Sticky Notes - Here's how to blow a $36,000 sale.

There's a long list of shit I wouldn't want to do hungover: sell guitars in a guitar store, can sardines, work the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese, gargle whatever I had gotten drunk on the night before, barter over rugs at an Antique & Garden Show, etc. 

Yesterday, quite hungover from a night of downing copious amounts of sake and tequila (they make for a bizarre but brilliant combination), I found myself elbows deep in the last item on the above list. 

My girl and I were walking, hand-in-hand, through the meandering halls of a convention center so large, you could winter a ship within it and still have ample room to host an indoor football game, when we stumbled upon this booth filled with such an astounding plethora of Persian rugs that if Aladdin had laid eyes on it, he'd be batting down a boner for the remainder of the day. 

Now, before I continue, you must know that I'm not a rug guy. I'm a lot of guys. I'm a boot guy. I'm a denim guy. I'm a typewriter guy. I'm a coffee guy. I'm a ribeye guy. I'm a tequila and sake guy. Sometimes, I'm even a handmade soap guy. But, I'm not a rug guy. 

While I don't have anything against rugs, I've always found them to be terribly expensive (most especially the Persian ones) and I just can't fathom spending a small fortune on a rectangular piece of fabric that covers one's floors, especially if those floors are made of hardwood. Yes, I'm also a hardwood floor guy.

With that said, my girl feels differently. 

After gazing at dozens and dozens of intricate patterns, her eyes landed on one she really desperately wanted: a creme brûlée colored runner (supposedly dating back to the 40s and 50s) festooned with faint hews of turquoise.

I turned over the price tag to see five figures staring back at me: $2,400.

Not particularly one for barterning herself, I took the reigns and walked over to the rug merchant, a man as old as a wizard, and I told him the runner was really gorgeous (and that she wanted it) but $2,400 was much too expensive.

The rug merchant agreed, almost immediately, and he said that he could do $1,850. I gave him a very skeptical look and wrung the worry from my fingers and countered with $1,750. He paused, just for a moment, uttered something under his breath about me watching too much Pawn Stars, nodded, signaled to his assistant to take our payment and then turned to see to another customer who was looking terribly overwhelmed at a large pile of blood-colored area rugs.

My girl was happy. I was happy because the rug wasn't going to cost her twenty-four-mother-fucking-hundred-dollars. The rug merchant was happy because he was soon to have seventeen-and-a-half-mother-fucking-hundred dollars. The deal was closed.

Here's how the assistant blew the sale...

Right before she was about to process the payment, she noticed my girl was eyeing another rug: an area rug so goddamn big it could smuggle a bull-moose.

The assistant stopped what she was doing and immediately began selling my girl on this other rug: a century-old masterpiece, as soft as a baby kitten, and of a very similar shade and color to the runner she was just moments away from spending $1,750 on. 

As I ran my hands along the area rug, even myself as a non-rug guy, felt its bewitching powers take hold of my loins and draw me in.

But, the magic quickly skirted away like rats at the arrival of light when I asked what the price was and the assistant responded: $36,000.

Our eyes turned into saucers as the assistant reassured us that not only would the rug "hold" its value but it would appreciate because it was "Oriental".

While this very well may be true, $36,000 that you can spill red wine on and drop Green curry on and have a dog shit on and blow a load or two on, seems like a pretty dangerous investment.

The two of us immediately started back-peddling and when the assistant saw our retreat she went to try and close out the runner. But, we had gotten cold feet. We left, rugless, with an hour of our time wasted, but the $1,750 still firmly intact.

All that to say, here's the moral of the story: don't oversell.

When someone has agreed to buy something from you, be patient and remember that repeat customers don't have to be repeat customers, today.

The best thing the rug merchant's assistant could have done is close the sale on the runner and take down our phone number. Then, after a week or so, give us a call and say... 

"Hey, you know that area rug you were eyeing? I'm in the area if you'd like to see what it looks like in your home..."

But, I digress.

By Cole Schafer.

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There's a very good chance you read the above essay from top to bottom. This wasn't by happenstance.

I obsess over the written word and I've spent hours upon hours honing my craft. So much so that I've just managed to get you to give-up ten-minutes of your valuable time, to a complete stranger, who've you never met, as he tells you a story about buying a rug.

If you want to steal people's attention like this, I've taken everything I know about writing and placed it in a neatly-packaged afternoon-size course called: How to write words that sell like a Florida Snow Cone Vendor on the hottest day of the year.

If you want in, tap the button down below.

"Cole Schafer, feeling insecure about rubbing so many people the wrong way with his writing, reminds himself that he is not writing to please anyone, to make friends, to get laid, to win a handjob, to receive applause, to find fame... he's writing to tell the truth; his truth."

You're probably fairly familiar with the concept of compound interest.

$100,000 compounding at an interest rate of 10% year over year will be worth approximately $259,375 in 2031.

Your skill at a particular craft compounds at a similar rate of return when exposed to enough time.

If you've been a...

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