are trying to help someone else, and you are thinking that this change will help them, you're going to have problems. People who don't think it will help them are going to raise their hands and scream that you are being unkind. Because what they're saying is, "You're destroying the way things have always been." And that's a reasonable reaction if they don't understand what you are trying to do. You have to believe that you can see the truth, which is always possible when it's about yourself. When it's about your market or business, you can only know what you believe is true for yourself. And when it's about someone else, you can only know the truth as you think it is. Selling the traditional identity to someone else is hard to sell in this world. To change someone else's belief, you must become aware of it. This is the problem with people who think that things are not working. They are usually wrong about what's going on in their life. Even if they are right about something, they have no idea why they are doing what they're doing. They have no idea what's happening in the world. So even if they seem right, they are wrong. To be able to sell the traditional identity, you must also understand the idea of change. ## 4 ## The Old Way As a former teacher, I often thought about people whose first language wasn't English. Maybe you don't know how your language came to be, but I will tell you a little bit about how mine came to be. I grew up in Mexico with my mother, my father, and my sister