My Disclaimer for the Disruptive Age

Those of us who write and speak about selling today are often guilty of communicating as if each idea is a universal truth. Most of what we write our broad generalizations. This is what makes them useful. You can understand the idea and use it where it’s beneficial to do so.

But this is a disruptive age. And there’s nothing more dangerous than dogma. Your beliefs and ideas need to be subject to constant revision as new information and new situations occur. You need to be skeptical of anyone who touts his or her process, methodology, or idea as the final word. You need to take a jaundiced view towards easy answers.

No matter what I write or how universally applicable it might be, it never fails that someone writes to tell me that there is some exception to whatever it was that I’ve written. And they’re often correct (except when they talk down the human sides of what we do). There’s no way that anyone can write, speak, or share ideas without sharing their point of view. To make something interesting and useful you have to talk about it as if it’s a universal truth. But there are exceptions. And there are exceptions to exceptions. And things are changing rapidly.

My Disclaimer for the Disruptive Age

So here is my disclaimer for the disruptive age.

Every single word I write on this blog is absolutely true. Except when it isn’t.

Your job is to read the idea, determine for yourself where and when it can be useful to you, and discard it when it’s not useful to you. Your job is to scour every source you can to find other ideas that might be useful to you and add them to your repertoire.

In this disruptive age there are no easy answers. There is no panacea for producing greater results. Anyone that tells you they have the final answer isn’t telling you the truth. You need to be agnostic about ideas. You need to be agnostic about your sales process, your methodologies, and your tools.

You need to adapt to what comes next . . . and what comes after that.

Think for yourself. Bring your a game. And for the foreseeable future, these are two statements that I unwaveringly stand behind.